Follow TV Tropes

This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Nightmare Fuel / From Hell

Go To

The Comic:

  • Every murder is shown and described in graphic detail. Gull himself becomes an in-universe Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant, inspiring both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and William Blake's The Ghost of a Flea.
    • Capped by the entirely of Chapter 10, where Gull is killing and mutilating a woman who might not be Mary Kelly. Remember, this was the murder committed indoors and uninterrupted...
  • This miniseries delves into the Jack the Ripper murders in graphic detail, and you'll be glad it's in black and white. (Then you read the appendix, which contains actual crime scene photos, obviously also in black-and-white. There, the lack of color is no help.) The violence eventually takes a back seat as the story delves into the mind of a misogynist madman, which is no less unsettling.
  • In general, the depiction of Whitechapel's slum district is this. It shows what being on the Wrong Side of the Tracks really means and how terrible poverty can really be.
  • The appendix "Dance of the Gull-Catchers" tells us why exactly no one will ever know who Jack the Ripper is, and how so many scholars have gone nuts and ruined their careers searching for the Ripper:
    "Koch's Snowflake begins with an equilateral triangle, which can be contained within a circle, just as the murders are constrained to Whitechapel 2nd Autumn, 1888. Next, half-sized triangles are added to the triangles' three sides. Quarter-sized triangles are added to the new shape's twelve sides, and so on. Eventually, the snowflake's edge becomes so crinkly and complex that its length, theoretically, is Infinite. Its AREA, however, never exceeds the initial circle. Likewise, each new book provides fresh details, finer crennelations of the subject's edge. Its area however can't extend past the initial circle: Autumn 1888, Whitechapel. What have we to look forward to? Abberline's school nickname or the make of Mary Kelly's shoes? Koch's snowflake: gaze upon it, Ripperologists, and shiver. The complex phantom we project. That alone, we know is real. The actual killer's gone, unglimpsed, might as well not have been there at all."

The Movie:

  • In order to silence her, Anne Crook is roughly strapped down to an operating table while she's whining in terror and confusion, knocked out with chloroform, and then wheeled into a medical theatre to be lobotomized in front of an uncaring audience of students. Thanks to a Gory Discretion Shot we don't actually see it happening, but we can hear the crunches of her skull being cut into.

Top