Some of the most popular motifs for Jack the Ripper cinema first appeared in the Silent Era. The period offered 3 versions of Pandora’s Box and launched the career of Alfred Hitchcock—which took off after he directed the first screen version of The Lodger.
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After such a fertile 1920s, the early sound era is surprisingly fallow… giving us only a half-baked remake of Hitchcock’s Lodger. Two more versions of The Lodger, though, would appear in the 1940s—one of them brilliant, the other quite clever.
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The 1950s, for the most part, proved another fallow period. But Ripper cinema and television really took off after 1959. Throughout the 1960s, Jack seemed to be everywhere—from Boris Karloff’s Thriller to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone; from an Austrian version of Pandora’s Box to the Sherlock Holmes thriller A Study in Terror.
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Probably the single most prolific decade for Ripper film and television, the 1970s produced some of the best Ripper cinema… and some of the worst. Blackenstein‘s maker tried to follow up with Black the Ripper. Softcore Swedes dropped Jack into the middle of an erotic comedy. Cult director Jess Franco presented a fetishistic, near-necrophiliac, and eminently dull Ripper. But the 1970s also gave us a couple of good ones—Time after Time and Murder by Decree.
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And then came the crash! Though many new Ripper productions appeared on 80s screens, few are worth remembering. Some of the best, actually, are faux-Rippers and copycats. In the middle of the decade, the slasher influence reached its climax, resulting in violent direct-to-video movies with poor production values. In 1988, though—the centenary of the killings—Britain’s ITV unveiled one of the finest Ripper movies of the decade: Jack the Ripper (starring Michael Caine).
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In the 1990s and 2000s, good productions made a comeback. 1993 saw the release of the eccentric British black comedy, Deadly Advice. And in 1995, Babylon 5 treated its fans to one of the finest Ripper productions ever made. Even the silly cameos of the 90s were reasonably clever. Johnny Depp took an investigative turn in From Hell, and even Jackie Chan snuck the Ripper into an action comedies.
