Hannibal: 10 Things We Won't Get To See
8. Lecter’s Bloody Escape Artistry
One of the absolute highlights of The Silence Of The Lambs was Hannibal Lecter’s escape to go on the run, picking the lock of his handcuffs and killing the guards. Taking a guard’s clothes, he then cuts off the man’s face and carefully lays it out over his own. The heavily armed S.W.A.T. team find one dead guard and one living guard, covered in blood and supposedly unconscious, and immediately call for paramedics to take him for urgent treatment while they search the building for Lecter, thereby giving him his escape route.
It’s a stroke of genius, only made possible by the fact that Lecter is moved to a makeshift imprisonment in Tennessee: the killer called ‘Buffalo Bill’ has kidnapped the daughter of a US Senator by mistake, and when he learns this Lecter refuses to give the information he has to anyone but the Senator, and is transported to her location. Lecter has no idea where he will be held or what opportunities he will be presented with, so one has to assume that his practically foolproof escape plan is an almost completely spontaneous invention.
We’ll never get to see the Mads Mikkelsen iteration of this escape from captivity. Would they have retained the iconic ‘skin mask’ set piece? Or would Fuller have had his show live up to its reputation for grand guignol theatre by making his version even more horrific?