The brilliant psychopath. The obsessed cop chasing him. A dangerous dance that threatens to consume them both. It’s a formula that we’ve seen repeated over and over in movies and TV series, several of which were adapted from the same source material: Thomas Harris’ 1981 bestseller Red Dragon. But before Hannibal and Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter (or Lektor, as it’s spelled here) and Will Graham first met on screen in Michael Mann’s Manhunter.
Movies about serial killers have been hits since the 1930s, but the term came into popular use in the ‘70s as interest in real-life cases made a wave of murderers like Ted Bundy into household names. By 1986, Court TV was broadcasting high-profile trials into millions of homes, and a small mountain of paperbacks had been written about famous serial killers, both real and fictional. That year, two movies took opposite approaches to the subject: With Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, John McNaughton sought to deglamorize the serial killer. Manhunter took the opposite approach, turning the perverse murders of Harris’ novel into a work of cinematic art.
