07 · 24 · 25

Michael Mann and the birth of Hannibal Lecter

Rafael Aviña

In recent days, the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) confirmed that renowned American filmmaker Michael Mann will be honored in October of this year with the prestigious Lumiere Award presented by the festival of the same name. Mann is a director, screenwriter, and producer who is known above all for his unique talent for surrounding his films with striking visual designs supported by powerful images that are linked, in turn, to soundtracks that are a true treasure.

Author of spectacular films with highly prestigious casts, Mann is responsible for contemporary classics such as Heat (1995), starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, among others; The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), and Public Enemies (2009). He is also credited with the first appearance of one of the most iconic characters on screen: Hannibal Lecter, five years before Anthony Hopkins catapulted the brilliant cannibalistic psychiatrist and serial killer created by novelist Thomas Harris in his 1981 novel Red Dragon.

Although born in Chicago in 1943, Michael Mann soon gained recognition in Great Britain filming commercials and documentaries in the 1960s. He soon joined American television, directing episodes of Police Woman, starring Angie Dickinson around 1977, and made his debut with the television movie The Final Run (1979), followed by Thief (1981), The Keep (1983), and the pilot episode of the fascinating television series Crime Story (1986), as well as the disturbing and underrated Manhunter(1986), in which Mann himself adapted Red Dragon.

In this film, he creates a mind-blowing high-tech thriller centered on the hunt for a serial killer by a former FBI agent. While in Crime Story, which he also created, the political and economic changes of the 1960s were seen through the encounter between two sides of the law: Mike Torello (Dennis Farina), head of the FBI in Nevada, and mob boss Ray Lucca (Anthony Denison); Manhunter ambiguously and disturbingly links the maniacal serial killer Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) and his pursuer, former officer Will Graham (William Petersen).

Manhunter is one of those rare films that dignifiedly inaugurates the new wave of serial killer movies. Despite following certain conventions of Hollywood action thrillers, it manages to create an intriguing atmosphere in a brutal story centered on a killer of entire families. The plot is told from the point of view of retired FBI officer Lieutenant Graham, who is on the trail of a psychopathic killer who not only kills his victims, but also mutilates them and performs strange post-mortem rituals: he smashes the mirrors in their homes and acts according to the phases of the moon.

Similar to Hannibal Lecter or Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991), inspired by another novel by Thomas Harris, Dollarhyde is a sociopath who feels no emotion or remorse for his actions. Graham, like the rookie FBI agent Clarice Sterling played by Jodie Foster in that film, turns to the refined and hyper-intelligent Lecter—who appears in Manhunter as Dr. Hannibal Lektor—played exceptionally by Brian Cox, future star of the hit series Succession. Graham (and Sterling) is confronted with his inner demons when he interviews the psychopathic former police psychiatrist confined to a high-security cell.

Manhunter manages to blur the line between good and evil while lending credibility to the killer's alienation in a film that stylizes its images to the max, courtesy of the talented Dante Spinotti and its extraordinary soundtrack composed by The Reeds and Michael Rubini, and emphasizes the importance of forensic technology, as well as tracking and fingerprinting. With Iron Butterfly's famous “In a Gadda da Vida” playing in the background, Dollarhyde tries to transform himself and be accepted, but he cannot control the horrors he has invoked, just like Graham, another lonely being who has once again explored his own dark side.

Translated by Adrik Díaz