Well, the winner for the last poll was Jack the Ripper, which, of course, is an interesting choice. So I hope you like ominous shots of feet in the dark and lots of women getting brutalized! And, you know, I don't mean that in the fun way. Of course, it's always kind of a sexualized fetishization, most of it is from the 70s and 80s, and looks like garbage, but, you know, viewer discretion advised. The Ripper case was a huge press sensation at the time, especially given early speculation that he was an educated surgeon, owing to his apparent knowledge of human anatomy, which gave rise to the image of the upper class fellow stalking the streets in a top hat and a cloak. Why did this guy stick in the public imagination in the way that other serial killers, even more recent and infamous ones, haven't? It's not like he was the only serial killer in Victorian England. But the biggie is the fact that this mega sensation a) Never got caught, and B) His victims were all sex workers, which doubled the scandalous. And so, it entered the public consciousness like the perfect scandalous thing. you know, we've got women being brutalized, an unsolved mystery, a presumed upper-class villain, and we don't even know who he is. It could be anybody. So here's what we had to work off of, the five victims generally agreed to have been the work of a single killer known as "Jack the Ripper" were: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. These murders occurred between August and November of 1888, all within a few streets of each other, and are collectively called "The Canonical Five". There are actually six more murders between then and 1891, all women, and may or may not be connected to the Ripper, or might be copycats. There's a BBC show about the direct aftermath, but I'm not gonna get into that one, because it's about the direct aftermath. And a lot of these movies also include victim Elizabeth Smith as canonical, and then there are six murders, instead of five, because Freemasons. Chief inspector Fred Abberline and his contemporaries had a lot of suspects at the time, none of these went anywhere. In later years, we'd see suspects like Lewis Carroll, Winston Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill (he was Freemason, see), and... Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, because... doctor. The Freemasons come up a lot. Apparently, they're the precursors to the modern Illuminati, except for the part where they actually exist, because, say it with me, the Illuminati isn't real. Prince Albert Victor became a favorite theory after the 1970s, when British physician Thomas Stonewill published an article implying that he'd been driven mad by syphilis. The idea that the Freemasons were involved with the royal family also became really popular in the 70s, and we'll get to that. Although, I swear to God, we could have had this thing happened, like, a hundred years later, and there'd be all these YouTube channels about how the Ripper killings were, like, a false flag operation for, I don't know... Brexit, or, you know, "they're trying to take away our guns"... "our England guns", somehow. Anyway, I don't know. One of the first effective incarnations came in the form of Marie Bella Lowndes's serial book, "The Lodger", published in serialized form between 1911 and 1913. This wasn't a straight Jack the Ripper story per se, it had only been about 20 years at the time. #TooSoon, but the killer here, called "The Avenger", was clearly based on the Ripper. This became the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock's first films, also called "The Lodger". The eponymous lodger is a houseguest, staying with a London couple who eventually come to suspect him of doing the killings. In the original, he leaves and it's left ambivalent as to whether he was the killer or not. In Hitchcock's version, turns out the lodger is not the killer, but was acting weird because he's a vigilante, and he's actually trying to catch the killer. This story would get remade four more times. By the 1950s, the Ripper was becoming a popular horror element. A 1959 Hollywood movie simply titled "Jack the Ripper"... is a standard whodunit based on Leonard Mathers theory that he was an avenging doctor. Not just any doctor. "Avenging". but where Mather's theory had it that the Ripper was mad about his son catching a venereal disease, this being rooted in the fact that Katherine Eddowes's nose had been cut off, which implies not only that she had syphilis, but that the Ripper wanted to post-mortem-ly shame her for it, because your nose rotting off is a syphilis thing... Was. We have penicillin now. In this movie, he's mad, because his son committed suicide after learning his lover was a prostitute. By the 1960s, the Ripper was established in media as less as a men, and more of a universal force of evil who could be adapted to suit any villainous niche. Here he is in a Western! "Cimarron Strip" was a Western that only lasted one season, and in one episode, interestingly, written by Harlan Ellison, women start getting murdered, and, of course, they blame the native guy, until a British dude comes along like "Hey, this seems familiar!" "He calls himself Jack the Ripper" So maybe the Ripper skipped London and has been terrorizing his way across the American West. "Things were getting too warm for him in London, so he came to America. I followed him" "You know who Jack the Ripper is. Who is he?" "I'm afraid I must keep that from you a little longer, Watson" Another trend that popped up around this time was "Ripper vs. Sherlock Holmes". The first movie version was 1965's "A Study in Terror", which starred John Neville as Sherlock and Donald Huston as Dr. Watson. This one plays again off a presumed aristocratic villain. "-Any trade must be dishonorable.
