Hannibal Lecter has been ingrained in the DNA of pop culture since 1991, when the character appeared for the second time on film with Anthony Hopkins’ chilling performance of the cannibalistic/serial killing doctor in “Silence of the Lambs” — a movie my uncle once bought me for Christmas when I was about 10 years old that my parents wouldn’t let me keep.
The character was created by author Thomas Harris for his suspense novels, and since then has taken off in different media — often hit-and-miss interpretations and mostly been portrayed by Hopkins himself (“Silence of the Lambs,” 2001’s “Hannibal” and 2002’s “Red Dragon”). But he wasn’t the first to play the character, nor was he the last, with Brian Cox playing him in 1986’s “Manhunter” and Mads Mikkelsen portraying him in the excellent now-canceled TV series “Hannibal.” There was also that “Hannibal Rising” film from 2007, but nobody likes to remember that piece of crap.
Well, there has been three on-screen performances of a particular scene from Harris’ book “Red Dragon.” The first two were in the film adaptations of that book, “Manhunter” and “Red Dragon” with the third in the TV series “Hannibal.” All three dealt with the “Tooth Fairy” story arc, and includes FBI profiler Will Graham trying to get the man he put in prison to help him find a notorious serial killer.
Matthew Morettini made a supercut of this scene from those three versions and posted it on Vimeo. It is interesting seeing how this one scene is portrayed differently when in different hands. All are chilling in their own right, but each version offers a different take on the character. And since all three do not stray too much from the source material, the supercut works fantastically.
“I’ve focused on the scene where FBI profiler Will Graham visits the cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter ostensibly to ask for advice on a serial murder case but really to ‘recover the mindset’ of a killer so he can catch this new one. Most of the dialogue from the three adaptations come directly from the source novel so it was possible to seamlessly recreate the scene using the three productions,” Morettini says on his Vimeo page.
The JOE-DOWN 