First published in Rue Morgue #23 Halloween 2001
“For my part I am concerned with cutting into and examining the still warm corpse of history itself. In some of my chilliest moments I suspect that this was [Jack the Ripper’s] foremost pre-occupation also, albeit in pursuit of different ends.” -Alan Moore/From Hell
Once, in answer to an interview question, I remarked that horror has nothing to do with murder. As in actual murder. As in people actually killing other people. The interviewer gave me a wry grin as if to say; “how is that possible?” I’m going to get really technical at this point, but it’s a technicality worth making, especially as it comes to bear on the topic at hand. Horror has nothing to do with murder. Actually, horror has nothing to do with death either. It does, however, have everything to do with the concepts of murder and death. Still with me?
Of course, anyone who disagrees would really only need to reference the case of Jack the Ripper, who killed five prostitutes in Whitechapel, London late in the 1800s, and whose deeds found echoes in a plethora of horror movies, books, comic books and plays ever since. Despite the grisly and meticulous accounting and recounting of everything humanly known and related to the Whitechapel murders, very little is known about Jack the Ripper himself. No one knows why, in the last day of August 1888, he was driven to viciously murder a 42-year-old prostitute named Mary Ann Nichols. No one knows why, three months and as many more killings later, on November 9, he slaughtered Mary Jane Kelly – another prostitute – in the most grisly manner imaginable, before vanishing into the night forever.
Who was Jack the Ripper? Historians and so-called Ripperologists never tire of going over the suspects, the theories, the psychological profiles and the open guesses – both educated and outlandish. Still, no one knows much about Jack the Ripper. In fact, the entire body of known facts can be whittled down to a few key points: he was probably a man. He used a knife. He wrote at least one letter to the police. He used the words “From Hell” as a return address.
Despite this, or maybe because of it, Jack has become much more than what we know of him. Writers, playwrights and grim hobbyists have filled in the blanks by rearranging (sometimes ignoring) the scanty facts to recreate London’s fog filled streets and the inner mind of a killer. Thanks to them, the image of the Ripper – face shrouded in shadow, steely knife glinting in the moonlight – has become a classic icon of a collective fear.
So yes, Jack the Ripper was an actual murder and his deeds have inspired a lot of people to write horror and make horror movies, but the fact that none of those stories actually try to solve the murder ought to tell you something. It’s not about the murder. When Alan Moore wrote From Hell (in which the Ripper is dispatched by the Queen to cover up a Royal slip-up) and Harlan Ellison wrote Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World (in which Jack gets transported into a mechanical city by the bored children of the future), neither was trying to throw light on the case. They were dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight, that’s all.
It’s generally believed that speculation about Jack the Ripper has included doctors, women, Freemasons and members in the highest ranks of British government, but that’s not entirely true. Most of these people are not actually suspects so much as fictional frameworks for persons other than the one who killed five prostitutes in Whitechapel circa 1888. Entertainment is the goal, not investigation. That’s the difference between being a writer and being a Ripperologist.
I’m not trying to say that speculation about who or what Jack the Ripper really was is not something worth pursuing — it is, but it’s not nearly as important as the mythology of Jack the Ripper: Jack as a ghost, as the personification of hatred, as the evil intellectual, as the Boogyman himself. In other words, Jack as a concept but never as an actual person.
It’s probably best that we never know who Jack the Ripper really was. Why? Because it’s no longer important. In a way, it never was. Not for the writers and the filmmakers at any rate. Horror stories have their own ends and Jack – not the real Jack but the Jack we tirelessly reinvent – is the one who will always keep us coming back.