Wild Mass Guessing for The Silence of the Lambs.
Manhunter takes place in a separate continuity from all the other books and films.
Chilton isn't a dick. Dollarhyde is killed by Will instead of by Molly. Will's marriage doesn't fall apart. Hannibal's victims were co-eds who happened to be his patients. His last name isn't even spelled the same (Lecktor). Heck, the Manhunter Lecktor might not even have been a cannibal at all.- More or less Word of God, seeing as there exists a film of Red Dragon, clearly tied to the other films.
Lady Murasaki is still alive
And is waiting for a chance to do what she should have done years ago: kill Hannibal. If there is another book, there will be an epic fight scene in which she faces off against Lecter with the Murasaki family katana.- Won't she be a bit... elderly to swordfight? Since she was (according to my superb calculations) thirtyish during The '50s, she will be a bit geriatric when coming to seek revenge, Japanese or not.
- (OP) There are many instances of octogenarian martial artists who can still kick serious ass. Being that by that time, Hannibal will be no spring chicken himself, it might not be as one-sided a fight as you think.
- An addition to the theory, if there's a fifth book, that's what will happen..., but Hannibal would still win because there's no way Harris would allow the object of his mancrush to lose.
- Also, in addition, if there is a fifth book, it would more than likely be set before Lector's murders that Will Graham was trying to figure out (in fact, a great tie-in would be that the murder that gets the FBI involved with looking into the murders could be Lady Murasaki's death, basically leading Will Graham to be involved with Lector and essentially having Lady Muraski being indirectly involved with Lector's incarceration).
Hannibal Lecter is, in addition to being a brilliant psychopath cannibal highly -cultured aristocrat (and a few other things I've missed, I'm sure), a SITH LORD.
Because, come on—HOW in Hell did he get ahold of that pen, if he didn't use the Force?- In the movie, at least, there isn't a clear moment when he could have grabbed it. Maybe it's explained in the book.
- In the novel Lecter has had a small inktube piece of a ballpoint pen stashed in his mouth (and various other crevices) for years. Inside it is a piece of paperclip, both lifted from a researcher and an orderly on days Barney was not working. Silence of the Lambs the film shows Chilton losing the pen to leave less unexplained to the viewer.
Hannibal Lecter is a Time Lord
- Aaran Thomas regenerates into Gaspard Ulliel, who regenerates into Anthony Hopkins.
- If we somehow incorporate the theory below, Aaran Thomas regenerates into Gaspard Ulliel regenerates into Brian Cox, who regenerates into Anthony Hopkins.
- Perhaps Hopkins regenerates into Mads Mikkelsen, making him the Fifth Lecter?
The Silence of the Lambs is in a continuity separate from Red Dragon and Hannibal.
Though the events of The Silence of the Lambs may take place between Red Dragon and Hannibal, the visual representation that we have seen is in a separate continuity.- At the end of Red Dragon, Dr. Chilton goes to Lecter's cell and tells him that a female FBI agent is there to see him. This is clearly meant to be Clarlice Starling. However, in The Silence of the Lambs, Chilton does not leave Starling to see Lecter in his cell before she visits him, and his clothes are different.
- Jack Crawford is portrayed by Harvey Keitel in Red Dragon and by Scott Glenn in The Silence of the Lambs. He is absent from Hannibal, in which Starling is portrayed by Julianne Moore instead of Jodie Foster.
- In Hannibal, the dialog in the recorded conversation between Lecter and Starling is slightly different from how it is heard in The Silence of the Lambs.
- In Hannibal, Starling says that Lecter killed Benjamin Raspail. This is also implied in Red Dragon. In The Silence of the Lambs, however, he denies it. He could have been lying. Then again, it could be that he did not kill Raspail in the continuity of The Silence of the Lambs film.
Alernatively...
Each film takes place in an alternate universe.
Perhaps due to the fact that... Each book takes place in a different universe.
Thomas Harris is pretty inconsistent when it comes to the timeline of the book series. The Hannibal novel is in the same universe as The Silence of the Lambs film.
The former takes place in the year 1997 and the Buffalo Bill murders are said to have taken place seven years prior, in the year 1990, when the latter is set.- Jossed. Hannibal mentions Lecter's extra digit.
The FBI agent at the end of the Red Dragon movie was not Clarice Starling
Lecter asked, "What is her name?" but we never heard it. For all we know, it was a female FBI agent looking for a different killer. The Silence from Doctor Who was in The Silence of the Lambs.
But where??? The Great Red Dragon is Francis Dolarhyde's Dark Passenger.
Connecting these stories to Dexter.Hannibal Lecter is a genetic experiment in making a superman that went horribly wrong
...accounting for the maroon eyes, the Improbably High I.Q. and six fingers on one hand. He will later change his name to Khan Noonien Singh and lead his favorite bits of humanity in killing the rest in the Eugenics Wars. Seriously. Look at him in "Space Seed". Except for the eyes and fingers, which he probably could have found a way around by that point, it's him. Hannibal Lecter's distaste for rudeness is not an ethical standard.
Simply put, Lecter dislikes rudeness in a similar way that other people dislike cockroaches. He finds rude behaviour distasteful or repugnant in terms of its appearance or sensory effect, not because it transgresses any ethical or cultural norms. Clarice is Iris Steensma.
When Iris grew up she sought to distance herself from Travis's headline-grabbing vigilante killing spree by changing her name (which she already hated), dyeing her hair brown (or, if it was dyed when Travis met her, letting it return to its natural color), and moving to Virginia. (Hell, maybe Starling was her late father's name; by the time Iris returned from the Lutheran orphanage in Bozeman, Montana, her mother had moved to Pittsburgh and married a man named Steensma. From there Iris ran away to New York, where she adopted the local accent in place of her native West Virginia accent so she wouldn't stick out.) Travis would be proud that she's carrying on his campaign against criminal scum more effectively than he ever could—let's just hope that he never ended up seeking psychiatric help from Hannibal!