People are fascinated by evil because it's mysterious and it doesn't seem to have a rationale behind it, and the second you say that Hannibal Lector was abducted as a child and he had to eat his sister or something like that, it becomes immediately mundane. The character becomes mundane.
“All those days of waiting on tables until I could get a role on Broadway, all that time going to school taking lessons, and all those years of being a nobody following a dream-and now here it is.”
“The CIA's research program is described in a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.”