Wuthering Heights Review: The House of the Damned – Bronte's Gothic Classic Becomes a Horror Film Part Dracula, Part Jeeves and Wooster

Emily Brontë's classic is reimagined with strangling, slicing and extra fork strikes, but it streams directly, where it once would have been relegated to the pornography underfoot. Horror has become a genre that has infiltrated everything else and sees monkeys. Despite a flood of unlicensed cartoon characters that have recently been laid to rest over not-so-new IP, classic literature now apparently is fair game for a gruesome turn in the spotlight.

Where pornography was once trodden underfoot, horror has now become a genre that infiltrates and apes everyone else. With a slew of out-of-copyright cartoon characters recently buried for not-so-fresh IP, classic literature is now apparently fair game for a creepy flash, in this case, Emily Brontë's perpetual GCSE nuisance. But Becca Hirani's painstaking revision turns the book's Gothic subtext into a crushing, textual form by the jugular.

As in the novel, a wide-eyed Mr. Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) calls his grieving landlady Heathcliff (Sky Chima) at Weathering Heights. But this time, his stay is more like Jonathan Harker's life in Dracula's castle. Everywhere he turns, the cloaked ghost of Heathcliff's beloved Catherine Earnshaw (Elle O'Hara) lurks, leaving a haunting window sill in her famous nocturnal appearance. The impatient host doesn't do much to comfort Lockwood—even before he's caught by a bubo in the house. Between hallucinations, creepy servants, and the strange disappearance of Heathcliff's rumored son Linton, she begins to panic that this is another kind of Ant story she's stumbled upon.

Hirani makes an unmistakable effort to match her plot points with Brontë's - even if most of the characters, including poor old horse Lockwood, meet far more gruesome fates. Consisting of scraps from Catherine's diary, the confidence of housekeeper Nellie (Nicola Wright) and the random supernatural of Lockwood-related flashbacks, the mansion's backstory is fairly convoluted, albeit with Heathcliff's OTT hook as an 18th-century Yorkshire ripper. Rather than amping up the camp, as the likes of Kate Bush and Emerald Fennell have done in their take on the novel, Hirani plays it straight and bored, given the extra choking, slashing and gagging that goes into it.

At the same time, the disparate performances undermine the film's claim to being a pure slasher film: Townsend-Green's impassioned turn seems like he's drifted away from Jeeves and Worcester, while, despite his Rasputin looks, Chima is too loose-voiced to be convincing as a Byronic bad boy. For most of the running time, we have little that makes his descent into homicidal mania believable, until at the last moment his hell-bent plan to forgive Cathy (Anna Coupe) is cut short. Bringing Brontë's corpse to life in this clumsy way, this update is not only pointless, it lacks self-awareness or entertainment.