‘Jack the Ripper’ entered public consciousness in the autumn of 1888 with the murder of five women in Whitechapel. Whoever was responsible was never caught. This has resulted in a murder mystery that literature and film has turned into a virtual industry of words and images. This book Jack the Ripper in Film and Culture does not seek to solve the mystery, there are already enough investigators, but to examine how Jack the Ripper, the women who were murdered, the detectives that investigated the murders and the murder site of Whitechapel have been depicted on screen, from their first appearance in Waxworks (Germany 1924: Leni) to The Wolfman (US 2010: Johnston).

What are the facts of the murders—the names of the victims, the dates of their deaths and the injuries they suffered? Even the most basic fact, the number of women murdered by the Ripper, cannot be confirmed. I have used three books as the basis for information on the case; Paul Begg Jack the Ripper the Facts, Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Source Book and Philip Sugden The Complete History of Jack the Ripper.¹ These books present the biographies of the victims, detectives and suspects without agenda. This is important to my research as, with no disrespect to the victims, I have no interest in who Jack the Ripper was but in who he has become on screen.

During 1888 the media linked nine murders to the Ripper; the police at the time varied the number between four and nine. Five victims have become known as the ‘canonical’ victims, women who it is generally accepted were murdered by the figure who became known as Jack the Ripper. These were Mary Ann Nichols on 31 August, Annie Chapman on 8 September, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on 30 September and Mary Jane Kelly on 9 November. All of the victims had worked as prostitutes in the East End of London.

At 3.40 a.m. on 31 August the body of Mary Ann Nichols was found in Bucks Row, Whitechapel. Her throat had been cut and she had stab wounds to the abdomen. Mary Ann, or Polly, as she was known, was a 44-year-old woman who due to alcohol addiction was working as a prostitute in Whitechapel. Seven days after Polly’s murder on 8 September Annie Chapman was found dead on Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. Annie was 47 years old and as with Polly alcoholism had led her to a life of prostitution. Annie’s throat had been cut and her abdomen stabbed, in an escalation the killer had also removed her intestines from her body and placed them on her shoulder. A portion of her vagina and two-thirds of her bladder had been removed from her body and were not present at the murder site. The theory was that the killer had taken the organs from the scene.

The next murders took place on 30 September in what became known as the double event. At 1.00 a.m. the body of Elizabeth Stride was discovered in Dutfield’s Yard, Whitechapel. Elizabeth was 45 and her life mirrors that of Polly and Annie, alcoholism leading to prostitution. Elizabeth’s throat had been cut but she had not been mutilated. It was believed that the killer had been disturbed before he could mutilate the body and unsatisfied the killer went looking for another victim.

Less than an hour later at 1.45 a.m. the body of Catherine Eddowes, a 46-year-old alcoholic prostitute was discovered in Mitre Square, just outside the environs of Whitechapel within the City of London boundaries. The mutilations suffered by Cathy were extensive; her intestines had been removed and placed on her shoulder, her face was mutilated, a piece of her right earlobe and tip of her nose had been cut off. Cathy’s abdomen and organs had been stabbed and slashed, her left kidney and part of her womb were removed and not present at the scene.

The last of the canonical victims was Mary Jane Kelly who had a victim profile that was different to the four previous women. Mary was only 25 when she died and while she did drink she could not be considered an alcoholic, she was the only victim not killed on the street but in her one room lodgings in Miller’s Court, Whitechapel. What Mary did have in common with the previous victims was that she had earned her living as a prostitute.

At 10.45 a.m. on the 9 November Thomas Bowyer went to Miller’s Court to collect rent arrears from Mary; on not receiving an answer when he knocked the door Bowyer looked through the window and saw a scene that must have haunted him for the rest of his life. Mary was laid on her back on her bed, her breasts had been removed, one was placed under her right foot; the other was found with her uterus and kidneys under her head. Her heart been removed and was not in the room, her right thigh had been flayed to the bone. Miller’s Court was one of the first crime scenes to be photographed with the body in situ and the photographs still exist. However, the facial mutilations were so severe even after looking at the photographs it is impossible to tell what Mary looked like. Her catalogue of injuries is more extensive but this brief summation provides an idea of the brutality of the crime.

