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JACK THE RIPPER STRIKES AGAIN IN THE HUGHES BROTHERS' FROM HELL.
-By Gemma Files
There’s been over a hundred years of bloodshed between his time
and ours. Many other killers have topped his body count; many —
too many — have also melted away uncaught, their anonymity intact.
Yet Jack the Ripper, the Victorian era’s pioneer serial killer,
continues to fascinate and frighten... even now.
Perhaps it’s only fitting, therefore, that the
first real year of the twenty-first century should bring us a film purporting
to finally solve the twentieth’s most enduring mystery. One way
or another, however, From Hell — produced by Natural Born Killers’
Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher, based on a screenplay by Terry Hayes and
Rafael Yglesias, adapted from the taboo-breaking graphic novel by Alan
Moore — may yet become known as the definitive cinematic version
of Saucy Jack’s much-debated story.
Which, as its twin directors Albert and Allen Hughes readily admit,
was always their intention.
“Basically, we wanted to tackle something nobody’d
ever think we would do, and a period piece with an all-white cast sure
fit the bill,” Allen — who, along with his brother, is best
known for the groundbreakingly violent “urban” movies Menace
II Society (1993) and Dead Presidents (1995) — told reporters at
the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival, where From Hell had its
gala North American premiere screening.
Albert chimed in, nodding: “A lot of people seem
to think that what we brought to the project were these elements of
street crime, drugs, prostitution and violence, all these elements from
the ghetto. But if you read Alan Moore’s original series, you’ll
see that none of that stuff needed to be incorporated into the film,
‘cause it was already there. Whitechapel was a ghetto, one of the
worst ghettos around. It just happened to be a ghetto full of white
people.”
After studying “every Ripper movie around,”
the Hugheses decided that their vision would differ in the portrayal
of Jack’s victims: downtrodden street prostitutes “Polly”
Nichols, “Dark” Annie Chapman, “Long Liz” Stride,
Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly. All of the women shared turf on Whitechapel’s
mean streets, all knew each other, all had their throats slit, and most
were mutilated — to one degree or another — in such a way
as to suggest that the killer had a working knowledge of medical dissection.
“In most Ripper movies, Mary and her friends
get used like slasher props, just these things that show up and get
killed,” Allen says. “We wanted you to go deep into who they
were and the world they lived in, to really care about what was going
to happen to them. And that all goes back to Alan Moore.”
Naturally, the Hugheses admit, some things were bound
to get lost in the translation. Going by the finished product, however
— a stylish chiller with a high-tone Hammer Horror feel —
the changes between page and screen have mainly been cosmetic in a conventionally
Hollywood sense. Johnny Depp’s Inspector Abberline has been given
psychic powers so that he — and the audience — can be visually
“present” during the murders themselves, while a potential
love affair between Kelly (here portrayed by Boogie Nights ingenue Heather
Graham) and Abberline also boosts suspense.
But the most striking change lies in the fact that
From Hell the movie makes Abberline our focal character because
in From Hell the comic that honour goes to the Ripper himself.
“From Hell has to be a mystery,”
explains Albert. “We can’t know who he is right from the start.
What keeps people thinking about Jack the Ripper is that he was the
first — the first serial killer, the first murder case to really
spawn tabloid journalism, the figure in the cloak and the hat, waiting
in the fog with a knife.”
“This isn’t Scream,” he concludes.
“People may come in expecting a slasher film, but that’s not
what they’re going to get.”
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