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Filmmakers have frequently turned to English folklore for inspiration, constantly re-examining the heroics of Robin Hood, the poetry of Shakespeare or the deductive wisdom of Sherlock Holmes. Often our understanding and appreciation of each can be enriched with every new interpretation. There is, however, a much less noble British character who continually makes his way into films. He has no name, his face is unknown, and more than a century after his most famous real-life misdeeds, he continues to get away with murder.

Since the silent era, the enigmatic 19th century killer dubbed Jack the Ripper has been one of Hollywood's reigning villains. Even though his crimes took place in 1888 and movies about his murders have been around since 1912 or earlier, he remains star material. Last week, the latest Ripper flick "From Hell" ruled the American box office with a solid, if somewhat conservative, $11 million take. Nonetheless, saucy Jack still out-grossed Drew Barrymore, Denzel Washington and Robert Redford.

Hollywood's obsession with Jack the Ripper.

The $35 million thriller stars Johnny Depp ("Sleepy Hollow") as Inspector Frederick Abberline, the investigator who pursued the killer. Allen and Albert Hughes, the twins who directed the inner city crime dramas "Menace II Society" and "Dead Presidents" and the documentary "American Pimp," are the latest to look at the Ripper, but they follow in the footsteps of filmmakers as diverse as Nicholas Meyer (who nuked Lawrence in "The Day After"), Bob Clark ("A Christmas Story"), German expressionist great G.W. Pabst (who oversaw Kansan Louise Brooks on her way to meet the Ripper in "Pandora's Box") and the Master of Suspense himself, Sir Alfred Hitchcock.

The awful truth

The reason the Ripper has appealed to movie makers and audiences is no mystery. According to Donald Rumbelow, the author of "Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook" (U.K. title: "The Complete Jack the Ripper"), the onscreen villain benefits from some popular associations.

"We've sort of glamorized the period," Rumbelow says from his London home. "Jack the Ripper is sort of a contemporary with Sherlock Holmes: It's the era of Victorian London, gas lights and hansom cabs. There's sort of a romance about the period which masks all the brutality and ugliness of lower working-class life. This romantic blanket we've flown over the period also covers Jack. It gives him a color which obscures the brutal reality of what actually happened."

The tangible deeds of the anonymous killer elicit no warm feelings of nostalgia. From Aug. 31 through Nov. 9 of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of London's East End, an unknown assailant murdered (at least) five prostitutes named Mary Ann Nichols, Anne Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catharine Eddowes and Mary Kelly (played in "From Hell" by Annabelle Apsion, Katrin Cartlidge, Susan Lynch, Lesley Sharp and Heather Graham, respectively). The murderer had slashed the throats of the women and in most cases surgically removed various internal organs.

Johnny Depp, left, and Robbie Coltrane come across Jack the Ripper's handiwork in "From Hell."

If the murders themselves weren't appalling enough, local officials began receiving letters claiming responsibility. Some indicated in advance the outcome of victims. Some of the epistles were signed, "Jack the Ripper." Of the voluminous correspondence supposedly sent by the Ripper, one letter received on Oct. 16 by George Lusk, chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, is more likely the Ripper's than any other. It was addressed "From hell" and was enclosed with part of a human kidney (which the body of Catharine Eddowes was missing). The killer's horrific deeds and brazenly unrepentant attitude put Londoners on edge.

"You can imagine the terror he created in such a tiny area," Rumbelow explains. "The killing ground is only 15-minutes walk at its widest part. We're not talking about Ted Bundy in the States, where he's going 300 miles killing in other states. Two of the killings were only about a three-minute walk apart. He signaled when he was killing. Apart from his last victim (Kelly), he was killing in the open. You've got vigilantes out. Everybody knows what he's doing, and he's still not caught."

Victorian police lacked key tools that could have helped them identify the Ripper.

"It was going to be 17 years in this country (the United Kingdom) before there was a fingerprint conviction, and with blood groupings, you couldn't say whether they were animal or human. The (killer) could actually walk though the street covered in the victim's blood and leave fingerprints all over the murder scene, and there was no way you could link him to the victim or the murder scene," Rumbelow says.

We don't know Jack

The Ripper's elusiveness still haunts us today. Because he was never brought to justice, dozens of writers have speculated who the killer might have been.

"There is no other murder case where you have a range of suspects with such a variety, going from a future king of England (Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale), doctors, surgeons, backstreet abortionists, slaughtermen, police commissioners, high ranking Freemasons. There are people of both sexes. Every one of these suspects has his or her own supporters," states Rumbelow.

One Ripperologist, Stewart P. Evans, leans his suspicions toward an expatriate American quack surgeon named Francis J. Tumblety, who lived in Whitechapel. Evans explains his conclusions in his book "Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer." He and Keith Skinner edited "The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook: An Illustrated Encyclopedia" and wrote the new book "Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell," an illustrated study of the Ripper correspondence. Like Rumbelow, he's a former British policeman. Speaking from Cambridge in the United Kingdom, he cautions others who follow the case.

