The world in which Hitchcock grew up had its own “moment of Psycho” a decade before his birth, when Jack the Ripper established himself as a defining piece of East End mythology. When given the opportunity to select a story to film for his third movie, Hitchcock chose The Lodger, a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, based on the Ripper murders, which had previously been adapted into a stage play that Hitchcock saw as a teenager. The movie—The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, about a young man who is mistakenly identified as a serial killer whose victims are all blonde women—was a huge success with audiences and critics; it was the first great stride on Hitchcock’s path to stardom. The lasting afterglow of this triumph was perhaps part of the reason why Hitchcock described The Lodger as his “first good film” and “the first time I exercised my style. In truth, you might almost say that The Lodger was my first picture.” Its numerous similarities with Psycho are worth noting. The action in both is catalyzed by a mysterious outsider in search of a hideaway; both balance shocking horror with dark comedy, shot in a way that evokes the unreal atmosphere of German expressionism. Both were also based on novelized interpretations of real killers who committed depraved crimes against women. In The Lodger, the murderer is a cloaked figure known only as the Avenger, though partly because of changes to the script insisted on by the film’s producers, his identity is never revealed, meaning it’s never specified what he’s avenging—it could be read as simply a howl against the existence of females who remind him of his crippling inadequacies, in anticipation of Norman Bates, the original incel, and a precursor to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
Some believe that through these films Hitchcock was revealing his own torments and dark fantasies. Certainly, he explored submission and domination in his work, and found in moviemaking ways of controlling beautiful young women, which excited him. To Truffaut he mentioned the sadomasochistic connotations that accompany the many handcuffs in his movies, and told of his interest in the various instruments of torture, violence, and restraint he had seen at the Vice Museum in Paris. Strangulation appears in several Hitchcock films, and he posed for various photos with his hands clasped around a female throat, and sometimes his own.
However, the common denominator among Hitchcock’s murderers isn’t their victims—who are not all women—but male destructiveness, an emotional aberrance that Hitchcock was attuned to, and perhaps felt inside himself, but never truly understood. His murderers hit out at women, but also at other men, a government, or civilization as a whole. Norman Bates’s rage tumbles out in explosions of ham-fisted brutality, whereas the Avenger is presented as a fiendishly brilliant criminal with the power to haunt and terrorize an entire city.
Murder as a twisted expression of artistic flair was something Hitchcock repeatedly addressed. “All murderers regard their work as a fine art,” he explained, half-jokingly. “The better ones, I mean.” The reference to murder “as a fine art” was one Hitchcock made often; it derives from Thomas De Quincey’s satirical essay of 1827, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” an aesthete’s ironically disinterested appreciation of the act of killing, which outlines the ways in which a murder can be beautiful, an idea Hitchcock borrowed in his “Sophistication of Violence” piece for Esquire. De Quincey had a deep obsession with the serial killer John Williams, whose slaughter of seven people in twelve days in the East End of London was an early nineteenth-century precursor of the Ripper. Williams’s crimes also inspired De Quincey’s gothic tale “The Avenger,” the name given to Belloc Lowndes’s, then Hitchcock’s, murderer in The Lodger. “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” had a sizable impact on subsequent generations of British writers, not only in terms of its urbane, acrid irony but also in cementing a cultural association between murder and artistic brilliance.
In Jack the Ripper’s day, popular newspapers blurred the lines between fact and fiction as they cast the Ripper as the archetype of a new cultural figure: a genius twisted by the malevolence of the modern city. One mass-market publication described him as “another Hyde,” as though either Robert Louis Stevenson’s character from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had been flesh and blood, or the Ripper was a work of spine-chilling fiction. Such reporting promoted rumors that the Ripper was Richard Mansfield, the American actor who at that moment was terrifying West End audiences in a stage production of Jekyll and Hyde. A number of other artists have been named as suspects over the last century. In 2002 and 2017, the novelist Patricia Cornwell published books claiming that the Ripper was Walter Sickert, one of England’s most important early modernist painters and a member of the influential Camden Town Group. Hitchcock would have been intrigued
