Halloween Review: Hannibal

As the chill of the Halloween season passes through us this week like a ghost, I thought it only appropriate to write about something more spooky for this week’s article. And just as Halloween has arrived, so too has NBC’s Hannibal on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime -- and Hannibal is nothing if not spooky.

Now, Hannibal is not for everyone. That’s true of any piece of art, but it’s especially relevant when it comes to a show as bizarre as Hannibal. For starters, it’s not for anyone who’s expecting something that too strongly resembles The Silence of the Lambs film, nor any of Anthony Hopkins’s other Hannibal Lecter films; nor any true and total loyalist to Hopkins’s portrayal of the horror legend or the original Thomas Harris novels on which those films were based. Hannibal -- though in of itself an extremely scripted show -- goes entirely off-script when it comes to the canon of Hannibal Lecter. Make no mistake, this is simultaneously the deep baroque gothic grimdark big-brained arthouse horror film and the Riverdale of the Hannibal Lecter canon. But what makes this show so odd? And in its oddity, how does it work?

Well, the peculiarity of Hannibal is apparent to anyone that has watched it. The gore is one thing, but the way it’s presented, artistic and aestheticized, is peculiar. The over-the-top figurative language, dialogue which critic Matt Zoller Seitz has accurately described as “what vampires might say to each other if they got stoned,” is peculiar. The plots, people being stitched into horses and eating William Blake paintings being eaten, is peculiar. This is a show that at first presents itself as just another Thursday night cable television crime procedural that little by little begins to unveil itself as that arthouse horror film I mentioned earlier -- not unlike how Hannibal himself hides in plain sight as just a mildly eccentric psychiatrist before unveiling himself as the cannibalistic serial killer we know he is. The customs of crime television are thrown out the window as the series progresses: special agent Will Graham, our protagonist, who had previously been reluctant to kill, veers more and more into anti-hero territory, often aligning himself with Hannibal. Dr. Alana Bloom, who had previously been the connecting link in the conventional love triangle between Will, Hannibal, and herself, marries a woman. The show resembles Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) more so than Criminal Minds or CSI.

And this is what makes Hannibal work. How dull it would be to watch a typical crime show with Hannibal Lecter thrown in. I can imagine it: Will as our typical brooding but charismatic cop protagonist instead of an encephalitis-fevered empath drawn to murder. No ornate murder tableaus, just evidence of organs being stolen. The FBI being, at the end of the day, the good guys. It pains me just to write it all out. Hannibal is raw gothic flair, ambitious and relentlessly weird, and it’s all the better for it. It’s self-aware of its own hilarity and plays it up -- trust me when I say you’ll have the best time watching this show if you watch it as a romcom. So while you may not be able to trick-or-treat this year, I can’t recommend enough that you stay in, get cozy, and have a taste of Hannibal -- but be warned: nothing here is vegetarian.