10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About Hannibal Lecter

10. The Six Fingered Man

Hannibal Lecter, within the Thomas Harris novels, has a fascinating body feature, known in medical terms as 'mid ray duplication polydactyly.' Simply put, Hannibal has six fingers on his left hand, in this case, a duplicated middle finger. While some of us might find a use for that extra middle finger (one could conveniently insult two people at a time, should one wish), it has proved to be a minor difficulty, not only for Lecter himself but for the film makers of the popular film and TV series.

In the era of highly advanced computer generated effects, 'painting' on an extra middle finger would be a relatively simple special effect for tech wizards, but in 1990, when The Silence of the Lambs was being filmed, this would have been a meant a different solution altogether - prosthetics.

When Lecter first appeared on screen in the 1986 neo-noir version of Red Dragon, Manhunter, his first mainstream appearance, the film makers decided against a prosthetic extra digit. Subsequent productions followed the same pattern, including the Mads Mikkelsen led TV masterpiece.

After Lecter's escape in The Silence of the Lambs and sometime before his subsequent sojourn in Florence, Lecter, a skilled surgeon, removes this extra digit to avoid possible identification. Now that would have made a piece of Lecter memorabilia worth having...