There’s a moment in Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel Red Dragon when, shortly after having his first encounter with Will Graham since the man put him away, Dr. Hannibal Lecter lies on his bed with the cell lights down, ruminating on odors. Harris juxtaposes the mundane realities of Lecter’s incarcerated life (the smell of Clorox in the drains; orderlies serving chili) with the scents he associates with Graham. The first of which is semen.
Reading the novel for the first time as a teenager not yet fully in touch with her own queerness, I remember thinking, “That’s pretty gay.” And it was. Throughout the novel, Lecter is nothing if not the ex from hell, lashing out when Graham won’t give him his phone number, trying to remove his new partner from the picture, and generally refusing to let the other man move on.
Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Three decades later, Bryan Fuller, an openly gay creator, showed up to give me the canonically queer adaptation I didn’t know I needed in the form of Hannibal, a series that stays true to its horror roots while delivering on a promise in its character development that LGBTQ+ fans seldom get to see. Now, just in time for Pride, all three seasons of Fuller’s Hannibal have arrived on Netflix in the U.S. and Canada (the UK and South Korea have had them for some time), and you may have heard rumblings from fans that another season would be truly delectable right about now. If you were on the fence about taking a bite out of this twisted horror romance, allow me to whet your appetite and leave you hungry for that fabled fourth season—because the show’s queer past, present, and future is something you might need in your life, too.
First, a brief history. Hannibal debuted in 2013 on NBC, imagining the relationship that Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) might have had before the latter’s eventual capture. Of course, with Hannibal the Cannibal on the loose (not to mention a worryingly high number of active serial killers per capita), the bodies quickly pile up, and Fuller and his creative team push every boundary of network TV-approved gore—folding human origami, stacking a totem pole of corpses, flaying backs, and filling torsos with flowers. But between all the blood and mutilated bodies, something interesting starts to happen between the series’ two male leads.
They start to fall in love.
I feel it’s important to pause here and say, this is not just my interpretation. While countless shows shamelessly queerbait then ridicule their fans for reading into the subtext, Hannibal drags its subtext so far out of the closet that by the third season, it’s undeniably just text. Before long, the leads have basically adopted a child together, and Lecter is reminding Graham on the regular that he loves him. A love ballad plays over their final scene together.
I don’t believe Fuller set out to create a gay story. Based on various interviews he’s given over the years, some of it seems to have happened organically (perhaps fueled by that undercurrent of homoeroticism, subtle but unmistakably there, that runs through the original novel, as well as the queer-coding of Lecter’s character as a means of making him appear more deviant in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs). The rest may have been inspired by the passion of the fans, who instantly clocked a romantic and sexual tension between Lecter and Graham that Fuller was too close to the material to see. And while a lesser show might have doubled down on its heterosexuality in an attempt to brush the question of queerness under the rug, Hannibal did something unusual. It allowed its more sexually liberal character, Lecter, to pine after the object of his desire, while forcing Graham to confront how his feelings for Lecter squared away with something he’d always clearly believed about himself—that he was fundamentally straight.
This culminates in a fascinating scene in the third season where Graham sits down with Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), Lecter’s psychiatrist, and asks her something that has obviously been eating at him for some time: whether Lecter is in love with him. “Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment at the very sight of you? Yes,” Du Maurier replies. “But do you ache for him?”
Graham doesn’t have an answer for her then, but by the time the season reaches its erotically charged final act, he appears to have come to terms with a few things about himself (despite the fact that Lecter does indeed, during his incarceration, become the ex from hell that queer readers of the novel always knew he was). It’s an incredibly nuanced and beautiful arc, and one we rarely see in media, much less in gory horror television. The fact that Fuller remains to this day a vocal advocate for queer content created by Hannibal fans (aka “Fannibals”) is the icing on the cake. Where other creators quietly pretend that the queer corners of their fandoms don’t exist (or, in the worst cases, blatantly roll their eyes), Fuller has always set a place at the table for us.
Now that the show has found a new home on Netflix, I’m here to extend the invitation. To all the horror fans, queer and straight alike, who haven’t had a taste of Hannibal yet: we’ve kept a seat warm for you. And to the folks who might have originally dismissed it as just another remake of a popular horror property—I once assumed the same, and I can assure you it’s not. Hannibal raises the bar for horror television so high that, since it aired its final episode in 2015, every dish I’ve sampled since has tasted bland in comparison. It begins as a seemingly straightforward police procedural with a curious fixation on body horror and evolves into a psychological nightmare told through the lens of a European art film.
And it does all this while weaving an intimate and endlessly enthralling queer love story, taking a small seed of a backstory from Harris’ original novel and growing it into something unique and daring and beautiful. So come for the elaborate murder tableaux, but I promise you’ll be staying for sexual tension so thick you could cut it with knife. Trust me. Both Lecter and Graham try.
As for you, Netflix, it’s your turn to cook. The Fannibals have been waiting a long time for a fourth season, and this delicacy of queer-created, queer-friendly horror media deserves to find a new life on your platform. While the show was critically acclaimed during its original run, network TV audiences weren’t ready for it. Your viewers are. Auteur-driven horror and queer horror are having a moment, and you could be at the forefront of both. The time for Hannibal is most definitely now.
I would encourage you to step through the door Bryan Fuller is holding open. It’s dark on the other side, and madness is waiting—but it’s the kind you can’t look away from, and the kind that stays with you long after the final credits have rolled. After all, five years after it went off the air, we fans still daily feel a stab of hunger for Hannibal.
And yes, we ache for more.
