Jeff Davis | Vent Section Manager

Just in time for the Halloween season, Michael Jackson has a new single out. But I shall digress and write about something that’s just as scary. The newest effort from the Hughes Brothers, “From Hell,” takes a rip at the classic horror popcorn films that, until now, just stuck to you like theater litter.

This movie is perhaps the most intelligent horror film I’ve ever seen, being extremely literate and drawing upon many folk legends and bits of ritual history that most of us rarely ever heard of before. At its core, however, the film’s greatest victory is its ability to creep the viewer out, and not make him/her fly out of the seat. This way, ingeniously, the scares last past the walk back to the car.

Set in the Whitechapel district of 1888 London, the atmosphere is bleaker than seventh-grade charcoal drawings, with sunlight appearing only twice in the entire film. This slimy setting crawls under your skin like the blood dripping from Jack the Ripper’s knife. If you don’t know the “hell” of the story, Jack the Ripper was a serial killer who committed a rash of stabbings and slashings in London.

Johnny Depp (“Blow,” “Sleepy Hollow”) plays Fred Abberline, the opium-crazed investigator who has visions of what the Ripper’s next move will be. Heather Graham (“Boogie Nights,” “The Spy Who Shagged Me”) portrays Mary Kelly, an Irish prostitute, bawdy, streetwise and devoted to her co-workers. Led by the physician to the royal family, Sir William Gull, played by Ian Holm (“The Fifth Element”), the plot unravels to reveal blunders and delicate nuances involving the police, a baby and even the Freemasons.

The movie succeeds very well at something else it may not have set out to do: it shows the viewer the complete degradation prostitution carries with it, even 113 years ago when men treated women worse than they do now. The impoverishment of this small area of London is also well displayed, and the wealth of the murderer serves as a precise focal point when he lurks about in the bowels of the dank London night. Distinctions between have and have-not are rarely this clear in cinema.

The one loss is the romance that builds between Abberline and Kelly: it seems deeply superficial and does not develop any past an alleyway kiss, made worthy of the rest of the film by Abberline being mistaken for a regular citizen by a constable. That is the only funny moment in the film, and the unsuccessful, blissful romance that never goes beyond smooches is the only casualty.

Aside from that, this film is incredible. It was released just after the audience-wowing “The Others,” another horror film I recommend highly. Right on time if you ask me. If you’re looking for an intelligent scare, and not the forty-third sequel to “The Revenge-Crazed Flake with a Cheesy Mask,” fork over the $6.50 for this film. You’ll have all kinds of nightmares later. The good kind, of course.