MOVIES ABOUT JACK THE RIPPER

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

Of course Alfred Hitchcock did a Jack the Ripper movie. (The British filmmaker and the story of the Ripper go together like foie gras and apple compote.) This 1927 silent thriller, the first adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes‘s novel, starred Welsh actor Ivor Novello as the titular lodger wrongly suspected of committing Ripper-like murders. It was Hitchcock’s first commercial success.

A Study in Terror

This 1965 film put Sherlock Holmes (John Neville) and Dr. Watson (Donald Houston) on the tail of Jack the Ripper. And in this one, our crack crime solvers actually determine the identity of the killer.

The Ruling Class

Not a Ripper film per se, but a very dark comedy (from 1972) starring the sublime Peter O’Toole as a mentally disturbed earl who believes he is Jack the Ripper. Here’s Mr. O’Toole putting on an acting clinic, and, at around 3:43, letting out a primal scream that will absolutely liquefy your bowels

From Hell

Based on Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell‘s graphic novel about the Ripper case, this 2001 film starred Johnny Depp as the opium-addicted Detective Abberline and took the Hughes brothers off the streets of South Central (where they directed their 1993 hit Menace II Society) to the equally alarming “ghettos” of late 19th century London. Roger Ebert wrote, in his three-star review, “Despite its murders, it’s not a slasher film. What it is, I think, is a Guignol about a cross-section of a thoroughly rotten society, corrupted from the top down. The Ripper murders cut through layers of social class designed to insulate the sinners from the results of their sins.”