NBC’s “Hannibal” is Horror Done Right

The first season of NBC’s unexpectedly excellent adaptation of the Hannibal Lecter character winds to a close tonight. And for the many, many people who aren’t watching this series (I haven’t gotten a single person into it…so far), you’re really missing out.

The series is closest to the Manhunter movie (the very first Hannibal Lecter adaptation in a 1986 Michael Mann directed, pre-Silence of the Lambs movie), but set before Hannibal was caught. It turns out that a Dr. Lecter at loose in the world is a very interesting one, and Mads Mikkelsen’s terrifically creepy performance feels much more frightening than Anthony Hopkins. For one thing, he’s more physically imposing, using his tall, bulking frame to maximum effect while also downplaying all of Hannibal’s more obvious displays of monstrousness.

His interpretation is so subtle we hang on his every smirk, studying this seemingly hyper-rationale psychopath———he’s incapable of getting angry or confused———-as he manipulates the FBI team around him, playing them off one another, while occasionally indulging his flair for ghoulishness (in one episode he fed the organs of his victims to a table of unknowing dinner guests saying “I must forewarn you: nothing here is vegetarian” with the most sinister of winks). He’s found that the best place to hide is right in plain sight and his recent explanation to a victim (that he’s doing this just because he’s “curious” to see what will happen) left me more unsettled than all 7 seasons of Showtime’s cuddly serial killer show, Dexter.

So why aren’t more people watching? Probably because the show falls in-between two demographics. There’s the adults who would seriously love the show’s mature, intelligent tone, but are freaked out and disinterested in horror shows. Then there’s the typical horror demographic (12 to 30 year olds) who are used to a much cheaper, dumber level of suspense. They want their scares obvious (haunted houses, slashers on the loose, zombies climbing through the roof) and, if we’re being honest, subpar. Horror films like Paranormal Activity and The Purge routinely receive poor audience grades from exit polling, and I can’t help but feel young, “invincible” kids want it that way. They want to come in, know every scare that’s coming from a mile away, never let it get too far under their skin, and then leave the theater saying “that was dumb.” Yeah, no kidding, but when you can act better than the scares it’s another way of saying “It can’t really hurt me.”

By contrast, Hannibal is the most dangerous show that’s ever been on broadcast Television. It’s hero, Will Graham (played by Hugh Dancy with a fire I didn’t know he had in him) is losing his mind. Its title character, Will’s nefarious psychiatrist, knows exactly what’s wrong with him but is concealing it, knowing that the further he pushes Will into madness the easier it will be to keep killing. [Will is so good at putting himself into the minds of killers, in reenactment scenes that are always unnerving, it’s obvious he’ll be the only one to suss out what Hannibal really is.] When we enter tonight’s final episode, he’s set up an elaborate frame-job to get Will to take the fall for copy-cat murders he’s committed all season.

Let that sink in for a minute: a hero who isn’t sympathetic or even stable being manipulated and set-up by the one person he should trust, the same person who’s been getting away with murder all season long while undermining the very FBI team whose job it is to catch the really bad guys. But unlike other, brain-dead horror offerings like The Following, it actually seems believable. Talk about rattling our sense of security. We have stale old broadcast television, where CBS routinely rules the roost with only two kinds of shows (by the numbers police procedurals that deal with intense subject matter in safe ways and old-fashioned sitcoms), and even other broadcast shows that don’t fit that mold (Parks and Recreation, Fringe, 30 Rock, and Community have all been consistently excellent in recent years) would never push things so far into darkness and risk alienating such huge swaths of viewers.

Hannibal has an atmosphere and elegance that can almost disguise the very real dread lurking beneath every scene: the sense that something just isn’t right, either with those around you or within you. It tries to get you to experience the shifting reality of its hero and the fake disguise of sophistication its villain puts on. More than any other show on TV, Hannibal routinely takes us into the mind of how a crazy person thinks. It’s not a place most people would want to go, but for those millions of people who watch Criminal Minds (or overrated cable horror shows like The Walking Dead), I’m saying there’s a better way out there, and Hannibal is it.