When Warner Bros. released the poster for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the visual language was unmistakable. Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff are locked in a tempestuous, back-arched embrace. Her head is thrown back, and he is gazing down at her upturned mouth. This pose—known colloquially as “the clinch”—is not merely a promotional still, but, also, a genre signal. For decades, this clinch posture visually identified mass-market romance novels known as “bodice rippers” of the 1970s and ’80s: promised readers explicit passion, historical spectacle, and a very specific fantasy of male dominance and female surrender. Cementing this 19th-century gothic novel pivoting into the genre of a commercial “bodice ripper,” the new Wuthering Heights poster is also the cover image for the movie tie-in editions of the novel; Brontë’s text, therefore, is literally wrapped with the visual markers of mass-market erotic romance.
The film’s trailer amplifies this branding, moving beyond the static image to feature anachronistic costuming, febrile scenes of the protagonists licking pink tufted walls, and transforming the mundane task of kneading dough into a sexual metaphor. The trailer declares the film to be “inspired by the greatest love story of all time” and an “epic tale of lust, love, and madness,” before culminating in a dramatic, non-canonical ultimatum: “So kiss me. And let us both be damned.”
Set for release on February 13, 2026, a date precision-engineered for Valentine’s Day viewing, Fennell’s adaptation frames Emily Brontë’s 1847 masterpiece not as the Gothic tragedy it is, but as the ultimate Dark Romance event. Early test screenings describe the film as tonally abrasive and hypersexualized, opening with an execution that devolves into grotesque erotic spectacle and continuing with foreplay with horse reins, and lingering masturbation shots.1 Why?
Rather than dismissing the film purely as an “inaccurate” adaptation, we can read it as a culturally specific interpretation that filters Brontë’s Victorian text through the lens of contemporary digital desire. In the age of viral BookTok smut and “spice,” Wuthering Heights is being reclaimed as the original “morally gray” romance.2 However, this transformation requires significant aesthetic and narrative renegotiations, specifically regarding race, age, and genre, that threaten to obscure the radical and anti-romantic core of the original text. Even the most “pitch black” dark romances fulfill the promise of a happily ever after for their main characters. This narrative certainty creates a safe container for readers to explore dark themes. Brontë was not writing within these constraints or offering readers such catharsis.
It is simply a mistake to mislabel Wuthering Heights as a romance. To do so ignores the visceral horror that greeted the book’s publication in 1847: critics recoiled from its “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors,” warning that it was a book that should never have been written. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—which satisfies the romantic contract with the famous declaration “Reader, I married him” and the eventual softening of its Byronic hero—Emily Brontë’s text functions as a staunch anti-romance, explicitly devoid of a happily-ever-after or a redemption arc. In the original novel, Heathcliff is not a misunderstood lover, but a domestic tyrant: he hangs his pregnant wife’s dog, physically abuses the younger generation, and exhumes Cathy’s rotting corpse in a frenzy of necrophilic obsession. Meanwhile, Catherine’s “love” is depicted not as desire, but as a grotesque madness, a terminal slide into delirium, pillow-biting, and self-starvation.
The novel charts a descent into hell rather than a path to the altar. And this, ultimately, is what makes its repackaging as a Valentine’s Day date movie so perverse, a cynical distortion of a text where the only union is found in the dirt of a shared grave.
The Visual Grammar of the Clinch
Typically featuring a heaving heroine and a muscular, often shirtless hero locked in a passionate embrace, the “clinch” cover was born in 1972 with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower. The artwork was hyperbolic, colorful, and explicitly erotic; like today’s Wuthering Heights film poster, Woodiwiss’s cover signaled to the potential buyer that the book contained a narrative where danger would ultimately be transfigured into devotion. Such “bodice ripper” novels revolutionized the publishing industry by combining historical settings with explicitly described sex scenes, all while offering readers a “safe” space to explore fantasies of forced seduction and overpowering male desire.3
Fennell’s poster is a high-gloss, cinematic evolution of this tradition. It suggests that the primary engine of the film is the sexual chemistry between Cathy and Heathcliff, positioning their relationship as a turbulent but ultimately romantic union. Fennell herself noted that her goal was to recreate the “primal” experience she felt when first reading the novel in her teenage years. It is as if the book is a Rorschach test, but instead of seeing suffering, Fennell sees sex.
