Bates Motel and Hannibal

[Aractus]

You can supplement the show with a viewing of Red Dragon. Red Dragon is an alternate course of events with some of the same characters - Will Graham, Hannibal Lector, and Jack Crawford are all in it, though played by different actors (Sir Anthony Hopkins is of course Hannibal Lector). However, Red Dragon is very similar to Silence of the Lambs as far as plot. What's going on in the Hannibal TV show is far more interesting. I would tell you more but I don't want to spoil it for you.

Holy hell there are so many things wrong with that statement. Red Dragon the movie is one of the worst thrillers of all time, and one of the worst remakes too. The plot is similar?

Red Dragon (the novel) has a plot centred around the antagonist - Dolarhyde - and the protagonist - Graham. Dolarhyde has a split personality - or at least believes he does - and furthermore believes that he can become stronger by allowing the "Great Red Dragon" to thrive. A central theme is also Graham's obsessive compulsions and hence the way the book ends, both the movies changed the ending to a "happier" one. Crawford is depicted as deliberately using Graham without regard to his health or wellbeing, and Lecter is desperately seeking revenge against Graham for capturing him.

The Sequel - Silence of the Lambs - has a plot centred around the protagonist, Clarice Starling. Crawford, knowing that Lecter sent Graham mad resulting in him becoming an alcoholic, and thus afraid to interview him himself decides to send Starling to interview Lecter. This time Lecter is presented as a literal cannibal, perhaps to make his character more menacing. Although Lecter knows the identity of the Buffalo Bill serial killer, he is more interested in escaping and then enacting revenge against Crawford, Chilton, and everyone else who he hates.

The movie is surprisingly accurate to the book's story, except for Benjamin Raspail, in the film Raspail is killed by Buffalo Bill and not Lecter, which allows for a death's-head moth to be found inside his head thus proving that Lecter knows the identity of Bill. Offhand I can't remember how the novel originally handled proving this link, if it did at all.

So, in summary, in the first book Crawford selfishly uses Graham to catch a serial killer, and in the second book Lecter selfishly uses Starling to escape from Baltimore State. He does not try to help Starling more than he has to in order to escape, but he is impressed when she catches Bill.