One of the OGs.
After a month of Olympic crimes and true crime documentaries on Murder Made Fiction podcast, including Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and the Oscar nominated doc, The Perfect Neighbor, Jenn and I are going all the way back to the 19th century to the foundations of the true crime genre.
Jack the Ripper terrorized the residents of Whitechapel, London, leaving butchered bodies in the street before disappearing into the night. Carole Peters’s docuseries episode of To Kill and Kill Again: Jack the Ripper chronicles this disturbing case and its wide variety of suspected killers.
Then, our first fictionalized adaptation of Jack the Ripper is an early Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927).
In the film, a landlord couple begin to suspect that their new tenant (played by gay musical composer Ivor Novello) is The Avenger, a serial killer of blonde women, who may have his sights set on their daughter Daisy.
Topics include: appreciating black & white silent movies; German Expressionism; Hitchcock trademarks; and how the film anticipates true crime discussions we’re still having 100 years later.
Want even more Murder Made Fiction? Be sure to check out the pod’s Patreon feed, where Jenn and I have 136 hours of content including episode by episode coverage of S01 of AMC’s The Terror.