The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (27 page)

Le Cinéma de Jack

It’s not surprising that
Jack the Ripper
—
the most famous of all serial killers—has been a longtime favorite of filmmakers. Following is a list of his most memorable big-screen appearances:

1.
Pandora’s Box
(1928). Classic silent film by G. W. Pabst, starring screen legend Louise Brooks as the femme fatale Lulu, who ends up as a streetwalker in London. And guess who her very first (and last) customer is?

2.
The Lodger
(1944). Based on a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, this suspense thriller—about a family named Bunting who suspect that their new boarder is Jack the Ripper—had already been filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1926. But Hitchcock’s version is like
Hamlet
without the prince, since it turns out that the Buntings are wrong. The 1944 version, directed by German émigré John Brahm, is more faithful to the original—Saucy Jack really is living in the Bunting house and taking a lively (or deadly) interest in their young daughter, Daisy.

3.
Room to Let
(1950). Adapted from a BBC radio play of the same title, this modest little thriller (in which Jack turns out to be a sinister physician named Dr. Fell) was an early production of the fledgling Hammer Film Company, beloved by horror buffs for the lurid fright films it began turning out in the late 1950s.

4.
Man in the Attic
(1954). Still another version of
The Lodger,
this one starring the inimitable Jack Palance as the Ripper. Talk about typecasting.

5.
Jack the Ripper
(1960). A low-budget British shocker with a memorable gimmick. Though the entire film is in black and white, the climactic sequence—in which Jack is crushed to death by a falling elevator—was shot in color so the audience could enjoy the vivid red of his gushing blood.

6.
A Study in Terror
(1965). What a concept! Sherlock Holmes battles Jack the Ripper in this brisk, entertaining thriller, produced with the cooperation of Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Holmes’s creator.

7.
Hands of the Ripper
(1971). Suffering from the traumatic aftereffects of watching Daddy stab Mommy, Jack the Ripper’s angelic daughter turns into a homicidal maniac whenever a guy kisses her. She ends up in treatment with an early disciple of Freud. A Hammer movie classic!

8.
Murder by Decree
(1979). Another Holmes vs. Ripper movie, this
one with a stellar cast: Christopher Plummer, James Mason, Donald Sutherland, Genevieve Bujold, David Hemmings, John Gielgud, and Anthony Quayle.

9.
Time After Time
(1979). Nifty little fantasy written and directed by Nicholas Meyer in which Jack the Ripper travels from Victorian England to modern-day America via H. G. Wells’s time machine.

10.
Jack the Ripper
(1988). Originally a two-part TV movie, this is a solid, lavish telling of the Ripper case, starring Michael Caine as a Scotland Yard inspector hot on the trail of Saucy Jack. It sticks to the facts except for its conclusion, when the hero succeeds in unmasking the killer.

11.
From Hell
(2001). Though it could have benefited from a bit more terror and suspense—not to mention the sort of grisly violence one hopes for in a Jack the Ripper movie—this handsome adaptation of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s acclaimed graphic novel does an impressive job of conjuring up the sordid underbelly of Victorian London. Johnny Depp gives a typically compelling performance as the opium-using Scotland Yard sleuth who uncovers a high-level conspiracy in his pursuit of Saucy Jack.

J
EKYLL
/H
YDE

Plenty of people lead double lives: suburban matrons with lovers on the side; happily married hubbies who sneak off at night to cruise the gay bars; successful corporate executives supporting costly heroin habits. But cases like these pale beside the lives of certain serial killers. Ted
Bundy
was so bright and personable that he could have run for elected office if he hadn’t also been a sadistic sex killer who murdered dozens of young women. John Wayne
Gacy
liked to dress up as a clown and entertain hospitalized children when he wasn’t torturing teenage boys in his suburban home. And the Swedish physician Dr. Teet Haerm, who mutilated and killed at least nine young women, was a respected forensic pathologist who actually ended up performing the autopsies on some of his victims.

