Was the doctor insinuating that the beautiful victims had pushed Simmons into a violent rage? "Were the murdered people attractive?" Salazar asked. Salazar" in the prison medical office, describing him as a "small, lithe man with dark red hair" and "a certain elegance about him." After a few nondescript answers, the doctor sprung to life as he probed the reporter for his thoughts on Simmons' disfigured appearance. Simmons, with his unnerving eyes and "bad Z-plasty repairing a cleft lip," certainly fit the profile of a killer, but Harris found himself more intrigued by the doctor who'd tended to the American following a botched prison escape. Harris met the doctor in a Mexican prisonĪs he revealed in the preface to the 25th anniversary edition of The Silence of the Lambs in 2013, Harris was a 23-year-old journalist in the early 1960s when he visited the Nuevo León state prison in Monterrey, Mexico, to report on an American convicted of murder named Dykes Askew Simmons. 1 movie villain of all time by the American Film Institute in 2003.īut if it's frightening to follow Hannibal the Cannibal's grisly actions in print and on screen, it's even more disturbing to know that he was based on a person whose butchery spilled from the confines of the imagination to the flesh-and-blood contours of the world around us. The character is such a riveting one that he appears in multiple books, movies and a TV series, his depiction by a gleefully wicked Anthony Hopkins in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs deemed the No.
Hannibal Lecter, the sadistic psychiatrist who first jumped off the page in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon for his penetrating questions, impeccable manners and taste for making gourmet meals out of his victims. Still, it probably would have been better for everyone involved if this book never came to be.Few fictional creations spark more of a visceral reaction than Dr. There's a big difference between inspiration for a story coming naturally to a writer and it being order. Moreover, the reason it's so uninspired is because it was forced upon him. From a technical standpoint, it's a still a very well-written piece of literature. In one go, Hannibal Rising tarnished a good amount of the mystique that surrounded the iconic character.Īll of that said, Harris should definitely be forgiven for this. The book lacks a distinct identity and is a rather uninspired affair throughout. Lecter into a by the numbers revenge story. The ultimate result of this was Hannibal Rising, the disappointing novel that turned the long-speculated provenance of the enigmatic Dr. Harris, understandably, resented the idea of his greatest brainchild being given a backstory without his involvement and reluctantly agreed to write the book. The story goes that film producer Dino De Laurentiis flat out told Harris that if he didn't write an origin story for Hannibal Lecter, he would get someone else to do it instead.
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