"There have been dozens of suspects over the years," Evans says. "There are about only four or five viable suspects who could have been the killer. Of course, we'll never know. We'll never be able to prove it."

Rumbelow adds, "What tends to happen is that people tend to work sort of backwards. They actually pick a suspect, like Montague Druitt or Neill Cream (who can be exonerated because he was in the United States during the period of ALL five murders), see what they know, and they interpret the character they do know as Jack the Ripper, which is the wrong way around."

When asked about the most outlandish Ripper suspect, Evans laughs and replies, "An American wrote a book trying to say that ("Alice in Wonderland" author) Lewis Carroll was the Ripper, which is pretty extraordinary."

Because of the mystery, a filmmaker has considerable freedom in presenting the character. In Hitchcock's 1926 silent adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes' Ripper-inspired novel "The Lodger," the director teases his protagonists and the audience into thinking that a hyper-sensitive man with a foul temper (Ivor Novello) could be a killer who has been attacking unsuspecting blondes at night. A much different Jack the Ripper inhabits Nicholas Meyer's "Time After Time." In that film, David Warner plays a suave, cavalier killer who steals H.G. Wells' time machine to terrorize 1979 San Francisco. The futurist pursues the killer but finds that his lofty ideals are less at home in the modern world than his quarry is.

Filmmakers also can solve the crime in a more bold and decisive manner than real investigators. "From Hell," Bob Clark's "Murder by Decree" and the 1988 miniseries "Jack the Ripper" starring Sir Michael Caine attribute the deeds to a Masonic conspiracy to cover up discretions by the Duke of Clarence. Evans and Rumbelow are both skeptical of this explanation, which was advocated by Stephen Knight's now discredited 1976 book "Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution."

Evans states, "It wasn't a Masonic conspiracy at all. In (the Duke of Clarence's) case, they've got the Royal calendar, and on a couple of occasions during the murders he was away from London. He was in Scotland."

Fellow "Masonic" conspirator and doctor Sir William Withey Gull (played in "From Hell" by Sir Ian Holm) is portrayed suspiciously in all three films. From 1887 through his death in 1890, the doctor, who was 72 during the period of the murders, suffered a series of paralyzing strokes that would have made his committing a brutal killing spree seem less likely.

The makers of "From Hell" play fast and loose with the data, but according to screenwriter Rafael Yglesias, who also has adapted his own novel "Fearless" and Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" to the big screen, solving the 113-year-old crimes was not the filmmakers' objective.

"I wasn't concerned at all if I was historically faithful," Yglesias says in a recent telephone interview from his office in New York. "I assumed the audience would enjoy it as a ghost story, just a good yarn of how it might have been. My main concern was to make sure the mystery was a compelling reveal for the audience, an interesting dance. I didn't think the story was about the Ripper case. I thought it was about class and sexual hypocrisy. That's really what I wanted the audience to get at. I wanted them to get a Victorian society where there was a lot of vice going on, drug use and sexual behavior of all kinds. It pretended to be a society in which none of that was going on. That pretense, that desire to cover up the abuses of sex and hypocrisy in general, is what made this kind of killing and the mystery of this killing possible."

Mr. Ripper's neighborhood

"From Hell" may be telling the same old story as its predecessors in regard to the "solution" of the crime. Nonetheless, it is unique in that it portrays the poverty and desperation in Whitechapel with an unflinching eye. Violence, overcrowding, poverty and sadness rule. "Murder by Decree," while lively and engaging, features clean and spacious streets.

Yglesias, who wrote the final drafts of the script (the earlier ones were penned by Terry Hayes, "Vertical Limit"), explains, "That was what Allen and Albert wanted to do, and I wrote everything to give them that ability. I wrote the whores as real whores. They're drunks; they're lesbians; their lives are miserable and they have trouble finding a place to sleep. Of course, they're actresses, so they're prettier than those miserable creatures were, but the lives that are depicted (in the film) are every bit as miserable as the lives they had. There were pimps then. There was rampant drug usage. There was an underclass. It was a ghetto. That's what the movie was about."

According to Rumbelow, who leads a regular walking tour through the murder sites for London Walks (www.walks.com), "In my book, in the opening chapter, ("Call of the Wild" author) Jack London is living (in Whitechapel) with one of the detectives who had actually worked on the (Ripper) case. He couldn't stand it after a time and had to escape and go back to his hotel. He wrote to a friend saying that if he had to live in that area for two years, he would have committed suicide. Jack London was a very tough man. If you ever get the chance to read his 'People of the Abyss,' read it. It's an amazing portrait of the era. I just quoted a few things from it, but the overall picture is absolutely terrifying, and that's nearly 25 years AFTER the murders."

Evans, who served as a consultant on "From Hell," states, "They've gone for realism with all the squalor and the horror of the murders and how bloodthirsty they were. I don't think they've glamorized it."

"From Hell" examines this ghetto environment by presenting some of the ethnic tensions that ran through Whitechapel at the time. Some British authorities refused to believe that an Englishman could have been the killer and attributed the crime to Jews.

