chronological
guide to jack the ripper film & television
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| silent
era: 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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| 1930s-1940s: 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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| 1950s-1960s: 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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| 1970s: 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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| 1980s: 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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| 1990s-2000s: In
the 1990s, 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. |
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