WARNING: The following article contains graphic images.
There are a few key things that set the violence of Bryan Fuller's Lecter origin story Hannibal apart from other shows in its genre – the ravishing cinematography, the sheer, grisly ingenuity of the gore, and the fact that each horrifying image holds psychological weight rather than mere shock value. It's why we miss it so.
Nevertheless it is, by Fuller's own admission, a near-miracle that half of this stuff got past NBC's Standards & Practices department. With the ever-lovely Fannibal Appreciation Day in the US this week, Digital Spy looks back at the cult hit's five most censor-defying moments…
Related: Bryan Fuller reflects on the end of Hannibal: "I wrote the last scene with Hugh Dancy"
5. Angel wings
One of season one's more memorable killers of the week has a religious MO, which involves flaying the skin off his victims' backs and lifting up the flaps to resemble angel wings, exposing the ribs and spine beneath.
In a sad, creepy twist that's pure Hannibal, it turns out he has a fatal brain tumour and is creating guardian angels to watch over him because he's afraid of dying.
NBC initially rejected the shot above of a naked, flayed couple, not because of the exposed muscle tissue and blood and sinew, but because - as quoted by Fuller - "'We can see their butt cracks.' So I said, 'What if we filled the butt cracks with blood so we couldn't see the cracks?' And they said okay!"
... Standards and practices logic, ladies and gents!
4. The mushroom garden
Will Graham's face in the above photo says it all, honestly. Ugh. While the pilot episode of Hannibal culminates in one of the bloodiest sequences ever, it's the second episode 'Amuse-Bouche' that really sets the tone for truly demented crime scenes.
This killer of the week is a pharmacist who takes advantage of his privileged position (paralleling Hannibal as he becomes Will's therapist) to drug and abduct diabetic patients. He sends them into a coma, then puts them on his own very special brand of life support and uses them as human fertiliser for his mushroom garden.
It's hard to know where to start with being creeped out by this, but the worst moment in the sequence has to be when one of the bodies abruptly spasms into life, recalling the 'Sloth' moment from David Fincher's Se7en.
If you were in any doubt as to whether Hannibal was appropriate TV dinner viewing, this scene helpfully cleared that issue up for you early on.
3. Mason Verger is full of himself
Hannibal Lecter is famously intolerant of the rude, and possibly the most extreme proof of this comes in his punishment for sadistic billionaire Mason Verger (played here by Michael Pitt). In Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal, Lecter compels a drugged Verger to cut off his own face and feed it to a pack of dogs. It was hard to imagine how this was going to translate to primetime network television in the US, and yet the final version might actually be even more grisly than Harris describes.
Knowing that the iconic scene was a must-have, Fuller and his team approached Standards & Practices well in advance, and found them accommodating (presumably because the scene in question involved no butt cracks).
"They gave us some parameters - 'The more you keep in shadow, the more you can do, the less vibrant the reds are in the blood the more you can do,'" Fuller explained. "A lot of what we were seeing on screen in that scene almost read as black, so it's less likely to set off that trigger."
Just to recap, in case you're not keeping up with S&P logic here: naked bodies are okay provided they're caked with blood, and a man eating bits of his own flayed face is fair game if he does it with the lights off.
2. Abel Gideon's first kill
"Eddie Izzard killing a nurse" isn't a phrase that necessarily strikes fear into most hearts, and yet this might take the toughly contended title of most difficult-to-watch scene in Hannibal history.
Izzard's Abel Gideon, a prisoner in the maximum-security Baltimore State, breaks free from his hospital bed by slaughtering the nurse on night duty. But he doesn't just kill her. He gouges out her eyes with his fingers. The state that he leaves her body in is disturbing, but there's something viscerally awful about the eyes, particularly since we get treated to the sight of both the gouging and the empty sockets left afterwards. Shudder.
What makes this scene extra-horrifying is that we don't see Gideon doing any of this, but Will, via his empathic re-enactment. Looking back on the scene after season two, it plays as a potent foreshadowing for Will's increasingly dark trajectory.
1. The human mural
The show's most horrifying moment, by some distance, comes at the beginning of season two's second episode. The premise leading up to the scene is bad enough – the show's latest deranged killer has sewn corpses into a human mural, which from above takes on the appearance of a giant eye. He's an artist, see.
The mural maker kills by heroin overdose, but one poor victim is an ex-addict with a higher tolerance than his fellow human brushstrokes, and so awakes to find himself sewn into a mural of corpses. And then tears himself free. Slowly.
It's the only scene in which the show has ever felt at risk of crossing over into the torture porn territory which it otherwise so studiously avoids, and Fuller himself told Digital Spy that he was stunned by how visceral the scene ultimately was.
"I was sort of in shock watching it, because I was so horrified at what I was seeing," Fuller admitted. "It felt like it was part and parcel with the story, but I kind of expected them to pull us back, and they didn't, and then when it aired I was like, 'Good God!' And yet we got away with it.
"It was one of those times where I shocked myself, and then felt immobilised to pull it back, and then it aired!"
Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture, mental health, and true crime. She loves owls, hates cilantro, and can find the queer subtext in literally anything.