This is a significant departure from the visual legacy of the Gothic, which traditionally relied on atmosphere, isolation, and the ominous threat of violence to generate tension. By wrapping Wuthering Heights in the visual language of the romance novel, the film aligns itself with the contemporary Dark Romance genre: stories where the hero’s capacity for violence is often what makes him desirable. His willingness to burn the world down for the heroine is framed as the ultimate act of love. It is precisely this catharsis offered up by Fennell’s marketing. It promises a version of Wuthering Heights where the destructive obsession is the point, and the abuse and psychological torment is aestheticized as intoxicating lust.
From the Attic to the Algorithm: A Genealogy of Dangerous Love
To understand the specific promise Fennell is making to her audience, we must trace the lineage of Dark Romance, all the way from the Victorian era’s moors to today’s TikTok “For You” page. The archetype of the dangerous male romantic hero begins with Charlotte Brontë’s Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847) and continues with Daphne du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1938). These Byronic heroes—brooding, secretive, and potentially violent—established the template for the man whose love is indistinguishable from a threat.
In the mid-20th century, these foundational texts evolved into the Modern Gothic, mass-market paperbacks famously analyzed by feminist critic Joanna Russ in her 1973 essay “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s my Husband: The Modern Gothic.” These novels featured covers with a fleeing woman and a single lit window in a dark house. Crucially, they were defined by sexual repression. As Russ noted, in these stories, sexuality is displaced into fear, and the terror of the husband is the central engine of the plot. Decades later, these chaste conventions of the Modern Gothic were shattered by the bodice ripper historical romances of the 1970s. Now, the danger of the Gothic hero was no longer sublimated. It was explicitly eroticized.
Today, we are living in the era of algorithmic desire and Dark Romance. This genre is the direct, digital descendant of the bodice ripper, turbo charged by BookTok. On social media platforms and online forums, romance novels are categorized by “tropes,” such as “enemies to lovers” and “touch her and die,” and ranked by “spice” level (quantifying the number and explicitness of the book’s erotic scenes). This online ecosystem has codified toxic love into a searchable aesthetic. The most prominent example is H. D. Carlton’s viral Haunting Adeline (2021), where the hero is a stalker who breaks into the heroine’s home yet is framed as the romantic lead. Reviews on the website Romance.io describe the dynamic with a mixture of horror and arousal: “The spice was smutting, but also in a pretty messed up kind of way.”
This transformation of abuse into a thirst trap is precisely the operation Fennell is performing on Wuthering Heights. By utilizing the visual language of the bodice ripper and the morally gray aesthetics of BookTok, Fennell invites the audience to read Heathcliff not as a tragic figure of vengeance, but as a Zade Meadows for the Victorian era, a hero whose violence is just another flavor of spice.
The Problem of Heathcliff: From Racialized Other to MMC
The most revealing and contentious aspect of this romance rebranding is the casting of Heathcliff. In the novel, Heathcliff’s status as an outsider is foundational to the plot, and this status is inextricably linked to his racial ambiguity. Brontë describes him variously as a “dark-skinned gipsy,” a “little Lascar” (a 19th-century term for Indian sailors), and a “castaway” with “black eyes.” He is not merely poor, but racialized: described by other characters as an “it” and a “fiend.” And his abuse at the hands of the Earnshaw family is fueled by this xenophobic rejection.
To understand the significance of Fennell’s casting choice, we can look at the antithetical approach taken by Andrea Arnold in her 2011 adaptation. Arnold cast James Howson, a Black actor, as Heathcliff, a decision that stripped away the romantic veneer to expose the brutalizing influence of racism and classism. In Arnold’s film, Heathcliff is not a swooning lover, he is a man broken by a system that refuses to see his humanity.4 In stark contrast, Fennell has cast Jacob Elordi, a white, conventionally handsome actor known for his roles as a dangerous but irresistible heartthrob including in Fennell’s own Saltburn (2023). To sell Wuthering Heights as a Valentine’s Day blockbuster, Heathcliff must be transformed from a victim of racial trauma into a Male Main Character (MMC), the romance genre archetype of the tall, dark, and handsome protector/destroyer. By casting Elordi, the film erases the specific sociopolitical dimensions of Heathcliff’s rage and replaces them with a musk-scented presentation of palatable, aestheticized angst.
A white Heathcliff—an Elordi Heathcliff—fits seamlessly into the Bad Boy trope. He is dangerous because of his nature, not because of his marginalization. This allows the audience to desire him without the complicating guilt of historical racism. Elordi is the embodiment of this safety: a known quantity, a tall, dark, and handsome sex symbol, and the precise type of fixable man Taylor Swift satirizes in her song “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”: a monster you want to take home.
