Scary stuff

Sixteen years ago, an up-and-coming young writer and a scrappy little Philadelphia publisher hit the jackpot with a simple recipe:

1. Take eight parts out-of-copyright text of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

2. Add two parts zombies.

3. Combine.

4. Count the money as it rolls in.

I wasn’t a fan of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which felt to me like a one-note joke that outlasted its welcome long before Elizabeth and Darcy got hitched, and I liked the 2016 movie even less.

But perhaps you, unlike me, feel that the connection between Jane Austen and horror has been insufficiently explored. If so, you’ll be delighted to hear that a production company is planning to adapt Austen’s best-loved novel into a film entitled Pride and Prejudice: Serial Killers.

Although the company, ScaryContent, has announced plans for a “Gowns and Gore” series, it’s apparently too early for P&P: SK, the planned second offering in the sequence, to have its own IMDB page.

But we can get a flavor of the undertaking from the IMDB summary of the first movie in the series--Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned. “A visitor seeks shelter at remote Wuthering Heights, where Catherine's vengeful ghost haunts the halls,” IMDB explains. “Her obsessed lover Heathcliff obeys her dark will, turning murderous. Lockwood must flee before the spirit claims him too.”

So, basically, scrupulously faithful to Emily Brontë’s original novel.

You might think that the Austen film will have to take greater liberties, since when you search for “pride and prejudice serial killers,” Google’s AI summary helpfully notes, “There are no serial killers in the original 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice.”

Typical error-ridden AI slop! I call your attention to Chapter 53 of Jane Austen’s novel, wherein Mrs. Phillips tells Mrs. Bennet that she has seen the Netherfield cook, Mrs. Nicholls, shopping for Mr. Bingley’s return: “She has got three couple of ducks just fit to be killed,” Mrs. Phillips reports.

Later in the same chapter, urging Mr. Bingley to come over to Longbourn any time, Mrs. Bennet offers this inducement: "When you have killed all your own birds. . . I beg you will come here, and shoot as many as you please on Mr. Bennet's manor.” 

And all this comes just two chapters after the newly married Lydia brags to her family that Wickham “did everything best in the world; and she was sure he would kill more birds on the first of September than anybody else in the country.”

Mrs. Nicholls, Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Wickham: All brazenly committed to wiping out the avian population of Meryton—and in broad daylight, too! Pride and Prejudice: Serial Killers indeed! It’s astonishing that no one has thought of this before.