Writer-director Daniel Farrands’ The Haunting of Sharon Tate is destined to become a VOD-dare for the kind of movie-watcher who likes to smell a carton of spoiled milk out of curiosity. As far as technical competence goes, it doesn’t smell that bad. But in nearly every other respect, it’s a carton of milk that should never have been made.
The movie is loosely based on the last days of actress Sharon Tate, who in 1969 was brutally murdered, while she was eight months pregnant, in a mass-killing ordered by Charles Manson. It’s a case that still shocks and fascinates true crime fiends 50 years later. Yet what writer-director Daniel Farrands does with it is something else.
The premise is not unlike the revisionist history of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which invented a rogue WWII outfit that killed Nazis. The Haunting stems from the legend that Tate had a horrifying vision of her death soon before the murders took place. The movie starts with eight-month pregnant Tate (child star Hilary Duff) having gruesome dreams – which gives filmmakers a chance to recreate the murder scene and show clips of it again and again. That alone makes the movie no more than cheap exploitation.
Farrands’ script is the kind of exposition-heavy writing that makes sure to explain why Polanski, then married to Tate, isn’t in the movie (he was in Europe working on a movie project he later walked away from) and who certain characters are (like the coffee heiress Abigail Folger, played by Lydia Hearst, whose mother Patty was a notorious figure in her own right). Certain details of Tate’s life with her Polanski are accurate; they really did have a dog named Dr. Sapirstein, named after the character played by Ralph Bellamy in Rosemary’s Baby. Manson really did target their house because it was previously occupied by Terry Melcher, a music producer who rejected Manson’s demo tapes.
But Farrands wildly fictionalizes the truth, plotting that Dr. Sapirstien was killed by The Family, while the dog was actually run over by a friend. He also offers that Manson kept leaving tapes for Melcher, and that Polanski left a tape loaded on a reel-to-reel player, which leads to a recurring and ineffective scare tactic that sets the tapes playing of their own accord. These aren’t just any demonic self-playing tapes; they’re layered with backmasking techniques (the kind used to deliver sinister subliminal messages) that didn’t actually exist on Manson’s demos.
As ludicrous as so much of The Haunting is, there’s a level of B-movie competence in camerawork and sound design that, on top of the premise’s basic cringe-worthiness, generates a reliably creepy mood – albeit one that’s highly cliched. When Tate has visions of Manson himself, Fantom’s score ramps up to a high-volume dissonance that seems like the kind of soundtrack a media-savvy five-year-old armed with an electric guitar would come up with if asked to convey The Boogeyman.
Worst of all, Ferrands uses this morbid, opportunistic product to rewrite history, and give Duff some of the hokiest dialogue ever spoken by a tragic murder victim, with lines like, “Do you think we’re slaves to our own destiny?” The Haunting of Sharon Tate unshackles Tate and the other Manson victims from their destiny in a final act that lets the victims fight back and dispatch their killers one by one. In the manner of an invincible horror movie villain, Ferrands isn’t done, even when the movie is over. His next project in the works? The Haunting of Nicole Brown Simpson.
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