"That did happen in real life," says Rumbelow. "The reason for those remarks, which were said by a minority (of people), was that the area had been swamped by Jews escaping from Czarist Russia, the pogroms in Eastern Europe. The area was already overcrowded and seriously depressed as far as work and wages were concerned and was swamped ever further by this influx. Of course, there were going to be these prejudices. The local people were hit by starvation, unemployment, overcrowded slum housing. There was bound to be this sort of backlash."

The filmmakers had to go to some lengths to reproduce Whitechapel as it was in 1888 because the current location has changed considerably. "From Hell" was actually shot in Prague in the Czech Republic. Evans says, "There are very few spots in East London that are Victorian. There's been so much development. All the murder sites are all but unrecognizable. Certainly they wouldn't have been able to shoot the movie there."

Rumbelow adds, "It's becoming gentrified right now. You can still feel some of the excitement. You still get people saying, 'I wouldn't come down here.' There's still a certain atmosphere."

The facts about fiction

To be fair to fiction writers, making a compelling, credible story out of an established murder case does present challenges. The tale has been told frequently, and making it palatable for both audiences and cost-conscious studio executives can require a diligence that rivals a good historian's. In addition to trying to gauge audience enjoyment, a screenwriter also has to consider what historical elements to keep in order the give the film a minimum of integrity. In the case of "From Hell," Yglesias also had to ponder the massive comic book on which the film is based. Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell, the graphic novel is remarkably popular and thoroughly researched (Moore's footnotes are as fascinating as his main story). It also has a cult following that is sometimes leery of movie reworkings of comic book stories.

" If you take on the job of adapting something people know well and love, you have to pretty much accept that you're going to be the one that everyone will complain about," the screenwriter explains. "If you don't understand that going in, you're going to have a long and miserable experience. Like with 'Les Miserables,' when adapting a book that people think of as one of the great masterpieces of the world, you have to take for granted that people are going to blame you for any disappointment. I took that for granted with ("From Hell") as well. I took the job because I love the graphic novel and because I loved the idea of Allen and Albert directing it. I didn't expect to get a lot of credit out of it in the outside world. I expected to be paid well and enjoy the work, but I'm surprised I'm getting any good notices. You're the easy target."

In graphic novel form, the story is loaded with flashbacks and reveals the Ripper's identity early on. Yglesias was required by the studio to wait before unmasking the killer. He also had to modify a problematic narrative which featured both a drug-addicted Inspector Abberline and a clairvoyant named Robert Lees (a favorite among some Ripperologists).

"Allen and Albert had the idea of making him an opium addict before I came on board," Yglesias says. "The way they had it before I was involved, he was just an addict. I didn't really see what purpose his addiction served other than the fact that Allen and Albert wanted to show that guys were addicted at the time. I knew that Lees had to be eliminated, which everyone was amazed at as an idea. He has to go, and Abberline has to be a clairvoyant, and he's in touch with it because of the opium. Albert liked that A LOT because he could see there would be these dreams. And then when I wrote them out, he got very excited the dreams would be a movie within the movie and would help set the visual style to the type of surrealism he wanted.

"In a funny way, things like that are what get movies made when you provide directors and studios with something that they really fall in love with. That idea of mine is the single most important idea I came up with."

This change gave the film a motif even if it doesn't quite match the truth. Abberline lived to be 86-years-old a difficult feat for an opium junkie.

"In the 1988 movie, Michael Caine played Abberline as an alcoholic," explains Evans. "In this movie, Johnny Depp plays Abberline, and he's an opium addict. In real life, he was a highly respected chief inspector in Scotland Yard. When he retired, he became a top detective for the European branch of the Pinkerton agency working in Monte Carlo."

Still, as Yglesias points out, penning these distortions requires the ability to think quickly.

"Albert (Hughes) called me and said he wanted a page-worth of dialogue with Gull talking clinically about the heart," the screenwriter recalls. "He asked me with very short notice. He was in Prague, and I was in New York. I remember because of the time difference. I looked up a long clinical description of the heart in an encyclopedia and cut it together. I didn't put any phony words in. I cut it together in such a way that it would sound ominous, the drier he said it. It's a huge sequence in the movie. It's funny, and it was done very casually and without much consultation with anyone else. Albert didn't say what he wanted; he just said I need some stuff on the heart. I thought the more clinical and more accurate it is under the circumstances, the weirder it would seem," the screenwriter recalls.

Happy medium

The relationship between the filmmakers and historians who've covered the Ripper case is hardly antagonistic. Occasionally, fictitious accounts attract the curious to study the real thing. Evans, pleased with his association with the film, has dedicated "Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell" to Depp. The actor, who had a fascination with Jack the Ripper before taking the role, also met with Rumbelow. The Web site for the film (www.fromhellmovie.com) links to a more scholarly site (www.casebook.org) that helps separate good stories from verifiable facts.

Curiously, because of the myths, interest in the truth remains. Evans, who fondly recalls meeting Yglesias, says, "He gave me a copy of the script and wrote, 'To Stewart, with apologies to the facts.'"