-A Trade, sir?" Oh, you do not throw shade at Watson like that. Of course, Sherlock figures up who did it, but I find it more remarkable that he appears to be invulnerable. "But how on Earth did you get out of it, Holmes? "You know my methods, Watson, I am well known to be indestructible" Are they really just gonna wave that off? Does Sherlock have Luke Cage powers? There have been video games based on Sherlock versus Ripper. They even go head-to-head on our old friend... Celebrity Deathmatch. "Super sleuth Sherlock Holmes takes on the poster boy for a prostitute-killers, Jack the Ripper" Boy, I love me some "Celebrity Deathmatch". A 1979 film called "Murder by Decree", once again, pitted Sherlock, this time played by Christopher Plummer, against the Ripper. But this one's a double crossover! See, in 1978, this guy named Steven Knight published a book called "Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution", which pushed the so-called "Royal conspiracy", though the culprit isn't poor syphilitic Prince Albert Victor. While this theory is one of the more, you know, "out there", it's also one of the most popular, you know, presumably because it included... everybody! The Freemasons, the Royals, a prostitute conspiracy, and a doctor. "Proof that a woman was cynically taken in marriage. I have proof of the husband's name; that a child was born" "I have proof that the woman was committed to an asylum by order of Spivey" That, incidentally, is who did it in this theory: Sir William Gull, the Royal physician. See, there's a legitimate Prince baby no one's supposed to know about, and also, Albert had syphilis, and Sir Gull wants to hide this shame. So there's our motive, I guess. "Would these injuries imply a... medical doctor?" So, this one, a two-part made-for-tv movie simply called "Jack the Ripper", stars Michael Caine as an alcoholic Inspector Abberline, and coincided with the hundred year anniversary of the murders. This one is the most extensive adaptation based on the Knight conspiracy. "Our story is based on extensive research" Ehh? Wow. OK. And like the Knight conspiracy, the killer is, ultimately, the Queen's personal surgeon, Sir William Gull, who also does Darth Vader breaths? "Our story is based on extensive research..." The most well-known derived from the Steven Knight theory is 2001's "From Hell", based on the comic book of the same name. This time, Abberline, played by Johnny Depp, is an opium addict instead of an alcoholic, and apparently has psychic powers. "A repetitive code saturated with blood..." "You know, they used to burn men like you alive" Yeah, this doesn't go anywhere, and Heather Graham plays Mary Kelly, the last of Jack's victims. Honestly, the thing I find the most remarkable about this version is that Jack's victims are actual characters, and not objects that exists solely to scream and then die. In fact, Mary Kelly actually lives. Some hapless other lady's the one who gets killed, and then they just kind of hide it. Also, John Merrick is here for some reason. Yeah, that also goes nowhere. Anyway, as with the '88 version, the culprit turns out to be the Queen's surgeon, Sir William Gull. Something, something, Masons. Something, something, conspiracy. And who's Gull, but Bilbo, the Ripper! Nothing says "menace" like weird CGI evil eye black. "These symbols..." "The martyr," "the, pentacle star..." So, Mary Kelly lives the rest of her life out in secret with the secret Royal conspiracy baby, and Abberline dies in this version. I mean, the idea that these women all knew each other, and they also knew some horrible secret, and someone killed them trying to protect the secret, you know, it makes sense from a narrative standpoint. It's just bullsh*t history. "One day men will look back..." "...and say I gave birth to the Twentieth Century.' So, for our next section, I'm going to make this the start of a new segment, which I'm gonna call: And this will be the Content-warning-est part. So, again, viewer discretion advised. Ah, the 70s, when women being sexually brutalized on film was the new hotness, so Jack the Ripper movies were all the rage. In "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde", Dr. Jekyll is played by a sort of proto-Crispin Glover in a Jack-the-Ripper-themed Hammer Horror. Female hormones are the key to the elixir of life, hypothesizes Jekyll. "Hormones. Female hormones" And that's why we've got at least 200-year-old women running around. So, in this version, Dr. Jekyll's syrup turns him into a woman. Beautiful, but evil. "It is I who exists, Dr. Jekyll, not you" And in order to maintain the change, he needs a constant supply of female hormones from cadavers. Female cadavers. And, you know, he doesn't like killing, but Mrs. Hyde relishes killing. So, basically, the Whitechapel murders are done by an evil trans woman. Yeah. In "Hands of the Ripper", another Hammer horror, hey, Jack, had a daughter! And this daughter grows up to be a murderess, after witnessing her father kill her mother as a child. Even when the killer is a woman, the women in these movies just can't catch a break. So Jack's daughter goes into, like, this Pavlovian phew triggered by shinies and kisses, and her hands turn into Ripper hands, and she murders her mother figures. All of them. "Poor child" Stop putting her in the same room with sympathetic mother figures! She somehow even manages to kill a prostitute. Like, she wanders down the road and finds one. Yeah. "Did you say anything, dear?" She said with her totally real and not at all dubbed voice. This one is an Italian-Spanish co-production, and rather than being a period piece, is a modern retelling. OK... And this is what passed for erotic in the 70s. Yep... Man, the... the erotic.... Passion. Nothing hotter than a... bored woman undressing. Okay, I hope all the murders in this movie end with that bass riff. Also, because a serial killer targeting sex workers wasn't scandalous enough, apparently this one's also a cannibal. "But surely Jack the Ripper's dead" "Undoubtedly, or extremely old" The greatest detective minds of their day. This one, also simply titled "Jack the Ripper", is in German and dubbed into English. It takes a "Fifty Shades of Grey" approach, with the "I'm mad at my prostitute mother and that's why I rape and kill prostitutes" "I'm exactly like your mother" "A whore" Most of the movie's about Jack himself, and his motivations, and his tragic backstory, and how he's actually a nice doctor some of the time. Boy, do I not care. Of course, being German, this movie can and wants to get away with a lot more than we see in, like, the Hammer Horrors, or the Italian-Spanish co-productions. Oh, yeah. This one also adds a lot of rape. A lot of rape. I'm not gonna show it. Eh. Oh, but we didn't forget about you 80s. You want some 80s crack, we got your 80s crack. So, it's the hundredth anniversary of the Whitechapel murders, and some copycat is killing ladies, and who's our prime suspect? It's baby James Spader! Ah, they think he's the Ripper because he's a med student, and, as we all know, Jack the Ripper was a doctor, but uh-oh! How could it be him when he gets murdered? Well, fortunately he has, like, a twin brother, who is also played by James Spader. And so now Twin Baby James Spader has to clear his brother's name, save the girl and find the real killer. James Spader! Getting even more squirrelly, then there's the sub-genre of Jack the supernatural being. "Now, here we have another soul in torment" "Jack the Ripper" When a wax museum features an exhibit about famous serial killers closes, one curator begs to take the wax figures home, and he sympathizes a little too much with the wax figures. "And we can only guess..." "what devils pushed them to their bloody fate?" So, he takes them home and keeps them all nice and air-conditionered. But his wife doesn't like it, and then, she gets stabbed by the Jack the Ripper wax figure when she tries to turn off the AC. "Who would believe me if I told them you were killed by Jack the Ripper?" "Floor must've been pretty bad, huh?" Yeah, weird that it's shaped like a coffin. The twist is a bit ripped from "Psycho". The guy puts his action off on another entity, but... "No, Martin Senescu, it was you-- You murdered your wife" It was him the whole time! Only this time is from the point of view of Norman Bates. "It was you..." A more recent one comes from Grimm, which is a supernatural-based procedural, kind of like Sleepy Hollow, at the end of the Fourth Season, one of the protagonists is possessed by an entity that turns out to be Jack the Ripper. And yeah, he kills prostitutes, which are... Wow. Okay, I guess some people are into that. They get him out by shooting the captain with rubber bullets, and tricking the entity into thinking its host was dead. Squirrelier still... Jack, the literal alien. In a 1997 episode of "The Outer Limits," Jack was a crusader for good, see? These prostitutes are actually inhabited by an evil alien entity. "-Who are you?
-I am nightmare, Jack" "You are not even from this world" Cary Elwes plays Dr. Jack York, who, after figuring out there's an evil entity around, takes it upon himself to kill it, and sometimes that means killing its hosts. Also, hi David Warner. "Don't worry. You'll hardly feel a thing" But he fails, and, basically, he's framed for the murders by a spiteful, bored alien. "Nickname for mass murderer of women" "Other Earth synonym: Jack the Ripper" He pops up again in an episode of the original "Star Trek". Apparently Scotty was involved in an explosion caused by a woman in a previous episode, resulting in his... "total resentment toward women" Hmm, you know, I'm glad at least someone is bringing that up. So, basically, Jack the Ripper was a literal alien. "It feeds on horror and fear" "And I suspect it preys on women because women are more easily and more deeply terrified" Wow. That's like some bio-truther, misogynist YouTuber logic there, Spock. "Hater of all that lives" "Hater of women" And then, Jack the Ripper takes over the Enterprise, but, since fear is the issue, they basically save the day with valium. In a 1995 episode of "Babylon 5", Jack isn't so much an alien as... was abducted by aliens, and then made their Inquisitor. So, basically, the Vorlons unfreeze him whenever they need someone inquisitive, and he's good at this torture thing. But ultimately, he just kind of really wants to teach a lesson. "No greater love had a man, than when he laid down his life for his woman" Aww, did we just get the seal of approval from Jack the Ripper? Anyway, this is the only one where Jack apparently learned his lesson. "I was..." "...found by the Vorlons" "They showed me the terrible depth of my mistake" Not sure how I feel about