hannibal

In Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, the elegance of horror is dressed in fine suits and plated in silver, a macabre feast that seduces the audience into admiring the grotesque. At its core, the series is less about murder than it is about appetite—appetite for food, for power, for love, for transcendence. Underneath its painterly murders and refined dialogue, the show becomes a meditation on the seven deadly sins, not in a moralizing sense, but as the raw currents of human desire and failure. Each sin emerges not as a caricature, but as an aesthetic, a personality, a hunger that consumes and transforms. They are never neatly divided but flow into one another, contaminating characters and relationships until the entire story resembles an elaborate stained-glass window depicting corruption in its most seductive forms.

Pride is the cornerstone of Hannibal Lecter himself, the first and most insidious of sins. His very existence is a performance of superiority, each gesture measured, each word chosen like a brushstroke on canvas. Pride dictates his view of humanity: some are pigs fit only for slaughter, others are worthy of elevation, transformed into art through death. When he serves human flesh disguised as delicacy, it is not simply a meal, it is a demonstration of his intellect, his refinement, his divine right to curate life and death. His conversations with Will drip with this pride; he sees himself not as a man, but as a sculptor of men, chiseling at Will’s morality until it fractures. Even when he is imprisoned, Hannibal does not kneel. The glass cell becomes a throne room, and his words carry the same regal poise. Pride is his armor, his weapon, his essence. He plays god because he believes no one else is worthy of the role. This is most chillingly clear in the tableau of Beverly Katz’s body, sliced into panels and displayed as if she were both specimen and artwork, a prideful exhibition, a message that his vision transcends human empathy. Pride is not only his sin, it is the architecture of his violence.

If Hannibal is the sculpted marble of pride, Mason Verger is the grotesque, rotting flesh of greed. Wealth surrounds him, but it is never enough; his greed extends beyond money into cruelty, into domination, into the most obscene abuses of power. His fortune insulates him from consequences, allowing his every excess to metastasize unchecked. Hannibal exposes Mason’s greed by turning it inward, coaxing him into disfiguring his own face, a literal consumption of the self. Later, when Mason attempts to feast on Hannibal, greed devours itself, collapsing into cannibalistic parody. Mason has no artistry, no philosophy. He is a pig gorging on slop, his greed stripped bare of Hannibal’s aesthetic refinements. In him, the sin appears in its ugliest, most unvarnished form: an endless hunger that disfigures body and soul alike. His plan to feed Will Graham to the pigs highlights his depravity, treating human life as nothing but fodder for excess. The pigs, ravenous and squealing, become an echo chamber for his own gluttonous greed, a grotesque mirror in which he is finally consumed by the very excess he fostered.

Yet lust in Hannibal is never straightforward. It is not reducible to flesh meeting flesh, though flesh is always involved. It is a more perilous intimacy, an eros that consumes, destabilizes, and entwines. The gravitational pull between Hannibal and Will is not defined by sexual consummation but by an obsessive, unholy longing. Hannibal lusts for Will’s recognition, for the shared darkness in his eyes, for the possibility of a companion who can understand the abyss as he does. Will, in turn, lusts for the clarity Hannibal offers, the terrible freedom of shedding moral restraints. Their shared glances across candlelit dinners carry more tension than any kiss could, each meal an act of seduction that blurs the line between romance and ruin. This culminates in their final embrace, falling together off the cliff in a gesture that is both consummation and death, lust bound to annihilation. Francis Dolarhyde expresses lust in its more carnal form, his desire for Reba stitched with tenderness and terror. With her, he is vulnerable, yet lust is inseparable from his murderous compulsion to “become.” In the infamous tiger scene, the air is charged with both erotic tenderness and monstrous threat, lust poised on the knife’s edge between devotion and violence.

