Future Murders

Robert Bloch (1917-94) will be forever identified with Alfred Hitchcock's film PSYCHO (1960), but he also crossed over into science fiction, as here with a STAR TREK episode. Brief excerpt:

. . . when he [Bloch] returned to his tried and true theme of Jack the Ripper preying on contemporary society (“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” Weird Tales, 1943) and projected the character four centuries into the future, he succeeded very well. The Trek production team gave Bloch’s story the proper treatment, with nearly every scene largely drenched in shadows and fog accompanied by an intense, fittingly nerve-jangling musical score—and for the first time viewer, the attempts at misdirection succeed at diverting suspicion away from the real killer. — Mike Gray, "Jack the Ripper in the Twenty-Third and a Halfth Century," THE AMERICAN CULTURE (October 14, 2010)

Categories: Science fiction, Detective fiction