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In what follows I look both at how the horror saga uses Bach to mark Lecter's monstrous transgression of boundaries and at how this cinematic appropriation blurs the boundaries that define the musical object. On the other hand, by doing so, it can inflect the music's cultural identity, altering the way we listen and our sense of the music's ontology. 1 On the one hand, cinema can draw on the styles, seminal recordings and major tropes of so-called ‘classical music’, channelling them into a film's narrative style and strategies of cultural production.

By thus thematizing notions of difference and assimilation, ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, both as fictional character and as cultural product, dramatizes the friction between Western art music and mass culture, calling attention to the complex ways in which cinema can use and shape their relationship. At the same time, as a feature recurring across two decades, two novels and four movies, it is a unique case of Western art music's association with an entire Hollywood franchise. As a defining element of the doctor's refinement, juxtaposed with his appetite for human flesh, it is integral to the construction of the protagonist as monster. Dr Hannibal Lecter's taste for Bach is an example of both types of transgression. H orror, like cultural appropriation, is about the crossing of boundaries.