The Silence of the Lambs

The series is a prequel to the story the 1991 film told, with the same character at its centre, and it is working against the screen performance that film established rather than only against Harris's novels. Demme's Lecter is caged, still, and terrifying in short bursts. Mads Mikkelsen's is at liberty, a practising psychiatrist and host, and the horror is that he is charming for whole episodes at a time. The show can make that choice only because the audience arrives already knowing what he is, and it knows because of the film.

Seven exists in the space Demme's film opened four years earlier, and the commercial fact is part of the claim: a serial killer procedural could be a prestige picture with stars in it, which was not obvious before 1991. The structural borrowing is the killer as an intelligence to be interpreted rather than chased, whose design is revealed by reading his work. Fincher's departure is the ending. Demme lets Clarice win.

Demme's film adapts Thomas Harris's 1988 novel of the same name, credited on screen. The screenplay keeps Harris's structure almost intact: the trainee sent to interview the prisoner, the quid pro quo, and the parallel hunt for Buffalo Bill running against the clock. This names the specific novel The Silence of the Lambs, not the Lecter series, and the difference is a real one. Red Dragon (1981) is the first book and was filmed by Michael Mann as Manhunter in 1986; Hannibal follows in 1999.

Both killers are built on the Ed Gein case, and Jonathan Demme has spoken about the Hitchcock debt rather than deflecting it. The structural inheritance is the more interesting half: Psycho made the audience's sympathy for a murderer the point of the film, which is the position Hannibal Lecter occupies for the next thirty years of the genre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein