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 GCSE-botherer. But Becca Hirani’s laboured reworking makes the book’s gothic subtext crashingly, jugular-spurtingly textual.
As in the novel, wide-eyed Mr Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) pays a courtesy call to his brooding landlord Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) at Wuthering Heights. But this time, his sojourn is more like Jonathan Harker’s at Dracula’s castle; everywhere he turns, the shrouded phantom of Heathcliff’s beloved Catherine Earnshaw (Elle O’Hara) is lurking, and she leaves an extra dollop of gore on the windowsill in her famous nocturnal apparition. The tetchy host doesn’t do much to put Lockwood at ease – even before he’s trapped in the house by a bubo-inflicting malady. Between the hallucinations, the surly servants, and the weird absence of Heathcliff’s rumoured son Linton, he begins freaking out that it’s a different kind of moors story he’s stumbled into.
Hirani puts undeniable effort in getting her plot points to line up with Brontë’s – even if most of the characters, including poor old Lockwood’s horse, meet a much grislier fate. Rationed out in snippets of Catherine’s diary, the confidences of housekeeper Nelly (Nicola Wright) and more random supernatural flashbacks involving Lockwood, the manor’s backstory is rather garbled, though with the OTT hook of Heathcliff as an 18th-century Yorkshire Ripper. Rather than amping up the camp, as the likes of Kate Bush and Emerald Fennell did in their takes on the novel, Hirani plays it straight and dour, mystifyingly so, given the extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork-impalings she’s chucked in.
At the same time, diffident acting undermines the film’s claim as pure slasher fare: Townsend-Green’s jumpy turn feels as if he has strayed out of Jeeves and Wooster, while, despite the Rasputin looks, windy-voiced Cheema is too loose to convince as Byronic bad boy. For much of the runtime, we’re left with too little that makes his conversion to homicidal mania credible, until the last-minute lowdown on his Hellraiser-like scheme for his ward, Cathy (Anna Coupé). Reanimating the corpse of Brontë in this rickety way, this update not only feels pointless, but short on self-awareness or fun.
• Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned is on digital platforms from 19 October
