Well, I’m going to be at the Fanex Convention in Baltimore from Thursday till Monday. It’s going to be fun, so if you’re in the Mid-Atlantic region, you might want to come out and check it out.

I’ll be serving on panels discussing movies that deal with Satanism, Loss of Identity, Monster Rallies, and even Musicals. Curiously, several of these topics have implications for Jack the Ripper cinema and television… though that’s not how I’ll be approaching them at the convention.

Musicals: Well, the panel I’m on will be talking about the weirdest musical numbers we’ve ever seen on film. We’ve already talked amongst ourselves and have come up with a pretty impressive bunch of bizarre musical numbers… including “The Devil’s Cabaret.” If there were a Ripper screen musical, I’m sure we’d be showing a clip from it. But you know, even though no Ripper musical has ever made it to the screen, there have been Ripper musicals on stage. In fact, one will be opening in London in 2004. The theme song from the musical is pretty twisted (and is incorporated into the Flash intro for the website). So you might want to check it out!

Satanism: There are at least a couple of Ripper stories on the screen that place the Ripper in occult alliances with the forces of darkness. In “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” an investigator discovers that the Ripper’s murders are actually blood sacrifices, and that the locations for the murders form patterns that have meaning in the world of the occult. The Ripper’s purpose? To maintain eternal life. (In this story, it’s already the 1960s, so the Ripper seems to be doing a pretty good job at maintaining his objective). In Ripper Man, the killer (who believes he is the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper) just simply would like to be one of the forces of darkness. And of course, there are some Ripperologists who maintain that the Ripper himself was a Satanist.

Loss of Identity: We’re going to talk about what a scary theme this is, and point to movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. How does this apply to Jack the Ripper? Well, for the Ripper, obviously, total anonymity was necessary in order to commit butchery with impunity. The fact that the Ripper has remained anonymous, though, is just not psychologically tenable for the culture at large. The Ripper has no known identity—and therefore the case has no closure. We lack two things that humans desperately need: a sense of order, a sense of justice. That’s my theory for why some people actually dedicate their lives and financial resources to giving the Ripper an identity.

For some Ripperologists, the Ripper’s identity is merely a parlor game. But the more dedicated and rigorous students of the case, I think, are often on a quest to right a historical wrong. The blood of the murdered women of Whitechapel screams out to them, and they hope to bring the Ripper out of the fog into which he slipped, and into the light.

In the very disturbing movies we will be discussing, people are stripped of their identity against their will. The Ripper willingly stripped himself of identity… but that fact itself remains disturbing enough that over a century later, we still seek to give him one.