This week marks the return of NBC’s “Hannibal,” the show kicking off its third season on Thursday night. In the wake of Season 2’s shocking and brutal finale, I simply cannot wait to see what former BFFs Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham are up to now, nor can I wait for “Hannibal” to reclaim its spot as the best damn horror show on TV.
In addition to incredible acting, an enthralling storyline, and stunning visuals aplenty, one of the truly impressive things about the show is the ability of the writers to consistently dream up some of the most creative killers in the history of morbid entertainment, whom our old pal Hannibal was oftentimes helping the FBI to track down.
So creative are those killers, and their clever methods of murder, that each and every one of them could quite frankly be given horror movies of their own, and the show has already invited us to be flies on the walls of crime scenes that are more gruesome and disturbing than anything that’s ever been seen in horror cinema.
Today we take a look at eight of those killers, all of whom managed to upstage even the extreme brutality of the cannibalistic Hannibal Lecter!
In Episode 2 of the show’s inaugural season, Will Graham and his FBI cohorts were on the hunt for a serial murderer who literally used the bodies of his victims as fertilizer for the purpose of growing human-mushrooms. As it turns out, the killer was a pharmacist targeting diabetics, and he tainted their insulin in an effort to render them comatose. He then buried his patients alive in shallow graves and covered them with fungi so that mushrooms would sprout out of their decaying bodies. As if being buried alive wasn’t bad enough, am I right?!
Season 1’s fifth episode paid homage to Silence of the Lambs, particularly the scene where Hannibal flayed open the dead body of an officer and hung him from his cell. The killer in the episode does a similar thing to his victims, cutting flaps of flesh from their backs and stringing them up to the ceiling, thereby turning them into human angels. As the brilliant Will Graham surmises, he’s creating these angels to watch over him because he’s got terminal lung cancer and is afraid of dying, and by episode’s end the killer takes his own life, turning himself into one of his macabre creations.
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One of the most downright shocking visuals thus far on “Hannibal” was in Episode 8 of the first season, wherein the “killer of the week” literally turned one of his victims into an instrument, opening up the throat of a musician and inserting a cello into his mouth. The chords of the instrument exposed through the gaping wound in the man’s neck, the killer plays him like a human violin, all in an attempt to catch the attention of Dr. Lecter. We learn that the killer is a man named Tobias who uses human guts to make his violin strings, and Hannibal ultimately rejects his attempts at friendship, killing him at the end of the episode.
Things got even more shocking in the 10th episode of Season 1, with the reveal of this highly disturbing human totem pole – composed of 17 different human beings, many of whom were killed several years prior to the macabre structure being erected. The bodies are determined to be murder victims who were exhumed from their graves, and by the end of the episode we learn that an old man named Mr. Wells (played by horror veteran Lance Henriksen!) is responsible for the murders – and the creation of the world’s most horrifying totem pole. The structure is his legacy, he says, and he’s shocked to discover that his own son was among the bodies that went into creating it. Oops!
The first couple episodes of Season 2 centered on perhaps the most creative killer we’ve yet seen on the show, a guy whose goal in life is to essentially create a human color palette. Rounding up victims with all different skin tones and colors, the killer forces them to overdose on heroin and then crudely stitches them together in an abandoned silo, with each body serving as a stroke of his proverbial paintbrush. He then sprays the bodies with resin to keep them preserved, turning human corpses into pieces of art. If Van Gogh built himself a Human Centipede, it’d probably look a little something like this!
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Season 2’s fourth episode starred Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction) as twisted acupuncturist Katherine Pimms, who treats her patients much the same way the real-life Dr. Kevorkian did: by putting them out of their misery. When patients come to her in extreme amounts of pain, Pimms “cures” them by performing a lobotomy and removing their eyeballs, leaving them to die in beautiful meadows. Though one victim is found still alive, but of course completely brain-dead, another is found dead and decomposing in a meadow, his body literally turned into a makeshift beehive – with bees flying into and out of his empty eye sockets. Yum. Honey.
Episode eight of Season 2 was absolutely BONKERS in the best of ways, managing to be one of the show’s wackiest hours to date – no easy task, I assure you. The episode primarily centered on social worker/serial killer Clark Ingram, who is fascinated by the idea of rebirth. At the start of the episode, we discover that he’s murdered a young female and stuffed her dead body inside the fetus of a dead horse, and later on Ingram himself is buried alive inside the body of another horse. Yeah. This show is kind of crazy. And totally awesome.
We round out this gruesome list with Will Graham’s good pal Randall Tier, who was at the center of the second season’s ninth episode. A former patient of Dr. Lecter’s, Tier is so mentally ill that he truly believes he is an animal stuck inside the body of a human being, leading him to create an exo-skeleton suit that essentially turns him into a mechanical grizzly bear. He brutally rips apart several victims throughout the course of the episode, slashing their throats and separating their limbs from their bodies. In the end Graham is forced to kill Tier after he breaks into his home.
Needless to say, Season 3 of “Hannibal” should be jam-packed with a whole host of creative new killers, and we can’t wait to meet them. Bring on the brutality!