Hard knocks, hellfire, and a haunted estate with a hideous, cackling secret … what a magical setting for a romance! (And by magic, we mean the dark kind.)

We’re alluding to the chilling Gothic period romance flick based on the Charlotte Bronte classic Jane Eyre. An orphan cast out by her callow aunt and raised in a fire-and-brimstone charity school, Eyre learns early that she’s a wicked, unwanted girl. But things look brighter (well, not brighter, but a little better), when she’s hired as a governess for the wealthy Mr. Rochester and discovers true love — and Rochester’s deadly secret.

Hollywood has a thing for tormented lovers and scandalous secrets, so it’s no shock Jane Eyre has been adapted to film and television many times. In 1943 Robert Stevenson directed Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine as the passionate pair trapped in a sinister landscape of storms, lightning, and fire-starting fiends. In 1996, in a much more romantic, less-eerie Eyre adaptation, current True Blood fang obsession Anna Paquin played a young Jane while Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt personified the lovelorn literary couple. Even Timothy Dalton took a turn at Rochester in a 1983 miniseries version of the novel.

Now Cary Fukunaga, the director that helmed Sin Nombre (a brilliant and brutal chronicle of a girl’s struggle to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border), has decided to take a crack at it. As Jane and Rochester he’s cast Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) and Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds). Period-film pro Dame Judi Dench joins them as Rochester’s housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax. The trailer makes it clear love won’t be the coy, giddy centerpiece of Fukunaga’s film. “Do you know where the wicked go after death?” a tween Jane is asked at its opening. If the first few scenes of her childhood weren’t clear enough, a caption informs us she hearkens “from a loveless past.” Dickensian without the wit, Eyre’s dreary, harsh early years are followed by adulthood in Rochester’s grand, gloomy mansion, whirling in a tempest of fire, feverish downpour-drenched embraces, murderous phantoms, ethereal mists, horses madly galloping through ominous forests, and Jane and Rochester running to and fro in panic and passion. All of this is scored by an orchestra heartbeat that thumps at all the right moments.

Arguably, it could be the darkest Jane Eyre ever — a shuddersome thriller romance. Fukunaga reportedly spent a lot of time rereading Bronte’s book so he could fathom what she “was feeling when she was writing it. That sort of spookiness that plagues the entire story … there’s been something like 24 adaptations, and it’s very rare that you see those sorts of darker sides. They treat it like it’s just a period romance, and I think it’s much more than that.”

A spookier Jane Eyre by the formidable talent behind Sin Nombre? How can that not send shivers of anticipation down our thriller-loving spines?