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Tuesday February 18th 2025

Manhunter | 1986

Manhunter filming location: High Museum of Art, Peachtree Lane, Atlanta
Manhunter location: Agent Will Graham visits Lecktor’s cell: Richard Meier-designed Stent Family Wing, High Museum of Art, Peachtree Street, Atlanta | Photograph: Wikimedia / Chris Yunker

From the novel preceding The Silence of the Lambs, and filmed by visual stylist Michael Mann four years before that film (and – just to confuse things – since remade by Brett Ratner as Red Dragon).

This time, the oddly-spelled Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox, more chillingly psychopathic than Anthony Hopkinsgrand guignol monster) is incarcerated, not in an underground dungeon from a 1930s Universal horror movie, but in a glossy, white, hi-tech facility.

But rather than psychopathic cannibals, you’re more likely to come across Monet, Durer, Bellini or Toulouse-Lautrec. Michael Mann once again reveals his eye for striking architecture. The top-security institution is actually the High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree Street NE, in the Ansley Park area, north of downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Designed by Richard Meier in 1983, and deemed one of the "ten best works of American architecture in the 1980s" by the American Institute of Architects, the porcelain-enameled building houses over 11,000 pieces of art. Its towering atrium soars to four interior levels, with galleries moving from 18th and 19th-century collections near the ground floor to cutting edge contemporary art on the upper levels.

The museum was more recently seen as the HQ of Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and the Erudite in the second Divergent movie, Insurgent and as the 'Museum of Great Britain' in Ryan Coogler's 2018 Black Panther.

Meanwhile, investigator Will Graham (William L Petersen) stays at the luxury, 50-storey Marriott Marquis Hotel, 265 Peachtree Center Avenue, a location seen in another YA Dystopian fantasy, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

In Washington D.C., the FBI works out of the District Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue NW at 14th Street. And it’s in front of here, on Freedom Plaza by the National Theater, that the innocent jogger gets busted.

The airport at which the Lear jet touches down is Lambert–St. Louis International Airport, St Louis, Missouri.

Wilmington in North Carolina, the self-styled ‘East Coast Hollywood’, with its slew of studio facilities, hosted more of the filming. The hospital was Wilmington’s New Hanover Memorial Hospital, now expanded to become part of the New Hanover Regional Medical Center, 2131 South 17th Street, and Will Graham’s ‘Florida’ beach house (supposedly at ‘DeSoto Avenue, Captiva’) is on nearby Mansonboro Island, North Carolina.