When Emerald Fennell’s Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie-starring Wuthering Heights adaptation premiered earlier this year, it was met with mixed reviews from critics and a wildly divided response from audiences. Like most of the cinematic adaptations before it, Fennell’s film chose to mostly adapt only the first section of Emily Brontë’s iconic epic romance novel. The book has several elements that this latest movie never even dared to touch, such as an intergenerational cast of characters taking part in a larger tragedy that plays out over the course of decades and some bona fide hauntings, be they literal or not.
It’s no mistake that filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro have referred to Brontë’s novel as one of the great ghost stories of all time. But a new take on the material is taking that opinion to new extremes. The trailer for the latest in a long line of Wuthering Heights adaptations, and it posits itself as both a more faithful and more horror-indebted version of the story. Directed by Becca Hirani, the horror-centric take is coming to on-demand platforms this October.
How is this happening? Well, the same way that numerous of the other Wuthering Heights adaptations have come to fruition over the years, the novel is in the public domain. In layman’s terms, this means no one owns the rights to the novel of Wuthering Heights anymore. It is completely open for public consumption and use, which means that anyone can make a movie and call it Wuthering Heights. This is the exact same kind of legal loophole that has led to recent low-budget horror riffs like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or Screamboat. However, I find the use of IP here much more inspired than those other films, whose imagination seems to begin and end at "What if this beloved children’s character was a serial killer?"
Conversely, the trailer for Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned does a pretty solid job of selling it as being just as faithful of an adaptation as many of the others have been over the past century. There’s Catherine’s ghost, a look at Cathy (meaning that the story will at least dabble in the decades-spanning material), and even looks to be taking significant inspiration from the latter pieces of the book that rarely see any play in cinematic versions. Notably, the film has even cast Sky Cheema, a non-white actor, in the role of Heathcliff, which was famously played by the very white Jacob Elordi most recently, inciting a great deal of controversy.
All in all, this is a fun riff on the idea and is just as valid as any number of the countless other adaptations over the years, in theory. My hope is that Hirani and co. keep their heads up and resist the urge to just turn it into a hack-and-slash feature with Wuthering Heights cosplay, instead embracing the story’s actual text in meaningful ways. To their credit, the trailer looks like much more of the latter rather than the former, so I’m more than down to check it out.
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