“A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages,” says the manipulative Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, with the aim of impressing Mr. Darcy. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, however, the line is given to Mr. Darcy, but that’s not all that changes: “A woman must have a thorough knowledge of singing, dancing, and the art of war,” he says in the just-released full trailer, as it cuts to an image of a women sheathing swords and tucking them in to their garters.
And so the new trailer turns the campy mark left by the recently shared UK teaser into a deep, vast puddle of blood, shed alongside all those suffocating social mores. From the looks of it, this is exactly what AHS tries to achieve (and often doesn’t succeed): camp and grotesquerie structured by a plot of deeply developed characters (here, they’ve had 202 years to continue developing however society wants to see them). Because Austin’s novel remained greatly intact (for Smith’s book came about because he could just plug zombies into the public domain text), it comes with the sturdiness of the classic as its support. Watch the new trailer for the film, which stars Lily James as Elizabeth Bennet and Sam Riley as Mr. Darcy: