"From Hell" - An Introduction

As the student responsible for the movie portion of the blog, I chose to look at various scenes from the movie “From Hell” which takes place in 1888, a few years away from the birth of the twentieth century. It stars Johnny Depp as the inspector investigating the crime of Jack the Ripper and co-stars Heather Graham as a prostitute who is a witness to the source of the crime. As I watched the movie, I saw quite a few parallels to what we have been talking about in lecture and will be discussing them in detail as time goes on. The movie takes place in the ‘Whitechapel’ district in London, which is often referred to as ‘the east end’ in the movie and is a common place for prostitution (obviously), crime and is the epitome of an industrial area of London with its rampant filth and overcrowding.