Hannibal Rising

     "The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp." Do you compose

            verse, Inspector, and keep it under your pillow?

This prequel shows a young Hannibal Lecter from childhood in Lithuania, to his teen years in France, and up to his arrival in North America.

Lecter is boy of 8 years old at the beginning of the film (1944), living in Lecter Castle in Lithuania. Lecter, his younger sister Mischa, and his parents escape to the family's hunting lodge in the woods to elude the advancing German troops. Back at Lecter Castle, six Lithuanian militiamen (Grutas, Dortlich, Grentz, Kolnas, Milko, and Pot Watcher) request to join the Waffen SS. The SS commander orders them to kill the Lecters' Jewish cook who was left behind....A Soviet tank stops at the Lecters' lodge looking for water, and forces everyone out of the house. However, the tank is then spotted by a German bomber, which sparks a firefight. The bomber is shot down by the tank, but subsequently crashes into it, and the ensuing explosion kills everyone but Lecter and Mischa.

The SS militiamen then loot Lecter Castle. Seeing their wounded SS commander, Grutas shoots him and takes his badge. However, the impending Russian advance force them to hide out in the woods, where they locate the Lecter lodge. They storm and take over the lodge. Finding no other food in the bitterly cold Baltic winter, the men look menacingly at Hannibal and Mischa.

The movie then cuts to a scene eight years later inside Lecter Castle, which has been turned into a Soviet orphanage. A bully harasses Lecter, who has been rendered mute by his experiences, about not singing the orphanage anthem. The bully attacks his head, but Lecter blocks his swing with a fork, impaling the bully's hand. That evening, Lecter experiences his first flashback about Mischa, which angers the youth commander, who locks him in a dungeon. However, Lecter escapes from the castle orphanage to Paris to live with his widowed aunt. She manages to get him to speak for the first time, and instructs him about flower arrangement, martial arts, and ancestor worship.

At a local market, a butcher makes a crude remark about Lady Murasaki. Lecter then attacks him. Later, while the butcher was fishing, Lecter requests an apology from him, and is denied. He disembowels the butcher with a katana, then decapitates him. He is suspected of the butcher's murder by Inspector Popil, a French detective who had also lost his family to the war. Thanks in part to his aunt's intervention, however, Lecter escapes responsibility for the crime.

Eventually, Lecter becomes the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. He receives a working scholarship at a hospital in Paris, where he is given a job preparing cadavers. One day, Lecter witnesses a condemned war criminal receiving a sodium thiopental injection to force him to recall details about his war crimes. In an attempt to recall the names of those responsible for his sister's death, Lecter injects himself with the solution. His subsequent flashback reveals that the pot watcher was killed when the Russians bombed the lodge, and the dogtags were still left in the ruins of the lodge.

Lecter then returns to Lithuania in search of his sister's remains. While crossing the Soviet border, he draws the attention of Dortlich, who is now a Soviet border patrol officer. Lecter excavates the ruins of the lodge where his family died, and also unearths the dog-tags of the group of deserters who had killed his sister. Dortlich attempts to kill him but is incapacitated by Lecter. After he buries Mischa's remains, Lecter forces Dortlich to reveal the whereabouts of the rest of his gang, and then decapitates Dortlich with a horse-drawn pulley.

Lecter continues to hunt the gang down and one by one they meet their grisly fates..... However this film is about Lecters childhood, and the making of the man...or monster.

                                                                Copyright(C) 2007 - 2020. All rights reserved

                        HORROR HOME