Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned review – Brontë horror do-over is part Dracula, part Jeeves and Wooster
Emily Brontë’s classic is reimagined with extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork impalings but plays it straight Where pornography once trod, horror has now become the genre that infiltrates and apes all others. With a host of out-of-copyright cartoon characters recently grave-robbed for not-so-fresh IP, now classic literature is apparently fair game for a gruesome glow-up, in this case, Emily Brontë’s regular…
Key points
- A new film reimagines Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as a horror story with added stranglings, slashings and pitchfork impalings.
- The reviewer says the film plays its lurid material straight and dour rather than with camp, and that diffident acting undermines its slasher claims.
- The review concludes the update feels pointless and short on self-awareness or fun.
A new film, Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned, reimagines Emily Brontë's classic novel as a horror story, according to a Guardian Culture review. The review says the adaptation adds extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork impalings while playing the material straight.
How the story is retold
As in the novel, Mr Lockwood, played by Ross Townsend-Green, pays a courtesy call to his landlord Heathcliff, played by Sky Cheema, at Wuthering Heights. The review says his stay now resembles Jonathan Harker's at Dracula's castle, with the shrouded phantom of Heathcliff's beloved Catherine Earnshaw, played by Elle O'Hara, lurking everywhere and leaving extra gore on the windowsill in her famous nocturnal apparition.
The review says the host does little to put Lockwood at ease, even before he is trapped in the house by a bubo-inflicting malady. Amid hallucinations, surly servants and the strange absence of Heathcliff's rumoured son Linton, Lockwood begins to fear he has stumbled into a different kind of moors story.
mystifyingly so, given the extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork-impalings she’s chucked in
— the Guardian Culture review
What the review says
The review credits director Hirani with effort in lining her plot points up with Brontë's, even though most characters, including Lockwood's horse, meet a much grislier fate. It says the manor's backstory, told through Catherine's diary, housekeeper Nelly's confidences and supernatural flashbacks, is rather garbled, with the hook of Heathcliff as an 18th-century Yorkshire Ripper.
The review says the film plays it straight and dour rather than amping up the camp, and that diffident acting undermines its slasher claims. It calls Townsend-Green's turn jumpy and Cheema too loose to convince as a Byronic bad boy, and concludes the update feels pointless and short on self-awareness or fun.
