40 Years Ago, Manhunter Changed The Face Of Serial-Killer Movies
Enter the mind of a killer with Michael Mann.
The brilliant psychopath. The obsessed cop chasing him. A dangerous dance that threatens to consume them both. It’s a formula that we’ve seen repeated over and over in movies and TV series, several of which were adapted from the same source material: Thomas Harris’ 1981 bestseller Red Dragon. But before Hannibal and Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter (or Lektor, as it’s spelled here) and Will Graham first met on screen in Michael Mann’s Manhunter.
Movies about serial killers have been hits since the 1930s, but the term came into popular use in the ‘70s as interest in real-life cases made a wave of murderers like Ted Bundy into household names. By 1986, Court TV was broadcasting high-profile trials into millions of homes, and a small mountain of paperbacks had been written about famous serial killers, both real and fictional. That year, two movies took opposite approaches to the subject: With Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, John McNaughton sought to deglamorize the serial killer. Manhunter took the opposite approach, turning the perverse murders of Harris’ novel into a work of cinematic art.
Part of what makes Manhunter so compelling is its characters. William Petersen stars as Graham, who’s pulled out of retirement by his former boss, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina). Graham’s method for catching killers requires him to enter their psychological world. This can be quite intense, and quite harmful to Graham’s own mental health. But it also draws the monsters to him, and Graham is a figure of fascination for notorious figures like Lektor (Brian Cox), who still enjoys a tête-à-tête with the moody detective who caught him three years after the fact.
Compared to Anthony Hopkins’ version of the character, Cox’s Lektor is both a fool and a master manipulator, a snob who constantly overestimates his own intelligence but still manages to do major damage from his prison cell. His role here is as a covert helper to the lead villain, Francis Dolarhyde (Tom Noonan), who the cops have dubbed the Tooth Fairy but who refers to himself as the Red Dragon. Noonan is absolutely terrifying as Dolarhyde, managing to evoke sympathy and complex emotion in his character’s day-to-day life — until he drops the mask and reveals the inconceivable madness underneath.
Brian Cox as Hannibal Lektor.
But the real star of Manhunter is the cinematography. This is an intensely stylized movie, frequently bathing its characters in saturated colors that enhance the mood of a scene. The sets are all sleek and cold and very modern, and Mann uses unlikely locations — the film’s “supermax prison” is actually an art museum — to create distance between the viewer and the action. Against this smooth, cool backdrop, every drop of blood feels unbearably hot, echoing the frenzy of Dolarhyde’s bloodlust and the ritualistic transformation he calls his Great Becoming.
One of the film’s best scenes captures this feeling without any violence, as a blind woman — one of Dolarhyde’s coworkers, and both a potential romantic interest and a potential victim — pets a sedated tiger as it lies on a metal operating table. The moment evokes a visceral sensation of warmth and softness, contrasted with the cold steel and the dangerous thrill of getting close to a large predatory animal. Much of Manhunter revolves around Graham putting himself in the killer’s headspace; watching Dolarhyde’s face contort with pleasure as he observes Reba (Joan Allen) caress the beast’s fur, the audience gets a taste of what that must feel like.
Warm fur on a cold operating table.
It’s a bold and immersive approach, one that pays off in a bombastic finale set to Iron Butterfly’s "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” But even when the violence gets intense, Manhunter never really goes gritty, opting instead for beachy pastels and meticulous mirror shots set to a blissful score by legendary German electronic group Tangerine Dream. The heightened aesthetics are further enhanced in a new 4K remaster, Manhunter: The Final Cut, which amps up the color and turns up the volume on those heavenly synthesizer runs. The archetypes in Harris’ novel have influenced countless other pieces of media, including classics like David Fincher’s Seven. But there’s still nothing like the original, especially when the original looks this good.
