American popular culture is awash with historical horror mash-ups: Abraham Lincoln is a vampire hunter. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a werewolf ass-kicker. The admixture of history and myth isn’t anything new, even if the horror elements are. If Washington isn’t chopping down any cherry trees right now then maybe we can put him to work against the rising zombie horde (Hollywood?)
According to our friends at Dark Horse, Jack the Ripper will be the next historical figure to get the horror mash-up treatment. The comic book publisher said yesterday that a movie based on Cole Haddon’s and M.S. Corley’s 2011 limited run comic series The Strange Case of Mr Hyde is on track to development. In a storyline reminiscent of The Silence of the Lambs, Scotland Yard investigator Thomas Adye is forced to seek the deranged insights of imprisoned madman Dr. Henry Jeckyll in order to stop a serial murderer on the prowl in Whitechapel.
In an interview with Newsarama, Haddon said that he had planned the story for movie adaptation from its earliest days, and that the comic book and script had been written about the same time. While further details about the movie are thin on the ground, The original four issues of the comic have been collected for a trade paperback release in February. Check out a preview at the publisher’s website.
