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An amnesiac sashimi chef learns he was once the star surgeon of an organ-trafficking syndicate in “Hannibal Inside,” a crime thriller series from Studio76 adapted from “The Monster Community,” a novel the producers
picked up from Kadokawa Taiwan.
The project is at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei.
Two years after a car crash erased his memory, Owen works the knife at a fishing port in Keelung, Taiwan. The only person he remembers is his girlfriend Xi-xi. When he steps in to save a stranger’s life on the street, footage of the rescue spreads online and his old associates spot him. Owen, it turns out, was the chief surgeon of Undercurrent, a syndicate that sells organs to the global rich. He was second in command only to its shadowy leader, known as The Professor.
Undercurrent assassin Jiang Xu sets out to force Owen’s memories back to the surface. Meanwhile Detective Lin, whose son needs a heart transplant, pegs Owen as the prime suspect in a string of murders in which the victims’ organs are removed. After Xi-xi is killed, Owen heads to his hometown of Songkhla, Thailand, to take revenge. There he crosses paths with local police captain Xu Zhi-rou, whose father he once saved. The road leads to a luxury cruise ship where billionaires bid on living people according to their organ matches.
Producer Dennis Yang says the team took the serial killer plot of the book and wove in real news reports of black-market organ trading, “a high-risk underworld that is rarely explored with real emotional depth in Asian series.”
For director Ray Jiang, crime and action shows are plentiful, but few of them dig into what makes people tick or treat life with respect.
“I want to ask: ‘Who defines the value of a life? Who decides who gets to live and who dies?’” Jiang says. “Society often judges people by whether they are good or bad, or how much they contribute – as if criminals deserve to die, while good people should live forever. But I believe every life is valuable because of what a person achieves on their own journey. No one has the right to judge someone else’s worth.”
The series is in pre-development. Full episode outlines are complete and the writing team is working on scripts.
“This project blends commercial entertainment with a thrilling pace, while exploring universal questions of justice and survival. It is an ambitious crime thriller with great potential for the global market,” Yang says.
Yang calls the project’s selection for TCCF this year a major milestone. Two earlier Studio76 projects, “The Brides Town” and “The Swamp Thing,” were both picked to pitch in person at Series Mania in Lille, France, and Yang says “Hannibal Inside” marks the company’s third time.
At TCCF, the team hopes to meet IP investors and streamers from around the world, as well as distributors in Europe and co-production partners in Asia. “Ultimately, through TCCF and its bridge to Series Mania, we hope to bring our story to a wider global audience and maximize the project’s international IP potential,” Yang says.
The Taiwan Creative Content Fest, organized by the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA), runs Nov. 6–9 at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center.
