Premiered yesterday, NBC’s new series “Hannibal” offers its audience a deliciously terrifying narrative.

Directed by David Slade, the show is loosely based on Bryan Fuller’s novel Red Dragon and features the infamous cannibalistic serial killer and psychologist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen).

Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is a profiler with an extensive “imagination” that allows him to empathize with killers and visualize how they execute their crimes in his mind. Recruited by Behavioral Science Unit Chief Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), Graham begins to track down a serial killer who has been eating his victims’ intestines by mentally reconstructing crime scenes in order to understand the killer’s motives and reasoning. Hiding his taste for human flesh from the rest, Lector joins the FBI team to observe the new Graham to maintain his mental stability.

Scattered throughout the one-hour show are disconcerting, gory crime scenes reconstructed in Graham’s imagination that send chills down people’s spines, much like the image shown in the trailer where a girl’s corpse is hung by antlers.

Though the grotesque scenes contribute to the “horror” effect of the show, often times, they are not well integrated and pop up somewhat randomly without smooth transitions. Even though the disjointedness may give viewers a taste of how Graham’s mind works, it can be quite confusing, as it takes a few extra seconds to separate between his imagination and reality.

However, those scenes are not the only reason why the show can be considered horrifying. Dancy skillfully portrays Graham as someone who often feels fear and pain because he gets too involved with his cases due to his imagination, and Mikkelsen is simply brilliant at depicting Lecter as an intelligent fellow with more than a few loose screws.

Besides the great actors, the show also brilliantly uses dramatic irony to draw viewers’ interest, placing the two eventual enemies, Graham and Lecter, in a patient-doctor relationship. By the end of the show, the audience is left craving to find out when and how Graham will realize that the very person responsible for observing his sanity, Lecter, is actually the cannibalistic killer whom he will seek.