Directed by Michael Mann, Manhunter is an adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel “Red Dragon” that follows FBI profiler Will Graham (William Peterson) coming out of retirement to track a serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan). Graham tries to understand the criminal’s intention and psychology behind the randomly selected victims, for which he takes the help of the incarcerated Hannibal Lecter (Brian Cox) to stop the killer.
On its 40th anniversary, revisiting Manhunter is a reminder of just how easily Mann’s first Hannibal Lecter film has been overshadowed by The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The film is a pioneer of the most feared and, at the same time, revered criminal of cinema of all time, Hannibal Lecter. Yet, when we hear the name, we can only think of the latter and have sealed Manhunter away in a forgotten box in our cupboards, considering it as one of Mann’s most underrated films.
Though Manhunter underperformed at the box office and Anthony Hopkins’ menacingly iconic embodiment of the character in the screen adaptation of Harris’s 1988 sequel was more widely loved, the grounded forensic rigor and the chilling atmosphere created by brilliantly thoughtful scenes still add to the eerie cinematic ambiance even today. I can’t get the images of a man in a wheelchair set on fire racing down the ramp of the parking garage and the woman with glowing white light seen in her eyes and mouth.
Rewatching it after 40 years took me back to the unsettling atmosphere and the terror of its extraordinary villain, with the background music so captivating that each scene feels like a real case unfolding right before your eyes. The Sherlock Holmes-style forensic investigation, in times when high-end technology was missing, makes it a timeless masterpiece still able to boggle our minds a bit.
The movie is a pioneer of several other criminal investigation films like Seven (1995), Copycat (1995), Cure (1997), Red Dragon (2002), Zodiac (2007), and Prisoners (2013). The 1980s were more dominated by high-concept blockbusters, action films, and comedies, while the 90s were more about serial-killer thrillers. Hence, Manhunter came in a film landscape when it wasn’t considered a major cinematic subgenre with extensive scrutiny of “dreams” and “motives” of a killer.
Clearly, it was a box office gamble as the neon-soaked, stylized commercial proposition wasn’t common in those days. Mann was coming from television (Miami Vice) and bringing an unusually sleek sensibility to theaters, so the disappointing commercial performance was almost expected. The irony? The same source material later became a huge franchise and a cultural phenomenon with The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon, and the Hannibal series (2013-2015).
The film itself is a mirror into society’s rooting of evil and then blaming the evil on the whole. The thought that someone took the child and transformed him into a monster, which becomes irredeemable as he becomes an adult, is the evil so deeply and badly embedded that we are left to sympathize with the evil itself.
If taken a closer look, Mann’s characters race against time and have a hardcore obsession with what they love. In his most famed film, Heat (1995), the two protagonists race against the clock in different ways, with a fanatic commitment to their respective professions. The duality of the men themselves, who find themselves in the other, is the same element we could find in Manhunter too. The two versions of the same man, overloaded with melancholy, make up the professional identities of one another. This was evident in Lecter’s secretly established connection with the killer. And this is where Graham comes to learn about what goes on in the mind of a criminal, leading him to become a killer himself towards the end.
The core idea that Manhunter portrayed from another cinematic era continues to resonate in modern crime films, which makes the pic a fine blueprint in contemporary times. What motivates the killer is all explained by Lecter’s statement, “If one does what God does enough times, one will become as God.” The killers get an otherworldly power from killing, manifested in other serial killer portrayals like Netflix’s Dahmer (2022).
Though the serial killer’s power that came from killing was more psychological, an aim to escape feelings of inadequacy and isolation and becoming the mythical figure he imagines himself to be, the “Great Red Dragon,” the form of psychological transformation is even perceptible in later films and series explored in different ways.
Hence, after 40 glorious years, it would not be wrong to still take Manhunter as an archetype for modern serial killer films and revisit its legacy that deserves to be remembered not only for the sake of being a Hannibal Lecter movie but as one of the films that established the psychological grammar of contemporary crime films.
Article Courtesy of Madiha Ali
Feature Image Credit to De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG)