Ten Days of Terror!: The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (1927)

Film: The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Every great career starts somewhere. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, his directorial career started with a couple of romances. He really came into his own with The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (hereafter referred to as simply The Lodger), the first of his movies to take a deep dive into suspense. The Lodger is a silent, but even here there are the clear beginnings in what would eventually be many of Hitchcock’s signature themes and ideas—mistaken identity, murder, and obsession with blondes, just for starters.

The Lodger is very clearly a riff on Jack the Ripper, as is evident from the opening scene when a young woman is murdered. As we will discover, the young woman is the seventh victim of a serial killer known as “The Avenger” based on a calling card the murderer leaves at the scene of the crime. The killer acts every Tuesday night, and only kills young, blonde women.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Lodger (1944)

Film: The Lodger (1944)
Format: Internet video on Fire!

There are a lot of interesting things to talk about when it comes to the 1944 version of The Lodger, not the least of these being that this is a remake of a silent Hitchcock film. There are some real surprises here, although the plot isn’t one of them. There’s nothing here that is going to be a shock in terms of the plot and how it works, but there’s a lot around the edges that is surprising.

The Lodger is a sort of macabre love triangle that involves everyone’s favorite uncaught psychopath, Jack the Ripper. What I’m going to say here is going to seem very much like spoilers, but I promise you it’s not. If you’ve ever seen a movie before, especially one of this vintage, you’re going to know what is happening long before the people in the film do.