Wuthering Heights Director Explains What The Outrageous Opening Scene Is All About

This article contains spoilers for Wuthering Heights.

The Oscar winner packs in outrageous scenes from the get-go, with her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic novel opening with a public hanging, in which a rabble of people grow increasingly frenzied at the scene in front of them.

As the fast-paced sequence unfolds, a delighted youth in the throng of people points out the hanged man’s “stiffie”, while other members of the crowd are seen celebrating, dancing and kissing.

Speaking to USA Today, Emerald explained that she chose this as the opener of her film to “set the tone and say what it is”.

“This is a deeply felt romance,” she continued. “But I also wanted people to understand that it would be surprising and darkly funny and perhaps stranger than they would expect.”

Emerald added that it was crucial for her to “acknowledge early on that arousal and danger are kind of the same thing”.

“That is what the Gothic is,” she insisted. “And it was important that the first thing we see is Cathy, this young girl, seemingly frightened but then actually delighted. It tells us so much about who she is, but so much about Brontë, too.

“We have this idea that the world of period dramas was fragrant and beautiful and pastel and lovely. It wasn’t at all. It was a dangerous place to live in, so it was crucial for me to show that right at the beginning.”

Over the summer, it was revealed that Wuthering Heights had been screened for test audiences for the first time, with much being made of this hanging sequence at the time.

At first, it was reported by World Of Reel that the scene would have seen the man ejaculating “mid-execution”, and “sending the onlooking crowd into a kind of orgiastic frenzy”, with a nun in the crowd even being seen “fondling the corpse’s visible erection”.

It’s not clear whether this scene was eventually toned down in the finished version, or whether the original reporting was mistaken about certain details.

Emerald has previously spoken out in defence of the changes she’s made to the source material for her new Wuthering Heights film – including one scene in particular that’s garnered a lot of controversy since the movie hit cinemas last week.

Of course, before filming was even underway, Emerald faced backlash over her casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, a character who is heavily implied in the book to be a person of colour.

Responding to these “whitewashing” accusations, the filmmaker said: “The thing is, everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so, you can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.

“That’s the great thing about this movie is that it could be made every year and it would still be so moving and so interesting.”

Prior to this, she had claimed she was first inspired to cast Jacob as Heathcliff after noticing while working with him on Saltburn that he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff” on the first copy of Wuthering Heights that she read.

Wuthering Heights is in cinemas now.