10 Movie Sequel Villains Far Scarier Than The Original

Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter may have become one of the most iconic movie characters in history after his appearance in The Silence of the Lambs, but, and this is a weird sentence to type, the cannibal was never the villain of the piece. Sure, he wasn't exactly a good guy, but it was Jame Gumb AKA Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) that took that honour.

Bill was a scary dude, there is no denying that, as he attacked and took the skin of his female victims until the FBI could put him down with the help of Lecter. But when Hannibal released ten years later, Anthony Hopkins' character stepped into the role of the main antagonist and kicked things up a notch.

After escaping his confinement, Lecter took to Italy, but still kept in contact with Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore), giving only a few subtle hints of his whereabouts as he made his way up to the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list. 

What made Lecter so intimidating, apart from the fact that he ate people, and even threatened to eat a man's wife, was that at no point in the film was he ever out of control. Even when he allowed himself to be kidnapped by Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), he did so knowing that Starling would help him. He kept on killing, and the image of his feeding Paul (Ray Liotta) his own brain while still conscious is one that can't easily be forgotten, not to mention the fact that he then fed it to an innocent child on his plane to freedom.