Yes, films have to stand on their own, and good movies can radically alter the meaning of the source (Robert Altman's film of 'The Long Goodbye' and Roman Polanski's film of Ariel Dorfman's 'Death and the Maiden' are just two examples). But whatever choices they make does not mean that the source has been banished from memory. Of course, filmmakers have to be allowed the freedom to interpret or diverge from their source as they wish. Now that the film is opening, that question has been answered: 'They don't.' The Hughes' version of 'From Hell' is an extravagant period farrago that bears only a superficial resemblance to the novel. The unasked question was, 'Why do they want to do it?' This is a vast work of enormous power that will take you twice as long to read as almost any three other graphic novels combined.Ever since the film was announced, the press has commented on how incongruous it was that Allen and Albert Hughes would stray from the modern urban American milieu of 'Menace II Society' and 'Dead Presidents' to the Victorian London setting of 'From Hell,' Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel about Jack the Ripper. Gull do it? Why was the case never solved? And why are we still studying these events then studying the studies of those who have studied the events? That we know the who from just after the prologue makes the investigation all the more frustrating, infuriating and painful to follow, so it was never about the who - it's about the why. How did anyone have the arrogance to believe that they could ever film that? And speaking of Hollywood, how typical of them to turn this into a Whodunnit. Gull's eyes that see more than is there, or the bleak, unsanitised and dark and stark London which he scratches indelibly on your mind. Gull has visions of the world as we know it, where his deeds are anything but forgotten.Įddie Campbell's intense visuals are inseparable from the experience, whether it's the look in Dr. Madness and ceremony and the architecture of time play large parts in this gruelling masterpiece, as the women struggle hard enough to survive in their own unforgiving environment, let alone when they're lured by grapes into the alien world of an upper class cab, and Dr.

On the surface (Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's surface are most creators' core) it's the story of one sick bastard's execution of a royal cover up, fuelled by his own personal Masonic obsession with carving a male sigil across the heart of London by slaughtering the women of the street who happen to have strayed too close to a blue-blooded Victorian's philandering.

From hell eddie campbell