that. Well, piggybacking off of that, we have Jack the time-traveler! In "Time After Time", a less schlocky addition to the 70s canon, Jack is played by, well, hello again, David Warner, who escapes to the modern (well, "1979 modern") day in a time machine, and he's pursued by H. G. Wells, played by Malcolm Mcdowell. And see, Jack likes it here in the 70s, because it's so much more violent than 1888. "Oh, look" Look at these "Looney Tunes" beating each other! Look at how violence! "The world has caught up with me and surpassed me" Ah, the time travel variation on "Modern man is the real monster" "Ninety years ago, I was a freak" "Today, I'm an amateur" Wow, that's deep man. "Miss Peters has evolved a theory which, she believes, solves the identity of the infamous Whitechapel murderer" "You mean... Jack the Ripper?" "Fantasy Island" is a magical realism show where people come to Mr. Roarke's island to live out their fantasies, and Mr. Roarke is kind of like a philanthropic, less creepy Hugh Hefner with magic powers, and also wants to teach you a lesson. And usually the fantasies are kind of goofy. Like, the other one in this episode is just a guy who wants to be sexy, and learns a lesson about respecting women or something. But this lady's fantasy is solving the Whitechapel murders, and Roarke's like "I don't know, seems kind of dangerous, you sure you don't want like... a makeover or something?". "For your own sake, I must urge you to reconsider" No. At great personal risk, she figures out who Jack the Ripper is and yeah, he's a doctor, but oh, no! He's found her time portal. "It shows that Albert was abandoned by his mother" And was she a prostitute? "She became a prostitute" There it is! Oh, but don't worry, Ricardo Montalbán to the rescue. I guess Montalbán's steely gaze was just too much for him. "-You just killed Jack the Ripper!
-No, Catherine..." "...I just became him!" A slight inversion of the regular time traveler, this time the Time Cop goes back in time to catch, well, not Jack the Ripper, but a guy who killed and replaced Jack the Ripper. And also killed people. So you have to go back in time and make sure the replacement jack doesn't screw up history too much without altering history. "And save Mary Kelly" Hey, you could always pull a "From Hell" and have a Mary Kelly body double. Nope. Sorry, Mary Kelly. Then we have the oddly specific yet strangely common trope of Jack being transported through time through some magical artifact. A 1985 made-for-tv movie starring David Hasselhoff has him originally dying on London Bridge, only to be transported to a... modern-day (well, "1985 modern-day") Arizona. Anyway, London Bridge was apparently, in real life, relocated to Arizona. I assumed this was like a weird plot contrivance made because Arizona is cheaper to shoot your TV movie in than LA, but nope, this is thing that really happened. An oil baron bought the bridge, they deconstructed it brick by brick and reconstructed it in Lake, Havasu City, Arizona. Anyway, they missed the final stone until 1985, and it just happened to contain the spirit of Jack the Ripper. Wouldn't you know? In 1985's "The Ripper", Jack's spirit resides in an old antique ring, and his spirit possesses whomsoever is wearing it, in this case, a college professor who happens to be teaching a film studies course on famous crimes as depicted on film. And finally, during season 3 of "Sleepy Hollow", the Ripper's spirit is carried through... "We're not searching for a monster" "We're searching for a weapon" So there was a guy called simply "The Ripper" running around in Ichabod's time, which was about a hundred years before the historical Jack the Ripper. "Hw's gone by many names over the centuries" "You might know him..." "... as Jack the Ripper" Well, turns out The Ripper is like an evil knife, and whoever wields the knife, the knife builds on their worst attributes, and the knife is also like a vampire knife, absorbing the blood of its victims. The method of defeat here is that it stabs Ichabod, who infects himself with malaria, which is a weird resolution, because we know OG Ripper stabbed some late-stage syphilitics, So this is an interesting way to go about it, all things considered. Eh, maybe that's what brought the original knife down, too. So there we have it, a lot of piggybacking off of common conspiracy theories, but... mostly just weird shit. "I'll... kill you all..." And it is kind of human nature to want to ascribe some meaning to something so horrible, but really, it's just grasping at straws for something that is ultimately meaningless, you know, there is no grand conspiracy. The Freemasons are just, you know, some dudes's social club, and the Illuminati isn't real... Thank you for watching, and please remember to like and subscribe, because, as you know, all the youtubers are contractually obligated to remind you to do this thing every single video. Thank you very much to my Patrons who helped make this entire series and video-making thing possible. I've been getting a lot of requests to do more video-essay type things. So I'll work on that. But remember those take a lot longer than your straight-up Loose Cannon. And as for the people who keep asking me about the RENT video, I'm working on it. Patience.
I miss this series.
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Damn. I got excited thinking the series was back