Playing at Madness
Further divorcing the text from its tragic roots is the significant aging up of the central couple. In Brontë’s novel, the tragedy is inherently juvenile. Cathy dies at roughly 18 or 19 years old, and Heathcliff is of a similar age during the pivotal events of the first half. Their destructiveness is born of childhood trauma, arrested development, and a feral, sibling-like codependency. They are violent children in adult bodies who do not know how to regulate their emotions.
Fennell’s film disrupts this dynamic with casting that firmly places the characters in settled adulthood. Margot Robbie, at 35, and Jacob Elordi, at 28, bring a distinct maturity to the roles. The seven-year age gap between the actors, and the nearly 15-year gap between the actors and the textual characters, fundamentally alters the nature of their relationship. When played by actors approaching middle age, the petulance and violence of Cathy and Heathcliff read less like the desperate flailing of trauma-bonded youths and more like the calculated, high-stakes psychodrama of consenting adults.
No amount of clinch poster imagery can change the fact that Brontë wrote a tragedy about the impossibility of Cathy and Heathcliff’s union, rather than a romance about its narrative fulfillment.
This aging up is a prerequisite for the bodice ripper rebrand. For the sexual tension to be the primary marketing hook, the characters must be transformed from wild children into sexual beings capable of carrying a heavy, erotic gaze. By smoothing out their ages, the film legitimizes the spice, turning a story of developmental arrest into a story of adult erotic obsession. A faithful depiction of malnourished, dirty, traumatized teenagers would make the clinch look not sexy, but predatory or disturbing.
Aestheticizing Toxicity: From It Ends with Us to the Moors
Fennell’s commercial strategy aligns with other recent cultural moments where toxic relationships were repackaged for mass consumption. The controversy surrounding the 2024 film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s 2016 viral BookTok hit novel It Ends with Us highlights the risks of this approach. That story, which centers on domestic violence, was bizarrely marketed by star Blake Lively as a frothy romantic comedy, urging fans to “wear your florals” to the theater.
Fennell appears to be pivoting to the other extreme. Instead of masking the toxicity with florals, she is aestheticizing it with leather, lightning, and reportedly aggressively provocative BDSM scenes. Implicit in this imagery are the modern concepts of “consensual non-consent” (CNC) and “dubious consent” (Dubcon), both staples of the Dark Romance genre. These frameworks reinterpret the novel’s cycle of unmitigated abuse as a kinky power exchange; a reading entirely absent from Brontë’s original text. Promotional posters featuring slogans like “Drive Me Mad” and “Come Undone” further this agenda, explicitly romanticizing a psychological disintegration that, in the book, is depicted as tragic, pathetic, and ultimately deadly.
This approach is reinformed by the film’s sonic landscape, particularly the use of Charli XCX’s haunting original song “Chains of Love.” The song’s refrain—of being bound and wanting it anyway—turns Dark Romance’s compulsive desire into a pop anthem, collapsing harm into pleasure and mirroring the film’s insistence that intimacy and brutality are inseparable. It signals a definitive break from the orchestral swells of BBC period dramas.
Conclusion: Everything Isn’t Romantic
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights appears to be an experiment in genre alchemy. The original text, upon its release, was called out by critics for its unredeemed brutality. And Fennell’s adaptation attempts to transmute that brutality into the viral spice of 2026. By employing the visual language of the bodice ripper and the marketing language of a Valentine’s Day blockbuster, it promises an experience of epic romance. It frames the story as an erotic cinematic event that celebrates the sublime power of love.
But the text itself remains a stubborn and unyielding thing. It is a story where the heroine dies young. The hero becomes a tyrant. The only happy ending belongs to the boring and mild-mannered survivors of the second generation. No amount of clinch poster imagery can change the fact that Brontë wrote a tragedy about the impossibility of Cathy and Heathcliff’s union, rather than a romance about its narrative fulfillment.
That’s why the bodice ripper filter on Wuthering Heights is a fascinating cultural artifact in its own right. It reveals more about our current moment than it does about Brontë’s novel. It shows us how we read the past through the lens of our current desires. We want the aesthetic of the Gothic without the nihilistic horror. Contemporary culture craves the yassification of intergenerational trauma. We want Wuthering Heights to be a love story because we want to believe that love is enough to conquer death.
But Emily Brontë knew better. She wrote a book where love does not conquer death, it merely haunts it. The rebrand sets up a collision between viewer expectations and narrative reality. That collision may prove to be as violent and unresolved as the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff itself. 