Liver and loin are served up gourmet-style, young women are impaled on antlers, mushrooms grow out of decomposing bodies.

Hannibal Lecter, one of the world’s creepiest fictional villains, is back, and this time he is not locked up but is a respected psychiatrist with an appetite for art, fine clothes, good food and red wine.

And he is hiding a very dark secret.

Hannibal, which debuts on NBC on Thursday, is the first US television series about the infamous cannibal created by Thomas Harris in his 1981 book Red Dragon and made famous by actor Anthony Hopkins in his Oscar-winning turn in Silence of the Lambs.

After five Hannibal Lecter movies and four novels, the new TV series is based on just five early pages of Red Dragon and serves as a prequel to the entire Hannibal Lecter book and movie legend.

It combines solving a weekly, gory crime with the back story of Lecter and his early FBI nemesis, Will Graham.

“As somebody who had read the books and was really a student of Thomas Harris, I felt there were definitely aspects of the literature that had not been explored,” creator and executive producer Bryan Fuller told Reuters.

“There was a great chapter of Hannibal Lecter’s life that we haven’t seen in any of the movies or any of the books. We have seen him incarcerated and as a young man, and I felt the most interesting part of his life was when he was a practising psychiatrist and a practising cannibal and who he was prior to incarceration,” Fuller added.

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, best-known for playing the villain in 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale, takes on the role of Lecter, bringing a sophisticated, alluring edge to the psychopathic killer.

“I didn’t feel beholden to how he was seen in the films... I knew this Lecter had to be sexy, had to have a sensuality to him, because he is a man who appreciates beauty,” Fuller said.