The details of the victims’ lives are unpleasant and the manner of their deaths is brutal but these crimes fascinated the world, not least due to the coverage given in the newspapers. It is important to establish the press fascination with the murders as in my opinion they placed the murders firmly within the public consciousness. The coverage of the murders was so pervasive to the content of newspapers in 1888 that a book has been written solely to examine the phenomena: L. Perry Curtis examines both the content of the press regarding the murders and tracks the sales figures of the newly published newspaper The Star. The circulation of the paper after Annie Chapman’s murder was 261,000 a day rising to 300,000 after the murder of Mary Kelly. Curtis interprets these figures as a ‘barometer of public interest in the Ripper’.² I contend that this interest in the Ripper transferred from the printed press to film.

Jack the Ripper was never caught and this has created a market for books that claim to identify the Ripper. I do not claim to know if any of these texts do reveal the identity of the murderer but it is essential for this book to consider who has been linked to the murders. In films about the Ripper Queen Victoria, John Netley, Sir William Gull and the Duke of Clarence have all been implicated in the murders. A synopsis of the suspects is important as I am as interested in who does not appear on screen as the Ripper as much as who does.

The earliest suspect list is known as the Macnaghten Memorandum written by Sir Melville Macnaghten in 1894. Macnaghten was Chief Constable of CID with the Metropolitan Police from 1889 so was not personally involved in the investigation into the murders. The memo came to light via Macnaghten’s daughter, Lady Aberconwy, who showed it to a BBC reporter in 1959. The memorandum lists three suspects: Montague John Druitt, Michael Ostrog and Aaron Kosminski.

In the memorandum Macnaghten mistakenly identified Druitt as a doctor whereas he was in fact a barrister and a teacher who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Thames on or around 3 December 1888. Druitt had been sacked from his teaching job on 30 November 1888 and this together with a fear that he was suffering from the same mental illness that affected his mother causing her to be committed to an asylum in July 1888 were probably the reason for his suicide. The timing of Druitt’s suicide and the mistaken belief that he was a doctor led Macnaghten to believe he was Jack the Ripper believing that the brutal murder of Mary Kelly on 9 November caused Druitt to lose his mind and kill himself.

The second suspect, Michael Ostrog, Macnaghten described as a mad doctor, who was cruel to women and a homicidal maniac. Ostrog was eventually detained in an asylum but he had been at liberty during the murders. No evidence exists to connect Ostrog with the Ripper but in common with Druitt he had two of the attributes Macnaghten felt the Ripper had—madness and medical training.

The third suspect Aaron Kosminski was a Polish Jewish immigrant living in Whitechapel who suffered from mental illness and had threatened his sister with a knife. Robert Anderson who had been a senior official at Scotland Yard during the murders attributed the murders to a Polish Jew who had been committed after the killings. This is considered to be Kosminski who, for Macnaghten, like Ostrog fell into the category of mad outsider.

This is not the place to argue for or against the guilt of Sickert, Gull and Netley. What I do find interesting is that while Gull and Netley appear as characters in films about Jack the Ripper Sickert never does. The artist may be amoral but he does not represent, for the audience, the evil that an aristocrat or a doctor can. In Chap. 4 I will examine the presentation of Gull on screen as part of an examination of the transfer of Jack from reality to art.

Jack the Ripper had an early transfer to the arts. In 1904 Jack the Ripper had appeared on stage as a character in Frank Wedekind’s Die Büchse der Pandora. The play depicted the murder of the amoral Lulu at the hands of Jack the Ripper. In 1908 the artist Walter Richard Sickert painted ‘Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom’, a work that depicts the supposed bedroom of the killer. Without the title this painting could show any middle-class bedroom in any middle-class home. The move of the Ripper into Sickert’s imaginary home was confirmed by the 1916 play Who is He? The play was adapted from the novella The Lodger by Marie Bello Lowndes, a melodrama that explores the suspicions of a landlady about her lodger’s involvement in a series of Ripperesque murders. The play transferred to New York in 1917 where it played on Broadway.

In 1924 Jack the Ripper was on screen in the film Waxworks (Germany 1924: Leni), only 36 years after the murders and possibly in the lifetime of the killer. Since then every decade of the twentieth and twenty-first century has seen the release of at least one film depicting Jack the Ripper. The earliest of the films about the Ripper are based upon the novella The Lodger. This pattern held until the 1950s and 1960s when it was replaced by films that sought to answer the question of whom Jack the Ripper was and why he had not been brought to justice. This ‘detective’ model allowed for the introduction of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The combining of the factual and the fictional continued on film with the linking of Jekyll and Hyde to the Ripper film narrative. The ‘supernatural’ also became added to the film Ripper, not only in terms of possession and occult objects but also via time travel and mental illness. In the 1980s the Ripper copycat became a screen presence, the killer who seeks to recreate the killings of 1888 in a new age and in a new country—the United States. Films that span the years 1960 to 2002 often base the narrative on conspiracy theory, either monarchic or masonic, not only to protect the killer but also to instigate the murders.

The films I have selected to look at are US and European productions. In total there are 26 films that I consider primary source material; these are films that have a narrative that links directly to the Whitechapel murders or the personification of Jack the Ripper. The films span the gamut of high-profile, big-budget studio productions to films that never received a cinema release and have lower budget and production values. The directors of the films are also as widely distributed, from studio contract directors to art house auteurs. This selection of a divergent group of films allows me to establish patterns and innovations in depictions.

While the number of books about the true identity of Jack the Ripper reaches well into triple figures there has been much less written about Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders on film. In 1999 Jack the Ripper: His Life and Crimes in Popular Entertainment was published. Written by Gary Coville and Patrick Luciano the book can be described as a catalogue raisonné of the Ripper’s appearances in film, television and radio. The book locates the origins of the Ripper’s media character with two novellas; Maria Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger and Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper. Lowndes book is the basis for the Ripper as a Lodger subgenre while Bloch’s work is the basis for the supernatural aspect of the Ripper.

Coville and Luciano are very interested in radio plays dealing with the Ripper narrative that were popular during the 1950s and 1960s, including several directed and narrated by Alfred Hitchcock. In fact they state that the Ripper and the Radio is a perfect meeting of subject and medium, that radio allowed the audience to ‘colour details to personal taste’, which, in turn, contributed to ‘transforming the original Ripper into an archetypal figure’.³

However, I believe that the iconography of the Ripper that creates fear is visual and therefore that the Ripper is more suited to film than radio. Certain items when seen on screen can create a feeling of fear in an audience: the fear of fog that robs us of geographical certainty; the fear of a doctor/surgeon that a medical bag elicits; the gothic trope of a cape that makes us think of Dracula. None of these can be exploited on radio but have become integral elements of the screen Ripper.

The authors discuss the iconography of the Ripper without seeking to explain where or why the symbolism developed. They do not apply a methodology or seek to consider the audience responses to the Ripper. The current book is not as all-encompassing as Coville and Luciano’s as it does not seek to list the Ripper’s appearances instead it seeks to explain the narrative and the iconography connected to the Ripper.

In 2008 an exhibition at the Museum in Docklands, London explored the relationship between Jack the Ripper and the East End. In its accompanying catalogue one of the essays—Clive Bloom’s Jack the Ripper—A Legacy in Pictures considered how the Ripper, the police, the victims and the location of the murders had been mythologised on screen. Bloom notes how film can change the narrative of the murders and repla...