Killers like these possess such monstrously split personalities that they seem slightly unreal, as if they stepped from the pages of a horror story. More specifically, they seem like the flesh-and-blood incarnations of a figure first dreamed up by British writer Robert Louis Stevenson in the 1880s:
Dr. Henry Jekyll, who spends half his life as an idealistic scientist and the other half as a hideous creature named Edward Hyde.

“Dreamed up” is not just a figure of speech, since the idea for the story reportedly came to Stevenson in a nightmare. He dashed off a first draft in just three days, but his wife was so shocked by this version that Stevenson burned it, then rewrote it in a slightly less sensational form. Like
Dracula
and
Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
is one of those stories that everyone knows, even if they’ve never read the original. This is largely because it’s been made into so many movies, beginning with a 1920 silent version starring John Barrymore. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to discover that Stevenson’s novelette is not so much a horror story as a mystery, revolving around the question of Edward Hyde’s identity—who is this evil being and what is his relationship to the distinguished Dr. Jekyll? The answer to these questions isn’t revealed until the very end, when readers discover that Hyde is really Jekyll’s alter ego, the living embodiment of the good doctor’s bestial, hidden self.

For people who only know Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
from the movies there are other surprising aspects of the original story. On film, Hyde is typically portrayed as a fanged, hairy creature—a kind of werewolf in Victorian clothing. In the book, however, he is less overtly monstrous. There is something deeply repellent about him, but exactly where this quality comes from is hard to say. “He is not easy to describe,” one character remarks. “There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way.”

Furthermore, though Stevenson tells us that Hyde has a history of vile and violent deeds, he doesn’t appear to be a homicidal maniac. Rather, he is the personification of the nasty, lawless impulses that lurk beneath our civilized veneers: what Sigmund Freud called the Id. Indeed, in Stevenson’s story, Edward Hyde commits only a single murder—the clubbing of a distinguished old gentleman named Sir Danvers Carew.

In short, though serial killers like Bundy and Gacy are often described as Jekyll-and-Hydes, they are really far worse. Compared to them, Stevenson’s bestial creation was a pussycat.

J
OKES

Serial murder is no laughing matter. But that hasn’t stopped people from making fun of it—any more than it’s kept them from swapping sick jokes about other lurid and sensational subjects, from O. J. Simpson to Lorena Bobbitt, the Virginia housewife who, in 1993, sliced off her husband’s penis while he slept because she was unhappy with their sex life. The latter, in fact, costarred in this widely circulated rib tickler with one of America’s premier serial killers, the late Jeff “The Chef”
Dahmer
:

What did Jeffrey Dahmer say to Lorena Bobbitt?

“You going to eat that?”

Dahmer’s cannibalistic crimes inspired a host of sick jokes. One day, for example, his mother came over for dinner. “Jeffrey,” she complained, halfway through the meal, “I really don’t like your friends.” “Then just eat the vegetables, Ma,” Dahmer replied.

The phenomenon of serial-killer humor appears to have originated in relation to another celebrity psycho who (like Dahmer) resided in Wisconsin: Edward
Gein
. Not long after Gein’s atrocities came to light, jokes about the “Plainfield Ghoul” began circulating throughout the Midwest. These crude riddles—known as “Geiners”—drew the attention of a psychologist named George Arndt, who published an article about them in a psychiatric journal. Among Arndt’s examples were the following:

Why did Ed Gein’s girlfriend stop going out with him?

Because he was such a cut-up.

What did Ed Gein say to the sheriff who arrested him?

“Have a heart.”

Why won’t anyone play poker with Ed Gein?

He might come up with a good hand.

Why do serial-killer jokes exist? Are they an expression of pure callousness and cruelty? Probably not. Like other gross and nasty jokes, serial-killer humor offers an outlet for our fears—in the same way that a child walking past a graveyard will whistle a lively tune to calm his nerves. It’s a way of warding off terror with levity. As the saying goes, we laugh to keep from crying.