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4 hours ago
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It is significant that, at this point in our cultural journey, we have become accustomed to film producers jumping on every single property as it enters public domain, so they can make a cheap and exploitative horror film about it. We have seen Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. We’ve seen Bambi: The Reckoning. We’ve seen the six separate horror movies (including Mouseboat Massacre and Mouse of Horrors) that are based on Steamboat Willie. This is just the world we live in now.
But if you zoom out even a tiny amount, it all starts to look a little silly. Not because it suggests the paying public has a fondness for inarguably bad horror films based on loose interpretations of recognisable figures, but because it’s missing the bigger picture. In other words, while producers are watching eagerly for the next newly out-of-copyright property to exploit (by the way, Babar the Elephant will enter the public domain in January), there is an entire ocean of public domain work just sitting there to be desecrated.
In which case, you really have to applaud whoever came up with the idea of Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned. Available on digital platforms in three short weeks, it is a remake of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, only scarier. In the film, as far as I am able to tell, Cathy has died and her ghost starts haunting Heathcliff to the point that he starts murdering everyone. Is it any good? All signs point to not really, especially since the trailer contains a shot where Cathy seems to become a zombie so that she can punch through a window and strangle someone to death. But will I watch it? Oh God, try to stop me.
You can see what’s happening here, can’t you? Emerald Fennell made a Wuthering Heights film this year and it was wildly successful, currently the 19th biggest film of 2026. But Wuthering Heights was published 179 years ago, so anyone can do whatever they want with it. Fennell’s film proved this all too well, with its rubbing and squishing and skin-coloured rooms. But it also means that someone else can hop on the back of it and turn it into a hammy horror about a zombie in a bridal gown. It’s not like the Brontës are around to sue, is it?
What makes this so ingenious is that Hollywood is built on the back of expired copyright. All of Disney’s early animated films were based on public domain fairytales and Universal built its reputation on adapting lapsed horror novels. And don’t think this isn’t still a thing, because it very much is. In the coming weeks and months, we will see films and television shows based on Sense and Sensibility (215 years old), Pride and Prejudice (213 years old), Treasure Island (143 years old), Mrs Dalloway (101 years old), The Age of Innocence (106 years old) and The Sun Also Rises (100 years old). And there will be more, because there’s nothing the entertainment industry loves than not paying for an option to a published work.
But still, my point is that these are all ripe for the taking. Blood and Honey and its ilk have shown that we are all crying out to see something we recognise get shredded to pieces in a cheap and not particularly convincing manner, so let’s go for it. If someone can make a direct-to-digital horror movie based on Wuthering Heights, what’s stopping us from doing the same to any of these films?
Look, some of them have even been done. Ten years ago, they made a film called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and it was big enough to attract Lily James, Matt Smith and Charles Dance. That said, it was a bit too knowing to properly qualify for the market we’re talking about – the one where you watch it drunk at 2am and feel a bit grubby afterwards – so it’s still up for grabs. Pride and Prejudice: Darcy’s Bloodbath, maybe. It doesn’t even need to adhere to the plot very much. Just buy a load of cheap period costumes, rent a big house for a week and make a poster of a guy walking seductively towards the camera with their shirt soaked through with blood.
Or what about this: The Sun Also Rises: Revenge of the Bull, where a mutant bull escapes from Pamplona and stabs its way across the cafe society of 1920s Paris? Come on, that one’s gold. I really hope you’re paying attention to this, because I’m making one of you a lot of money here.
