wonders why Gen Z is seemingly obsessed with Gothic Victorians.
To nobody’s surprise, the release of a 90-second trailer for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights has been enough to lay the golden egg of modern media: discourse. Five months away from its Valentine’s Day release, nearly every frame has already been tugged and stretched to discursive oblivion.
Starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and set to an original soundtrack by Charli XCX, fans have not been short of things to object to: too old, too white, too commercial. What has been most objectionable for many, though, is the inclusion of sex. Corsets, horse whips and some surprisingly seductive kneading of dough, those 90 seconds have been enough to send many in frantic pursuit of pearls to clutch. So one can only imagine what reactions the full feature length, which leaked test-screening reports say opens with an ejaculating man being hanged, will evoke.
“Wuthering Heights has always been a provocative text,” Dr Claire O’Callaghan, author of Emily Brontë Reappraised and a senior lecturer in Victorian literature at Loughborough University, tells me when I ask if Emily Brontë would be turning in her grave at Fennell’s sexed-up version. “While Heathcliff and Catherine’s bond is undoubtedly emotional, it is also expressed in physical ways. For example, Heathcliff enters Catherine’s chamber when she is sick, and Emily writes that he ‘had her grasped in his arms’, and his grasp leaves bruises on Catherine.” Scandalous.
Sex is not explicit, but it isn’t absent in the novel either. Fennell herself, speaking at the Brontë Women’s Writing festival over the weekend, defended her choice to include it, describing the novel as “primal, sexual” and arguing that “there’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in the book”.
Dr O’Callaghan agrees, though in less explicit terms: “Desire and eroticism are present in coded terms and often gestured to as taking place off the page, so to speak – that’s part of the book’s power,” she says. After all, there are several pregnancies in the novel. “Sex is taking place in the world of the text somewhere.”
Prudish naysayers may not be convinced that’s enough to go full 50 Shades, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll be turning out to watch the film come February. Fennell, you see, has captured something at the heart of the Gothic genre: the inability to look away, even when we think we should.
“In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance,” wrote one contemporary reviewer of Emily Brontë’s novel in 1848. “The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising, and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself.” And yet, they added, “it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.”
Conceived partially in response to the cool rationality of the Age of Enlightenment, Gothic fiction came into its own in the 19th century arguably not in spite of, but because of, the Victorians’ famous prudishness. The private realm, so safely guarded in the 19th century, was made partially accessible through the reading of such novels. Exploring nature not in an ‘I-wander-like-a-cloud’ but an ‘aren’t-we-all-so-twisted’ kind of way, Gothic fiction allowed Victorians to look into the darker side of humanity, even if only to be able to object to it – an impulse we can certainly understand today.
Indeed, in 2025, the Victorian Gothic genre seems to be having a resurgence. Nosferatu (a copyright-evading adaptation of Dracula), Netflix’s new adaptation of Frankenstein and now Fennell’s saucy take on Wuthering Heights show that at least in the film world, there is a healthy appetite for the horrors born from the repressed writers of 19th century Britain.
Modern novelists have taken up the mantle, too. As well as the prolificity of dark academia – in many ways indebted to the genre, especially in aesthetics – many writers today are drawn to the Victorian Gothic. Virginia Feito, author of Victorian Psycho, a novel about a 19th-century governess-turned-murderer currently getting its own Hollywood treatment, said she was drawn to the “drama” of the period; a time where “every single decision was life or death” and marriages at 13 and deaths at 30 really raised the stakes.
Dr O’Callaghan says part of the appeal of the Gothic is that it “allows readers and viewers to safely explore the darker side and complexity of the world”. Our modern fascination with true crime and horror (now the fastest-rising film genre, having doubled its market share over the last decade) speaks to the same impulse. According to the surveys, Gen Z hates sex, hates risk and is too busy doomscrolling to have picked up any real vices. Perhaps, just like the Victorians, they protest just a little too much. (Anna Moloney)
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