Why We Fall for Fictional Killers Like Hannibal and Dexter
On catharsis, high-functioning psychopathy, and moral justification, and why audiences keep rooting for television's most dangerous, most convincing characters.
Since cinema was born, and art in general, it hasn’t talked about good and evil as simply as children’s stories do. Greek theater was full of heroes who killed, betrayed, and destroyed everything, and yet the audience wept for them. Aristotle called this psychological purging, or catharsis — meaning a person, while watching a tragedy, releases his suppressed emotions in a safe way. In other words, inside every human there’s a dark zone — art doesn’t create it, art reveals it. And when modern cinema started building the intelligent or complex killer character, it wasn’t glorifying evil — it was offering a mirror to a human psyche trying to understand its own limits.
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Hannibal Lecter and the Appeal of Total Control
Fascination with a killer isn’t love of violence. It’s fascination with power.
Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant psychiatrist in Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs novels and films, and of course the series, was never just a criminal. He was cultured, calm, spoke with confidence, analyzed people like open books. Psychology classifies his personality under what’s called “high-functioning psychopathy” — meaning someone with severe emotional coldness but who’s socially brilliant and reads other people extremely well. The secret of his appeal is that the viewer sees a model of total control — no confusion, no fear, no weakness. This character touches Nietzsche’s idea of the “Overman,” someone who creates his own standards, apart from society. The problem is the human mind is naturally drawn to the idea of superiority, even a dark one.
Dexter and the Killer With a Justification
The most dangerous thing isn’t the killer. It’s the killer who has a justification.
The series Dexter presented a different model. Dexter Morgan, the forensic expert who kills killers. Here the drama used a philosophical idea called utilitarianism — meaning an act is judged by its outcome. If killing one person saves many others, is that evil or good? Psychology explains the audience’s attraction through something called gradual moral justification — meaning when the drama gives you a convincing reason, your brain starts redefining the crime itself. Suddenly the killer becomes “society’s cleaner.” And here emotional entanglement happens — you know he’s a killer, but you just can’t bring yourself to hate him.
Joe Goldberg and the Monster Who Believes He’s in Love
Sometimes the monster doesn’t justify his actions. He’s genuinely convinced he’s in love.
The character Joe Goldberg in the series You is one of the most dangerous modern examples. This man sees himself as the perfect lover, and every crime he commits is internally justified as protecting the relationship.
Bryan Fuller’s television series Hannibal (2013-2015) pushed the same fascination even further by making the murders themselves beautiful. Bodies were staged as tableaus, arranged into flowers, mushroom gardens, cellos strung from human tissue, shot with the lighting and composition of fine art photography rather than a crime scene. That choice is doing real psychological work on the audience. When violence is filmed as ugly, the viewer’s instinct is revulsion. When it’s filmed as composition, the instinct briefly becomes admiration before the mind catches up to what it’s actually looking at, and that half-second lag is exactly the discomfort the character is built to produce.
The clearest demonstration of Lecter’s appeal is the dinner-table scene near the end of The Silence of the Lambs, where he calmly describes eating a census taker’s liver alongside a good wine, delivered in the same unbothered tone he’d use to recommend a restaurant. What makes the moment work isn’t the gore, it’s the composure. Nothing in his voice suggests confession; he’s simply reporting a fact about himself, the same way he reports facts about everyone else’s hidden weaknesses. That total absence of shame is the actual fantasy on offer, not violence but immunity from the self-doubt that governs everyone else in the room.
That fascination gets a lot riskier once fiction is swapped out for documented reality. Netflix’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022) drew sustained criticism from victims’ families, who said the show reopened real wounds and profited from real suffering that Hannibal Lecter, being invented, could never actually inflict on anyone. The difference matters. An audience can safely admire a fictional killer’s total control precisely because nobody real was harmed to produce the story; once a show is built from an actual murderer’s actual victims, the same aesthetic fascination starts to look less like catharsis and more like exploitation.
That distinction is probably the real answer to why these characters keep working. Hannibal, Dexter, and Joe Goldberg let an audience rehearse the seduction of total control, total justification, or total devotion without anyone actually paying the price for it. The moment that same fascination gets pointed at a real person’s real crimes, the catharsis Aristotle described stops being safe, because there’s no fictional distance left to absorb it.
