HANNIBAL RISING (2007)

Well, it isn’t “Hannibal Risible,” which I was afraid it might turn out to be. The latest chapter in the Hannibal Lecter saga almost fails because of a miscast director (Peter Webber, “Girl With a Pearl Earring’) and almost succeeds because of great cinematography from Ben Davis and some gloriously sleazy characters. It exists somewhere in the middle—watchable but never memorable. Anthony Hopkins put his brand on this character as surely as Anthony Perkins did on Norman Bates.

The film begins in Lithuania in 1944. The war is on and Hannibal, who appears to be around eight years old, flees the family castle, moving into a hunting lodge with his parents and young sister Mischa. Advancing Soviets arrive only to be fried by German aircraft. The parental Lecters are killed as well. Then five local collaborators show up and decide to hide out at the lodge.

But it’s winter and times are hard. In order to survive, they eat Mischa, whom they claim will soon die of pnuemonia anyway. More bombs fall and one of the snackers is killed and the other four scatter. Hannibal is rescued by the good guys and then spends the next ten years in an orphanage established by the Soviets in his family castle. He finall runs away to find relatives in France.

He locates an aunt by marriage, Lady Murasaki (Gong Li) who is conveniently able to teach him how to decapitate scumbuckets with a Japanese sword. Now that all the pieces are in place, let’s get ready to rumble.

From this point on the film is a series of revenge murders, and not just against those who ate Mischa. It seems that Hannibal has developed an aversion to all bullies as well.

Thomas Harris, who wrote the novels these films were based on, wrote the script and  does some interesting things with it. Even knowing what kind of monster this young man will turn out to be, we can’t help but sympathize with him the way we do with other out-of-control revengers. As long as he has a good reason and the killings don’t cross an undefined border of sadism, we can go along with them. Harris knows this and moves Hannibal slowly to the point where he and we have to say sayonara.

But the moment does come, and while it seems inevitable, it’s still shocking. I can’t be more specific. Sorry.

Gaspard Ulliel plays Hannibal adaquately but not spectacularly. He comes across like a good actor protraying evil in a movie he thinks is kinda silly. I could sit next to him in a restaurant and never think he’s about to order some fava beans and a nice chianti. On screen, his madness is all in his facial expressions, and they are limited to two.

Gong Li adds some class to the essentially thankless role of aunt/ennabler, and Dominic West is convincing as the French cop who understands Hannibal’s tragedy but wishes he’d commit his murdere outside of France. Rhys Ifans, as the chief villain, is so slimey he makes your average garden slug look like a strip of beef jerkey.

It’s all mid-tier nastiness.  A Hannibal Lecter story could be a lot worse than this, but a couple of them have been a lot better.

UNCLE SILAS by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1864)

We forget sometimes that writers were producing popular literature hundreds of years ago, especially when a novel that’s been around for a century or two is still in print. Longevity makes it a “classic,” but readability and a thumping good narrative is what give it longevity.

Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Uncle Silas was one of the last significant attempts at a full-blooded gothic novel after Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 and before the phenomenal revival of the form in Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.

As the story opens, young Maud Ruthyn is living a blandly idyllic life (you figure it out) with her wealthy father. When he dies suddenly, she is told by his odd Swedenborgian friend Dr. Bryerly that she must go to live at the run-down estate Bartram-Haugh, the home of her paternal Uncle Silas. Silas will care for her until she reaches her majority, at which time she will inherit her father’s money. In the intervening years, Silas will be paid out of the estate for her upkeep.

One problem: if her own father was eccentric, Maud’s uncle is nuttier than a rest stop at Stuckey’s. In fact, most of his neighbors think that, years before, he slaughtered a Mr. Clark, to whom he owed money, as Clark slept in one of Bartram’s guest rooms.

Two problem: if Maud dies before she gets her inheritance, Silas gets it all. If she marries Silas’ repulsive son Dudley, Silas gets it all by taking it away from Dudley.

