Halloween & East London, an Old Fashioned Type of Love?

Happy Halloween to you all! Halloween is the best day of the year and I won’t hear otherwise. Halloween means ridiculous party games which are invented to simply rid you of all dignity and face paint, and costumes which will leave you, your walls and your bed sheets covered in fake blood for weeks to come. Brilliant!

But, there are also a whole host of Halloween films on offer, but we’re all bored of The Shining and Saw 86 or whatever it is we’re on now, being rolled out. But what about the British horror film, and more importantly the East London tales of terror? Victorian set tales are the ones which seem to suit East London the best, as they are the ones which keep cropping up.

The most famous of East London horror stories are the Victorian Penny Dreadful themed ones, most notably Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, which have been remade and star your friend and mine, Johnny Depp. In Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Depp plays Todd- probably one of the most famous fictional characters that people think is real- the murderous barber who, hell set on getting revenge on Judge Turpin after he exiles him in order to take his wife, takes it upon himself to slit the throat of every man who comes to his door, and then bake them in a pie for good measure. Depp also stars in From Hell, a slightly bizarre retelling of the most famous of East London’s horror stories: Jack the Ripper, and the investigation into his crimes. Johnny Depp plays the brilliantly named Frederick Abberline who equipped with psychic powers sets off to solve the Jack the Ripper case once and for all.

The only really super famous, modern horror film is 28 Days Later, set partly in Tower Hamlets but the most famous scenes, like Cillian Murphy walking along a deserted Westminster Bridge, are in Central. Should there be more modern day horror films set in East London, or does the Victorian charm and buttoned down policeman’s uniforms suit the aesthetic of the dark alleys and passageways?