2025. – 

I have just returned from watching the trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights – starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, with music by Charli xcx. This is certainly a controversial adaptation! In all Hollywood, I do not believe we could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from what faithful Emily Brontë fans actually wanted to see.

In case you’ve missed it, the reaction ot the trailer has been... mixed, to say the least. “emily bronte is rising from her grave as we speak because why did they turn wuthering heights into fifty shades of heathcliff and cathy,” reads one X post, referencing the hyper-sexualised, ragebaiting tone carried over from Fennell’s Saltburn (2023). Another post reads: “wuthering heights starring margot robbie and jacob elordi featuring charli xcx on the soundtrack is kinda the matcha dubai chocolate labubu of film.” Which, presumably, isn’t a compliment.

Admittedly, there are many reasons to joke about the trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (even if it is just a trailer). You can find many of them in Dazed’s round-up of the withering memes it’s spawned in the last couple of days alone. But is it really fair to call out its lack of fidelity to the original, 1847 novel? Do films really have to stick close to their source material, in order to be considered a success?

The answer is: no, not really. There have been many great films – dare we say masterpieces – that demonstrate a total lack of respect for the books, other films, and true stories they’re based on. To prove it, we’ve listed some fo the best below.

THE SHINING, STANLEY KUBRICK

A classic. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 retelling of the Stephen King horror novel of the same name is the only adaptation of the author’s books that he can “remember hating”. Why? “Too cold. No sense of emotional investment in the family whatsoever on [Kubrick’s] part,” King told the Paris Review in 2006. “I felt that the treatment of Shelley Duvall as Wendy – I mean, talk about insulting to women. She’s basically a scream machine... And Kubrick didn’t seem to have any idea that Jack Nicholson was playing the same motorcycle psycho that he played in all those biker films he did... The guy is crazy. So where is the tragedy if the guy shows up for his job interview and he’s already bonkers?”

“No, I hated what Kubrick did with that,” he concludes. And yet... The Shining is (rightfully) one of Kubrick’s best-loved films, and therefore one of the best-loved films of all time. It’s spawned several iconic images – Danny riding his tricycle down the hallway, encountering the twins, blood gushing from the elevators, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” – and continues to provoke deep readings of its historical and psychological background. The book is, also, much-loved by King fans, but has nowhere near the same acclaim or cultural impact... besides serving as inspiration for the film.

NOSFERATU, ROBERT EGGERS

The film adaptations of Dracula are a bit like a game of Chinese whispers. FW Murnau’s 1922 version was an unlicensed version (hence the name change to Nosferatu, and Count Dracula’s rechristening as Count Orlok). Werner Herzog’s 1979 version took plenty of inspiration from both Murnau’s and the source text, but introduced a new sense of sympathy for the titular vampire. But in 2024, we got further away from the novel than ever before, thanks to Robert Eggers’ “beautiful and repulsive” take, which puts the book’s erotic undertones – and necrophilia – front and centre.

Whether Eggers’ film is the best of the bunch is still up for debate, but it seems pretty clear that his version could only have been made here and now, in today’s cultural landscape. And that seems valuable, somehow. Maybe there’s a lesson in there for the Wuthering Heights haters...

MARIE ANTOINETTE, SOFIA COPPOLA

The V&A museum described Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film as “pretty historically accurate” barring a few details, like the height of the wigs (higher in real life) and the use of electric chandeliers for safety reasons (paging the Barry Lyndon set designers). However, the last queen of France was not actually listening to Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and The Cure, or using 21st-century slang... obviously. “I wanted the film to be credible but I was inspired more by the visual than historical facts,” Coppola explained at the time. “I want people to be transported into another era with an echo of today.”

SUSPIRIA, LUCA GUADAGNINO

Dario Argento’s Suspiria is partially based on a Thomas De Quincey essay from 1845, but that only sets up the mythology for the filmmaker’s witchy dance academy (so it can’t be called a real deviation from the source text). However, Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 “remake” did gets lots of flak for how far it strays from Argento’s story and iconic visual language. “Polarising is too tame a word to describe reactions to Luca Guadagnino’s radical rethinking,” wrote film critic Peter Travers at the time, in a review for Rolling Stone. “For starters, Dario Argento’s 1977 landmark of horror didn’t need a remake.”

If we are going to live in a world of endless remakes, reboots, and nostalgia bait, though, don’t we want them to at least be fresh, adventurous, and even tonally jarring? Argento may be a master of horror, but there’s only so much neon and prog rock an audience can take.

LITTLE WOMEN, GRETA GERWIG

Like Marie Antoinette, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women doesn’t try too hard to reinvent history, but it does make one big change. (Spoiler alert: for both the 2019 film and the 1869 book. But if you’ve not read that yet, that’s on you.) Much like Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from the same year, the period drama performs an optimistic rewrite of the original ending, allowing Jo (played by Saoirse Ronan) to realise her dreams of becoming a published, and well-paid, author.

Instead of simply updating the screenplay for the 21st century, Gerwig builds this into a meta-narrative that also draws from Little Women author Louisa May Alcott’s IRL success. “What I love about Greta’s film is that we’ve sort of merged these two worlds together,” Ronan told Dazed in 2019. “There is Little Women, which is Louisa’s creation, and then there’s Louisa’s real life.”