20 Horror Movies That Revealed TOO MUCH
9. Hannibal Rising
Hannibal Rising as a concept just didn't really seem all that appealing. Did we as fans really need a forensic, warts-and-all examination of how Hannibal Lecter came to be the world's most iconic cannibal?
The 2007 prequel details Hannibal's traumatic youth, particularly the fact that his sister Mischa (Helena-Lia Tachovska) was killed and eaten by Nazi collaborators, who later claim that Hannibal himself unknowingly consumed her in a broth they made for him.
As explanations go it's just too tidy, for want of a better word, excessively pathologising Lecter's penchant for human flesh in a deeply uninteresting way.
Tellingly, franchise author Thomas Harris actually didn't want to write the Hannibal Rising novel, and only did so after being pressured by producer Dino De Laurentiis, who planned to find another writer to pen a Hannibal prequel if he didn't do it himself. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about how utterly inessential this story is, and how little of true value it adds to Hannibal as a character.