As an animal lover and as a sometime-meat-eater, I've read so much about the emotional sophistication of pigs and cows and sheep that I do think twice when I do still eat them on occasion.

Growing up, there were a lot of funerals that I attended, and the adults at the funerals went out of their way to make sure that I wasn't traumatized or overly depressed by them. So death is always a celebration of life for me, and it's also hugely dramatic.

For Hannibal, it's really about food as art and also, Hannibal's specific brand of art. And I guess I'm a bit of a foodie.

We only really, deeply consider what our life is when we're faced with mortality on some level.

One of the things that I always think about is the emotional sophistication of animals and how much we're learning about the emotional sophistication of animals. If you're eating a pig, you're essentially eating the equivalent of a four-year-old human being.

We're looking at a lot of race cars as inspiration for our starships. It's wonderful. It's surreal. I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, so to be able to craft a new iteration of the show with new characters and a whole new adventure and whole new way of telling stories that you haven't been able to tell on Star Trek is honorable and it's a dream come true. It's hard to articulate that.

I think accessibility is what often denies horror its deserved attention. So it all depends on the execution and whether mainstream audiences can accept it.