Hands of the Ripper

• Hammer paired it with Twins of Evil on a 1971 double bill, in what's often called the studio's last great double feature. It opened in Britain on 17 October 1971; the same pairing later went out in the US.
• Eric Porter plays Dr. John Pritchard as an open disciple of Sigmund Freud, which makes the film a rare beast: a Hammer horror that runs on psychoanalysis instead of crucifixes, with the doctor disposing of Anna's victims to keep his case study alive.
• The kills are nastier than Hammer's usual operatic stuff. Each trance is triggered by a kiss plus a glint of light, then Anna strikes: a fistful of hatpins into a woman's eye behind her raised hand, the maid Dolly's throat cut with a shard of broken glass, and a victim run through with a fireplace poker that pins her to the door. Reviewers also clock a broadsword and even a pair of lorgnettes in the impalement tally.
• Despite carrying an R rating, some of the goriest moments were trimmed from the US theatrical release; the complete version only resurfaced later on home video.
• Angharad Rees, who plays Anna, became a household name four years later as Demelza in the BBC's Poldark (1975-77). Hands of the Ripper was one of her earliest screen leads.
• Directed by Peter Sasdy and produced by Aida Young, who had previously teamed on Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970); Young was one of very few women producing genre films in Britain at the time. It was shot at Pinewood with cinematography by Kenneth Talbot and a score by Christopher Gunning that swings between lush romantic melody and dissonant menace to mirror Anna's two selves.

The movie never settles whether Anna is supernaturally possessed by her father or simply a trauma case who dissociates, and that ambiguity is the point. The trance trigger is a kiss or tender gesture paired with a glint of light, the exact sensory mix of the night she watched her father kill the mother who'd just shown her affection. Read clinically, it's textbook traumatic reenactment, no ghost required, which makes Pritchard's Freudian framing the correct one and the title's 'Ripper' a metaphor.

Pritchard is the real villain. He recognizes Anna is lethal, watches the bodies pile up, and covers each one because curing her, or rather studying her, matters more than the women she kills. His death on her blade in St Paul's plays as cosmic bill collection: the rationalist who treated a damaged girl as a specimen finally pays for it, and only at the literal moment of impalement does he stop analyzing and start caring.

The Whispering Gallery climax weaponizes its own gimmick. St Paul's gallery carries a whisper clear across the dome, and the film stages Anna's final break there, surrounded by voices, including her father's, that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. Whether those whispers are an echo of guilt or an actual haunting, the architecture stages the same question the whole film asks: is the voice telling her to kill outside her head or inside it?

London, 1888: a small child watches Jack the Ripper knife her mother in a candlelit room. Fifteen years on, Anna is a sweet, hollow-eyed orphan pimped out under cover of phony séances. Eric Porter's Freud-besotted psychiatrist, Dr. John Pritchard, takes her in, certain her blackouts are a case study, not a curse. He's half right. A kiss plus a flicker of light flips a switch, and she butchers without memory while he hides the bodies to protect his theory. Hammer's saddest monster movie barrels toward the Whispering Gallery of St Paul's.