The novel is an interesting blend of the gothic—detailed landscape description, characters who wear evil the way Paris Hilton wears stupid, and a crumbling, near-ruin of a country house—and the more popular for the time sensation novel—a domestic setting, mysteries to be solved, and a sinister servant in the person of the French tutor Madame de la Rougierre. LeFanu plays with the supernatural—he is the author of the wonderful vampire story “Carmilla,” so he could play with the best of ‘em—but the book is really a study in psychological suspense.

Yes, the dialogue can get pretty stilted in that patented second-tier mid-Victorian author sort of way, and the three-volume stretching is all too obvious when Maud and Silas have confrontation after confrontation that are all cut from the same pattern: Maud accuses someone in the house of tormenting her, Silas listens and then dismisses her complaint as coming from just a silly little girl, she becomes angry, he becomes sullen and insulting, she rushes from the room. It’s the sort of thing that comes with the territory, but it is more than made up for in the parts that LeFanu could really get into to—those subtle hints that the mold and rot of the house and grounds have infested the souls of Silas and his household.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the corruption and madness that have been growing in Silas all his life have tainted his physical surroundings.

Every fan of modern horror owes it to him/herself to look backward now and again to see where the contemporary genre came from. Many of the original gothic novels are deadly slow and about as chilling as a midday hike across Death Valley, but Uncle Silas isn’t one of them. Many of today’s go-for-the-jugular grossout-a-paloozas aren’t near as creepy.

TOWER OF SILENCE by Sarah Rayne

Something has got to be done about this woman. Her name is Sarah Rayne and she writes the absofreakinglutely most horrifying set pieces going.

Take this, for instance. Fourteen-year old Mary Maskelyne, after a short lifetime of emotional abuse from her parents, has murdered her father by driving a spike into his brain from the base of his skull. She has bound his corpse to her mother, face to face. When Leila Maskelyne awakens she sees her husband’s dead face only inches from her own.

“And then realization slowly dawned in her face, and with it had come panic and revulsion, and that had been the best moment of all. Mary had laughed once again to see those emotions on her mother’s face, although she had instantly put her hand over her mouth to push the laughter back down. But it had been a moment to store away and remember.”

There’s a reason, mad though it is, behind Mary’s act. It has a lot to do with a group of British children who were captured by Indian separatists in 1947. The Indians threatened to kill the young ones if certain political demands were not met. I don’t want to peel too much away. Rayne’s technique is to cut back and forth from current days to this night of horror. I like the way she suddenly, quietly and unexpectedly plops revelations in front of you and then glides along, leaving you going back to re-read what just happened in a state of surprise.

The modern part of the story features Selina March, a spinster in her late 50s. She’s timid and bound to Teind House in the Scottish village of Inchcape. It’s not that she’s particularly happy in the house where she grew up, but she has committed several murders there and you know how that creates a tie. The house is also a couple of miles from Moy, the hospital for the criminally insane that is now the permanent residence of Mary Maskelyne. We suspect that there must be a connection between the two women, and that becomes a certainty when we learn that Selina survived the massacre in India and Mary’s older sister died in it.

If the book has a weakness—and that depends on how you look at it—it’s an over-abundance of coincidences. But that’s also part of its strength. This novel is a throwback to the glory days of the Sensation Novels of the 1860s, fiction that was intended to appeal to the emotions of the new reading classes and stimulate sensations rather than thoughts. Sensation novels like THE WOMAN IN WHITE, EAST LYNNE, and LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET were early psychological thrillers and huge bestsellers. I still get a kick out of them and if you enjoy the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins—both of whom wrote about evil deeds done in India—you’ll probably like TOWER OF SILENCE.

And by the way, the scene referenced above, with Mary and her mother, is not the most horrific one in the book. Imagine dead bodies being lugged to the top of a tower and placed on a platform running around the outside of the wall. Now imagine vultures swooping down for a freshly killed feast. Now imagine human screams emanating from the top of the tower. Now imagine the details I’m leaving out.

Now start reading.