Emerald Fennell, director of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, has teased that her next project may be a film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Fennell recently posted an image on social media containing lines from the classic novel, credited to Katie Buckley with the line “A film by Emerald Fennell” at the bottom. While Fennell has not yet confirmed that she will be directing the new film version, it has been reported that she will be re-teaming with MRC, the studio behind Saltburn.
Wuthering Heights has received several adaptations over the years, including William Wyler’s 1939 version with Laurence Olivier and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 incarnation starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson. Fennell’s version would tell the story of two gentry families in the West Yorkshire moors and would showcase Fennell’s love for gothic fiction, a genre that Fennell has expressed admiration for in the past.
In a piece for the LA Times in January, Fennell wrote, “I’ve always been obsessed with the gothic. Whether it was Edward Gorey’s children who are variously choked by peaches, sucked dry by leeches or smothered by rugs,” Fennell said, “the gothic world has always had me in its grip.” Fennell also added that the gothic genre is a world 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.”
Saltburn, starring Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, became one of the most talked-about films of the last year. The film is about a middle-class interloper who poses as a scholarship student from a working-class background in order to strike up a friendship with a wealthy aristocrat from Oxford University. Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor,” which soundtracked the memorable final sequence of Saltburn, reached Number Two on the UK Singles Chart after its inclusion in the film
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