The Disquieting Guest — Hannibal, Horror and Television
I’m dreadfully late to this party, but over the course of the last few weeks, I finally had the chance to catch up on the first season of Hannibal. By and large, I enjoyed it very much, especially Mads Mikkelsen’s incarnation of the title character. I was very struck, too, both by how stylized the series is and how committed it is to bringing full-on horror to the small screen. In this respect, it is a pretty rare animal.* In his chapter about horror on television in Danse Macabre, Stephen King writes that horror has not been well-served by the medium. One of the big problems is that “television has really asked the impossible of its handful of horror programs — to terrify without really terrifying, to horrify without really horrifying, to sell audiences a lot of sizzle and no steak.” This is back in 1981, and the television landscape has, of course, changed radically since then. There were exceptions to this rule that King could point to then, and there have been even more since, but I think there is still a fair bit of
