The Yorkshire Moors are about to get freaky.
Emerald Fennell is teasing her own film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” the famed 1847 gothic novel by Emily Brontë about two families living in northern England.
The “Saltburn” filmmaker posted about the project on social media, sharing a graphic that reads, “Be with me always – Take any form – Drive me mad,” a line from the novel. Insiders tell Variety that the filmmaker will reteam with MRC, the studio behind her hit “Saltburn.”
There have been a handful of screen adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” throughout the years, including William Wyler’s 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon; Robert Fuest’s 1970 movie with Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall; and Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 film led by Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. There have been two TV movies — in 2009 with Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley, and in 2011 with James Howson and Kaya Scodelario — and two series, in 1978 and 1998.
Related Stories
Fennell’s latest film, 2023’s much-discussed “Saltburn,” starring Jacob Elordi and a bathwater-slurping Barry Keoghan, had a heavy gothic influence.
Popular on Variety
“I’ve always been obsessed with the gothic,” Fennell wrote in a January 2024 column for the Los Angeles Times. “Whether it was Edward Gorey’s children who are variously choked by peaches, sucked dry by leeches or smothered by rugs; Du Maurier’s imperiled heroines or the disturbing erotic power of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, the gothic world has always had me in its grip. It’s a genre where comedy and horror, revulsion and desire, sex and death are forever entwined, where every exchange is heavy with the threat of violence, or sex or both.”
Fennell’s other works include the 2020 rape-revenge thriller “Promising Young Woman,” which nabbed five Oscar nominations, and “Killing Eve,” on which she served as Season 2 head writer and executive producer.
Fennell’s representatives did not immediately return Variety‘s request for comment.