A red-latex Margot Robbie and a pint of “Emily ale” stir up fresh Wuthering Heights fever in the Yorkshire moors of 2025.

10 December 2025

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in the forthcoming adaptation. Photograph: Warner Bros

On a crisp afternoon in Haworth, West Yorkshire the village pub serves a pint called “Emily” to locals and visitors alike as excitement swirls around the upcoming film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic classic. The beer list reads like a literary family tree: a porter for Branwell, an IPA for Charlotte and the amber “Emily” ale for the novel’s singular author. Today that ale finds itself much in demand. Outside the pub the village appears unchanged, but inside hearts beat faster. The reason is the new cinematic take on Wuthering Heights headed to screens in February 2026, a version that already feels like a cultural earthquake.

The film, directed by Emerald Fennell and starring Margot Robbie alongside Jacob Elordi, has stirred controversy with a bold reinterpretation, a trailer filled with risqué imagery, tight bodices, and visceral intimacy. Robbie appears in red latex in promotional images, a jarring contrast to the mist-shrouded moors people imagine when they think of Brontë. The novel’s original darkness has always been legendary, tales of obsessive love, betrayal, revenge, and spectral incorporeality but this cinematic preview leans into sensuality and visual shock as never before.

For some villagers and longtime admirers of Emily’s legacy the transformation is disorienting. Haworth remains dotted with houses, the old parsonage where the Brontë sisters once lived and worked sits quietly beside an old graveyard. The narrow rooms where Emily penned the words that would haunt generations lie beneath the same worn timber beams. The worn sofa where Emily likely died at age 30 and the table with an engraved “E” where she wrote now draw pilgrims who come hoping to feel something of her spirit. Many leave shaken. For people who walked those old moors and read Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s doomed romance as a doomed love affair between souls haunted by nature and fate, the idea of a red latex-clad Catherine feels like a betrayal.

But others in Haworth have embraced the new energy. The tour-book shop owner reads lines from Emily’s poetry to patrons as they browse modern reprints and souvenir notebooks. Among the tourists from the United States, Australia, Japan and Europe filling the visitor logs are some who say they were drawn by the film’s audacity. The old gravestones and the moorlands that stretch out behind the village are suddenly being seen again not only as relics of a 19th century tragedy but as fertile ground for reinterpretation. Literature and pop culture, they suggest, must evolve.

This renewed interest extends beyond film buffs. There are flash-mob celebrations of the song Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. Once a strange, shrill folk-pop ballad in 1978, Bush’s song has long remained a cult anthem for lovers of Brontë’s moody moors. Now such events torchlight dances, red dresses, moor-wandering poetry slams are drawing older fans and a new generation alike. They mix Victorian heritage with contemporary theatre, local artisans selling handmade moorland maps and modern glassware etched with lines from Catherine and Heathcliff’s final promise: “Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same.”

At the same time the town just keeps breathing. At night the wind still whistles across tombstones and moorland trails remain empty and intact, waiting for the few who arrive to tread softly. For many visitors there is a subtle, chilling message in the narrow doorways, the stone-flagged floors, and the small windows of the old parsonage. The rooms are compact, the garden opens toward the graveyard and the moorland beyond. The world there remembers that Emily Brontë lived in a house of mortality and solitude. That tension between beauty, pain, love and death is as central to her work now as it always was.

The coming film may be sensational, erotic and divisive, but it carries echoes, loud echoes of the novel’s emotional thunder. Readers and critics who believe the book’s legacy lies in its savage portrayal of love and loss fear the changes. Others argue that every generation demands its own Brontëmania. For them it is not about purity but about resonance making a voice from 1847 scream across 2025’s digital screens with fresh urgency.