Denis Meikle - Jack The Ripper: Murders & Movies

[dem bones]

Denis Meikle - Jack The Ripper: The Murders & The Movies (Reynolds & Hearn, 2002)

Jack The Ripper - the phantom figure whose dark silhouette retains its power to chill over 100 years after his atrocious crimes electrified the world. A handful of murders in London's East End during the autumn of 1888 have inspired a virtual industry dedicated to revealing the killer's identity. Solutions to the mystery have been proposed in a host of novels, plays, short stories and increasingly blood-splattered movies.

In this unique book, Denis Meikle examines the historical background of the Ripper murders, and their evolution into a filmmaking genre and urban myth. From silent classics like The Lodger and Pandora's Box to the 21st century shocker From Hell, every twist and turn of the Ripper's pop culture progress is here.

Gruesome and thoroughly gripping, Jack The Ripper: The Murders & The Movies will fascinate film fans and devotees of true crime alike

It does what it says in the blurb: brilliantly. Meikle traces the history of this genre from its humble origins - the 1915 silent Farmer Spud Takes The Missus To Town (the couple fall asleep in the Chamber of Horrors at Tussauds) - through to the laudanum splattered adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel, taking in everything in between. Good as he is on the modern material, I most enjoyed the earlier chapters where he charts the Ripper's progress through the lurid newspapers accounts of 1888 through to Belloc Lowdnes influential short story, The Lodger (1911), later rewritten and expanded into the much-dramatised novel, and Leonard Mathers' much maligned "non-fiction" outing, The Mystery Of Jack The Ripper (1925: the basis for Jimmy Sangster's 1959 movie) for which he mounts a passionate defence.

In the battle of the 'seventies Hammer Jack's, Hands Of The Ripper has the effrontery to trounce all time classic Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (though Meikle grudgingly concedes that, "taken in isolation", Ralph's slaying of Virginia Wetherall when she asks him to undo her "ranks as one of the high points of Ripper cinema."

Even Tod Slaughter gets a name-check (for his Spring-heeled Jack epic, The Curse Of The Wraydons) and comes out of it considerably better than anybody who had a hand in Janet Meyers' notorious 1997 nasty, The Ripper!