The Best Wuthering Heights Adaptation You've Never Seen Is A Music Video

Challenging Victorian morality with an extreme depiction of love, obsession, and brutality, Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" is one of the most influential novels ever written. But while Emerald Fennell's 2026 "Wuthering Heights" film adaptation is righteously doomed to be polarizing, there's an argument to be made that Brontë wrote a text so thematically rich that adapting it to the big screen is an impossibility. Fennell has stated in multiple interviews that her take on the story was inspired by the way the book made her feel when she read it for the first time at 14, but if I wanted a teen girl's interpretation of the tale, I'd just listen to the ethereally strange Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" (the debut single she released seven years before her "Running Up That Hill," the song made anthemic by "Stranger Things").

"Wuthering Heights" has already been adapted in countless forms, including films, television series, made-for-TV movies, radio plays, stage productions, operas, graphic novels, and musicals. Naturally, these adaptations have varied greatly in quality and accuracy, but dollars to donuts, the adaptation to truly match Brontë's freak is the music video for "It's All Coming Back To Me Now." No, not the Celine Dion rendition — the original directed by the maestro of sex and death, Ken Russell.

"It's All Coming Back To Me Now" was written by Jim Steinman, the legendary songwriter responsible for massive hits like Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All," and Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)." Inspired by "Wuthering Heights," it was part of a concept album for the girl group Pandora's Box and was Steinman's attempt to write "the most passionate, romantic song I could ever write." Boy, did he ever.

As he noted on his personal website before his passing, Jim Steinman wrote "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" while "under the influence" of "Wuthering Heights" and described it as an "erotic motorcycle." He continued, "It's like Heathcliff digging up Cathy's corpse and dancing with it in the cold moonlight. You can't get more extreme, operatic, or passionate than that." Steinman wanted to write about dead things coming to life and the all-encompassing way love can take complete control over your psyche:

"It was about the dark side of love and about the extraordinary ability to be resurrected by it once dead."

"It's about obsession, and that can be scary because you're not in control and you don't know where it's going to stop," Steinman wrote. He continued:

"It says that, at any point in somebody's life, when they loved somebody strongly enough and that person returns, a certain touch, a certain physical gesture can turn them from being defiant and disgusted with this person to being subservient again. And it's not just a pleasurable feeling that comes back, it's the complete terror and loss of control that comes back. And I think that's ultimately a great weapon."

Most "Wuthering Heights" adaptations end with Cathy's death, leaving out the supernatural elements of Heathcliff being haunted by her ghost. The Pandora's Box video, however, depicts a woman following a motorcycle accident, a resurrection unfolding in a world of theatrical grandeur, dressed in assless chaps with metal-studded bras and codpieces. It's "Wuthering Heights" by way of a leather bar on lesbian night, with a better understanding of dominant and submissive dynamics than others who've dared to tackle Emily Brontë's work.

"It's All Coming Back to Me Now" is largely considered to be one of the greatest love songs ever written, but it caused varying degrees of heartbreak for certain people in Jim Steinman's actual life. For one, longtime collaborator Meat Loaf insisted that the song should be a duet, but Steinman was adamant that the song be performed only by women. But once you know that the song was inspired by "Wuthering Heights," the duet version that was included in "Jim Steinman's Bat Out of Hell: The Musical" (and eventually performed by Meat Loaf with Norwegian singer Marion Raven) does sound like the arrangement the song has always demanded — a song about Cathy and Heathcliff.

Steinman assembled Pandora's Box, a pop group that included New York-based musician and session singer Elaine Caswell, "Bat Out of Hell" collaborator Ellen Foley, Gina Taylor, and Deliria Wilde. The group released one concept album in 1989 called "Original Sin," which included "It's All Coming Back to Me Now." While Caswell had no hard feelings toward Steinman for later giving the song to Celine Dion, which was the precursor to her industry-altering success with "My Heart Will Go On" for "Titanic," she once admitted to The CBC that it was very hard to hear Dion's version of the song out in public.

But there is a happy ending to at least this relationship. As Caswell explained, "Jim always liked to tell me that there were all these fights on the internet, fans going back and forth about which version was the best, and he'd like to tell me that I was still winning." Dion's rendition is, of course, iconic ... but Pandora's Box set the standard.