I thought this was a good observation about the differences between Austen and Brontes:
“Jane Austen is like ‘Gossip Girl,’ and Charlotte and Emily were like Goth twins,” he (the director Cary Fukunaga) said. “It’s a totally different sensibility. The emotional world that Charlotte inhabited is much darker and more dangerous.”
It’s also a world that modern readers may more readily identify with. The story of an orphan who becomes a governess, sticks up for herself and finds true love in a spooky, haunted-seeming mansion, all the while pouring her heart out on the page in prose that is lush, romantic, almost hypnotic, “Jane Eyre,” is both a Gothic horror story and arguably the first and most satisfying chick-lit novel.
Not just darker and more dangerous, but supernatural - Charlotte has an actual incident of clairvoyance at the end of 'Jane Eyre' and while Emily doesn't give an indication as to whether or not Heathcliff is truly being haunted by the ghost of Cathy, certainly Heathcliff thinks so. Nobody is ever going to do a mashup of zombies with either of the two famous Bronte novels - there is already too much eerie going on.
Interesting slide show in the NYTimes: Jane, Rochester and That Zombie.