An amalgam of multiple serial killers through history, Hannibal was the first in a new breed of cinema nightmares- the killer who could show multiple faces depending on who he was dealing with. The way he treated you entirely depended on how you treated him.

It’s a terrifying thought, it’s it? The person you didn’t say ‘thank you’ to for holding open a door could decide that small slight was worthy of death, and you wouldn’t have even given it a second thought. Hannibal was chilling and creepy, yet refined and well-mannered. You had a hard time reconciling his two halves, knowing how truly dangerous he really was.

Silence of the Lambs is the movie that got me started in criminology and abnormal psychology. After watching it, I wanted to know what made these people tick. What made them different than the rest of us, how did their brains get wired so badly that they could think these horrible things were normal? Why does a subset of the human population seem to have no empathy, no capacity for understanding how to sympathize with another?

I never did get my answers. In truth, we don’t know. Some people are born different. Some are made different through the things they’ve gone through in their life. We have hundreds of theories and not one fits every person we come across. In the end, I think that’s what makes the people and characters so interesting… we want to understand the unknown. We want to uncover the enigma.

The entire time, we know a quirk of fate or birth is all that separated us from who we are and the monsters. We see our darkest desires in their misdeeds, and that’s the most horrifying part of all.