Iconography

This week I have been busy looking into the iconography in films about Jack the Ripper. I have been researching films through imdb then going onto Utube to view clips of the films I have found. The iconography in Ripper films is very important to the overall tone and mood of a film. In many of the films I have noticed an obvious pattern has emerged in the costume of the Ripper and the various film settings. I have also gone on to textually analyse a few of these films such as Murder by Decree(1979) and From Hell(2001) to understand the reasons why directors often follow this very similar pattern of dark foggy London streets and the Ripper dressed in black, middle to high class Victorian style clothes. I have also learned that the style of the Ripper has been similar in TV programmes, newspaper articles and books. The world seems to agree on one look for the Ripper and that look has been extremely popular for many years.