Here’s How ‘Hannibal’ Does — and Doesn’t — Work as a ‘Silence of the Lambs’ Prequel

All 3 seasons of Hannibal dropped on Netflix this weekend, giving folks a bloody good binge to kick off summertime in style. The NBC series is set in the years before Dr. Hannibal Lecter fatefully met FBI trainee Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, focusing instead on the cannibalistic psychiatrist’s intense relationship with FBI profiler Will Graham. So Hannibal is set before The Silence of the Lambs, great. But does that mean Hannibal the show works as a prequel to the Academy Award-winning film The Silence of the Lambs, which is ironically also streaming on Netflix right now.

The question isn’t whether or not you can jump from a Hannibal binge-watch to The Silence of the Lambs on Netflix, because you can. The question is whether or not you should. Does Hannibal make sense as a Silence of the Lambs prequel or should you just take them as wholly different things?

First thing’s first: we need to explain the difference between the film The Silence of the Lambs and the show Hannibal. Both are based on the Hannibal novels by Thomas Harris. The Silence of the Lambs is the second film adaptation of Harris’s work, following Michael Mann’s electrifying 1986 adaptation of Red Dragon, Manhunter. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, however, remains the most popular thanks to its massive box office, huge Oscar haul, and iconic turns from stars Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter. In The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice is asked by Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), the FBI’s Head of Behavioral Sciences, to interview “Hannibal the Cannibal” on background. Her conversations with him soon get under her skin, but in return, the unnervingly charismatic serial killer gives Starling insight that will help her nab a new serial killer nicknamed “Buffalo Bill.”

The Silence of the Lambs is actually the second of Harris’s novels to feature interviews with an imprisoned Dr. Lecter. Red Dragon was where the mythos of Hannibal began. In that novel, Jack Crawford asks Will Graham to come out of retirement to hunt down a new killer called the “Tooth Fairy.” Part of the investigation forces Will to confront the last serial killer he put behind bars: Hannibal Lecter.

NBC’s Hannibal is set before — and in its final season, during — the events of Red Dragon. Creator Bryan Fuller uses some background information given in Red Dragon to create a lavish psychological thriller hidden in the structure of a macabre procedural. Mads Mikkelsen plays this version of Lecter, Hugh Dancy is a perpetually tortured Will Graham, and Laurence Fishburne is Jack Crawford.

So can you go straight from Hannibal to The Silence of the Lambs? Yes, and no… It’s complicated.

WHY HANNIBAL DOES *NOT* WORK AS A SILENCE OF THE LAMBS PREQUEL:

Here’s the thing about Hannibal: it’s its own damn thing. From the get-go, creator Bryan Fuller takes the essence of Thomas Harris’s books and twists it, like origami, into something totally, exquisitely new. Hannibal uses almost outlandish murder scenes to spur the narrative action, and more importantly, inspire deep conversations about repressed emotions, psychological trauma, and the meaning of life.

Furthermore, by the time we get into Seasons 2 and 3, Hannibal plays fast and loose with Thomas Harris’s mythology. Characters like Mason Verger (Joe Anderson) and Frederick Chilton (Raul Esparza) experience very different fates from the books, which means that the timelines don’t quite add up. And don’t even ask me how Hannibal‘s breath-taking ending is supposed to set up The Silence of the Lambs. The last six episodes of the series might be an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, but they end very differently than the book does.

So if you binge your way through Hannibal and want more, The Silence of the Lambs might not do it for you. Then again, it might…

WHY HANNIBAL DOES WORK AS A SILENCE OF THE LAMBS PREQUEL:

Here’s why you could totally follow a Hannibal binge with The Silence of the Lambs: Hannibal, the show, loves Silence of the Lambs. Of all the pre-existing film adaptations of Thomas Harris’s books, Hannibal leans on Demme’s film the most. In Season 1, there are a series of episodes that directly play with the characters, themes, and settings of The Silence of the Lambs. After the institutionalized Dr. Gideon Abel (Eddie Izzard) claims he is the “Chesapeake Ripper,” aka the tabloid name for Hannibal Lecter, both Will and Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) interview Abel in a montage that feels lifted from the first 15 minutes of The Silence of the Lambs. The show even goes so far as to introduce us to the unctuous Dr. Chilton, another allusion to the film.

However, Hannibal comes closest to paying homage to Clarice Starling by introducing a character named Miriam Lass (Anna Chlumsky). She’s an FBI trainee that Jack sends off to research the Chesapeake Ripper to frightful results.

Now, this only proves that Hannibal is good at riffing on its source material, but it also links the show with the film. If you can suspend your disbelief with a few casting changes and character arcs, you should be able to jump from Hannibal to The Silence of the Lambs on Netflix easily.

(That said, my personal preference would be to watch Hannibal up through Season 3, Episode 7, “Digestivo” and then switch to Michael Mann’s Manhunter for the Red Dragon saga and then do The Silence of the Lambs, and then skip the terrible Hannibal movie altogether. But that’s just me.)

Where to stream Hannibal

Where to stream The Silence of the Lambs