Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned (Review)

Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned (Review)

Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned offers a twisted, supernatural horror spin on Emily Brontë’s enduring literary classic. Come in… if you dare!

Following her death, Catherine’s vengeful ghost haunts Wuthering Heights and its unfortunate occupants. To keep her malevolent spirit at bay, Heathcliff must satisfy her bloodlust. But when a dashing new neighbour enters the picture, Catherine’s obsessive lover succumbs to her dark desires, descending into a murderous madness.

Starring Ross Townsend-Green (War of the Worlds), Sky Cheema (The Sikh Soldier), Elle O’Hara (River City, Tommy’s Honour) and Nicola Wright (EastEnders, Sexy Beast), the film is directed by Rebecca J Matthews.

Essentially, Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned is a collection of jump scares loosely strung together around a plot featuring characters borrowed from Brontë’s classic. Unfortunately, it plods along at a snail’s pace, seemingly unsure what to do with its source material or where to take its story.

There is certainly potential here. A vampiric reimagining of Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance could have been a deliciously macabre affair, offering plenty of opportunities to have some twisted fun with the original novel. Instead, we get their lodger, Mr Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green), spending an inordinate amount of time at Wuthering Heights rather than in his own lodgings, poking his nose into everyone’s business while creepy things happen around him, and occasionally to him.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a beloved literary classic has been given a horror makeover. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies took a similarly cheeky approach, demonstrating that the right combination of literary familiarity and genre madness can make for an entertaining proposition. Sadly, as with that film, the concept here sounds considerably better on paper than it translates to the screen.

I’ll confess that the title had me hooked. It’s gloriously lurid, promising gothic horrors and supernatural nastiness aplenty, and I was genuinely keen to see what the filmmakers had in store. Alas, the finished product left me wanting, with a meandering narrative that seems every bit as directionless as its overly inquisitive Mr Lockwood.

Repeated jump scares can only get you so far, and when they’re doing most of the heavy lifting, the result quickly becomes tiresome. There’s a potentially entertaining horror film lurking somewhere within Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned, but it remains frustratingly out of reach. A cracking title, certainly, but a rather less compelling film.

Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned will be yours to own from October 19. Distributed by Signature Entertainment