Hannibal Lecter's Most Impressive Murder

If you don't know Hannibal Lecter, then welcome to Earth you strange visitor from another world, and please don't judge us too harshly during this initial period of subjugation!

Created by Thomas Harris for 1981's thriller Red Dragon, it took Lecter a while to grow in the public consciousness. Stephen King lauded Red Dragon as, "probably the best popular novel to be published since The Godfather." Famed horror editor and genre critic Douglas Winter praised the book as the best horror novel written in the 1980's. Horror at the time, unfortunately, was viewed much the same way as other genre fiction by casual readers--if you read it, there was probably something wrong with you, and there was definitely something wrong with anybody who would pen such perversity. This attitude wasn't helped at all by the recent reception received by 1980's Maniac, a film which brought protesters out in droves for its theatrical debut, and which newspapers such as the L.A. Times refused to even advertise:

Serial killers were alive and well, but they were persona non grata even in the fictional sense with the public at large. Joe Spinnel's performance was meant to terrify--you weren't in any way supposed to find him interesting or relate-able. They were sickos, pure and simple: ugly, deformed, psychologically disturbed, and utterly unable to fit in with modern society. People like Ted Bundy were, in theory, a statistical anomaly, an exception to the rule...except that of course they weren't.

Five years later in 1986, Lecter was given another chance by Michael Mann, who wrote and directed Manhunter, a big screen adaptation of Red Dragon starring Brian Cox as the cannibalistic serial murderer. But no, serial killers still weren't a good fit for audience interest. A second time, the public mostly shrugged their shoulders.

Two years later in 1988, with the publication of The Silence of the Lambs, the dam broke. Harris's third novel won both the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy awards. In sporting terms, that's like one team winning the World Cup and the Indianapolis 500 (I think that's how sports work). The literary world had crowned a new master, but the public at large didn't really care until 1991, when Anthony Hopkins and director Jonathan Demme rode the role of Hannibal Lecter to five Academy Awards. Bolstered by Hopkins's suave, controlled delivery and seduced by his ability to flip between the nicest and nastiest guy in the room, audiences fell head over heels for the well-groomed, soft-spoken, and dignified sociopath with the genius-level intellect and penchant for playing mind games with criminal profilers and psychologists alike, who bid both them and Clarice Starling a simultaneous and cheerful, "Good morning."

But of all the heinous acts perpetrated by the disarmingly-charming upper-class gentleman with a hatred for rude behavior and boorish manners, there's one not even Thomas Harris himself could chronicle within the pages of his fiction. Lecter's single greatest serial murder spree occurred not in print or on celluloid, but in real life.

He murdered the Horror genre itself.

Prior to The Silence of the Lambs, books about serial killers and their crimes fell into two genres. 'True Crime' was obviously for chronicles of real-life killers like Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, and Jack the Ripper; 'Horror' picked up everything else. Silence, despite being about a serial killer obsessed with lotion and prone to wang-tucking in his female skin suit being pursued by an FBI profiler aided by a cannibalistic murderer serving multiple lifetime sentences and confined to a psychiatric prison, was instead marketed not as 'Horror', but as a 'Thriller'.

Thrillers, as it turned out, were perfectly acceptable for Joe and Jane Average to be seen with in public. Nobody batted an eye at the dude on the train reading The Bourne Identity, but pull out Pet Semetary and watch the car empty at the next station. While the subject matter was no less off-putting and violent than other novels about multiple murders written by the likes of Thomas Tessier or Michael Slade, 'Thrillers' were seen in the same vein as 'Mysteries'. They were enjoyed by the more cultured and literate individuals--only the uncouth sought to get their kicks from the turd-gargling, sewage-clogged gutter run-off that was 'Horror'.

Lecter's murder of the Horror genre didn't happen overnight, but after the success of both the book and the film, authors who wrote horror stories, especially ones about serial killers, found themselves genre drifting. Publishing houses threw their considerable branding powers behind the 'Thriller' name, authors (especially James Patterson) began using it themselves to describe their work, and agents pitched manuscripts to publishers similarly. Regardless of how books about serial killers had been classified in the past, despite the prevalence of gore and violence against virtually every demographic (but especially women), "horror" took on a new meaning and subtext. Stephen King and Dean Koontz wrote 'horror', but people like Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris wrote 'thrillers'--this despite Ellis's Patrick Bateman from American Psycho narrating his involvement in behavior which would make any villain sprung forth from King's pen faint:

I try using the power drill on her, forcing it into her mouth, but she’s conscious enough, has strength, to close her teeth, clamping them down, and even though the drill goes through the teeth quickly, it fails to interest me and so I hold her head up, blood dribbling from her mouth, and make her watch the rest of the tape and while she’s looking at the girl on the screen bleed from almost every possible orifice, I’m hoping she realizes that this would have happened to her no matter what.

"How is that not horror?" you ask.

"Because shut up, that's why!" replied the public.

Horror, of course, isn't dead at all. Lecter may have killed it, but like some of its most enduring creations, the genre disinterred itself and moved elsewhere. The decimation of horror publishers in the late 80's saw the genre mutate and shift targets a few times, especially to a younger audience thanks to writers like R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike who figured out there was a taste for creepy things among young adults and teens. Kids raised on a steady diet of Goosebumps, Fear Street, and Point Horror grew into adults interested in reading and writing their own scary stuff, and while you won't find many groups publishing physical copies of novels dubbed 'Horror' today, the ebook and self-publishing market for these titles is enormous.

One of the reasons I find horror literature so fascinating is that, for all intents and purposes, it no longer truly exists as a genre. People still publish it, and people still read it, but by and large, the 'horror' section of most bookstores has shrunk considerably, if it even exists at all. At the store where I work, it used to command forty-two full shelves of space in the paperback section alone. Today it's twelve shelves, much of it filled with titles by King, Koontz, and V.C. Andrews and her ghostwriter, Andrew Neiderman. The store up the road completely retired its Horror section around ten years ago, after Leisure shut down in the wake of Don D'Auria's departure.

Readers still read, and writers still write, horrific stories. But the genre itself, which was birthed violently and thrust into the public's consciousness in the later decades of the 20th century, which ballooned into a lumbering behemoth struggling under its own weight in the 1980's, didn't just drop dead in the mid-90's of its own accord. It was killed, ironically enough, by the death of a thousand cuts, with the first delivered by one of fiction's most recognizable serial killers of all time. Hannibal Lecter might not have subsequently devoured its liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone (no, it's not a mis-quote--read the book, you uncultured heathen), but then he didn't have to.

The rest of the reading world made sure of that.