Envy coils around Francis as tightly as lust. His obsession with the Red Dragon is born of loathing his own reflection, his cleft palate, his human smallness. He envies the grandeur of the Dragon, the transcendence of becoming something more than human. Each murder is his attempt to shed his flawed skin and step into the magnificence of envy’s promise. The great burning painting of William Blake’s “Red Dragon” is the perfect image of envy consuming itself, as Francis devours the canvas in flames, desperate to take into himself what he can never wholly be. Yet envy seeps elsewhere too. Bedelia Du Maurier, always seated elegantly across from Hannibal, envies his freedom, the way he moves through the world without apology, without constraint. She is brilliant enough to perceive his monstrosity but too bound by fear to enact her own agency. Her envy is quiet, dressed in velvet, but corrosive nonetheless: she wants what Hannibal has, yet cannot step beyond the glass of her own morality. Envy, in Hannibal, is never benign longing; it is hunger that eats at the self until transformation, or destruction, is inevitable.

Gluttony is the most visible of the sins, and perhaps the most perverse. It sits at the heart of Hannibal’s persona, crystallized in the gleam of silver cutlery, the scent of reduction sauces, the way blood turns to broth. But Hannibal elevates gluttony beyond vulgar excess; he transforms it into ritual, into art. He is not a man who eats for sustenance, but for sacrament. Every feast is a communion of sin and beauty, indulgence framed so exquisitely that the viewer feels complicit in desire. The audience, like Hannibal’s guests, is seduced into admiring the lushness of the meals, knowing yet forgetting that the flesh belonged to someone. Gluttony in Hannibal is not just Hannibal’s, it becomes ours, as we hunger for the spectacle itself. Consider the moment he serves Jack Crawford a plate of veal osso buco, its rich sauce gleaming in candlelight, while Jack slowly realizes the meat may not be what it seems. The knife in Jack’s hand trembles, the gluttonous temptation to indulge warring with the dawning horror of what indulgence means. Hannibal makes gluttons of us all, turning appetite into complicity.

Wrath, meanwhile, erupts in different forms across the series. Jack Crawford embodies wrath in his righteous crusade, his grief and rage fueling his relentless pursuit of Hannibal. His anger blinds him, makes him reckless, driving him to push Will and others beyond their breaking points. Hannibal’s wrath, in contrast, is controlled, aestheticized. When betrayed, he does not explode; he choreographs punishments like operas, making his rage into performance art. Every mutilation, every display of cruelty is calculated to scar not only the body but the psyche. When he disembowels Will at the end of season two, his wrath is both intimate and theatrical, a gesture of fury that is also a declaration of love. Even Garrett Jacob Hobbs, in the opening season, demonstrates wrath’s inheritance: his violent worldview passed down to Abigail in blood, a father’s rage made legacy. Wrath in this narrative is not the hot flash of temper, but the slow-burning fire that consumes everything in its path, leaving ash behind.

Sloth is subtler, but perhaps most damning. It is not the laziness of the body but the paralysis of the spirit, the refusal to act when action is demanded. Will Graham embodies this in his quiet surrender to Hannibal’s influence. Time and again, he sees the truth yet drifts closer instead of severing ties. His passivity is as dangerous as Hannibal’s violence, because it allows monstrosity to flourish. It is easier to be drawn into Hannibal’s orbit than to resist, easier to surrender than to endure the pain of separation. Alana Bloom, too, reveals sloth through her hesitation to acknowledge Hannibal’s darkness, her willful blindness until devastation is unavoidable. One of the most striking examples comes in the dinner scene where Alana, Jack, and Will dine at Hannibal’s table, fully aware yet still indulging. Their silence, their complicity, is sloth’s mask: the inertia that permits evil to wear a smile and pour them wine. In Hannibal, sloth is the sin of moral inertia, the sin of watching evil unfold and doing nothing, until the blood is already spilled.

Together, these sins create the pulse of Hannibal. They do not appear as seven neat categories but as interwoven hungers, each feeding the other, each refracted through characters like light through stained glass. Pride sharpens greed, lust ignites wrath, envy fuels gluttony, and sloth allows them all to spread unchecked. What makes the series so intoxicating is not simply that it depicts sin, but that it makes sin beautiful, elevates it, seduces us into admiring it. The murders are grotesque but painterly, the meals are horrific but exquisite, the relationships toxic but magnetic. Watching Hannibal is to participate in this liturgy of appetite, to confess with our eyes that we too are drawn in. The seven deadly sins do not belong to the characters alone; by watching, by desiring, by hungering, we reveal them within ourselves.