Hannibal Lecter

Demme's film adapts Thomas Harris's 1988 novel of the same name, credited on screen. The screenplay keeps Harris's structure almost intact: the trainee sent to interview the prisoner, the quid pro quo, and the parallel hunt for Buffalo Bill running against the clock. This names the specific novel The Silence of the Lambs, not the Lecter series, and the difference is a real one. Red Dragon (1981) is the first book and was filmed by Michael Mann as Manhunter in 1986; Hannibal follows in 1999.

Red Dragon built the profiler thriller and Alex Cross is written inside it. Harris established the whole apparatus in 1981: an investigator whose method is to think like the killer, behavioural science treated as a real discipline with procedure and jargon, a serial offender given a full interior life, and the professional cost of the work as the actual subject. Patterson's series takes the parts and speeds them up. Cross is a psychologist working homicide, the villains are theatrical, and the short chapters are the innovation. Filed MEDIUM: this is a form being worked in rather than a specific debt Patterson has described.

The series adapts Red Dragon and material from the later novels, but spends its first two seasons in the years before them, on the working relationship between Graham and Lecter that the books summarise in a paragraph. Licensed from the novels without the rights to The Silence of the Lambs, which is why Clarice Starling is absent.

Ridley Scott's adaptation of the third Lecter novel, made ten years after The Silence of the Lambs. It changes Harris's ending, which had Starling leave with Lecter; Jodie Foster's refusal to return is usually attributed to that ending, and the film supplies a different one.

Michael Mann's adaptation of Red Dragon, the first of Harris's Lecter novels, made five years before The Silence of the Lambs. Lecter is spelled Lecktor and played by Brian Cox, and the film is built around Will Graham's method rather than around the prisoner.