Mark Reviews Movies: THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2019

A heap of exploitative garbage, The Haunting of Sharon Tate sees the vicious, gruesome, and real-life murders of five people as fodder for a by-the-numbers horror movie. The movie offers no insight into the lives of the victims or their killers. It tries to garner tension from a series of fake-outs, which tease the possibility of watching a re-creation of the killings with an untoward sense of excitement.

The gimmick of the story is that actress Sharon Tate, who was weeks away from giving birth at the time of her death, foresaw the murders of herself and her good friend a year before she, he, and three other people were murdered by members of the Manson "family." This is a little-known urban legend, propagated by a magazine of—to be polite, let's say—questionable journalistic ethics, so at least the foundation of writer/director Daniel Farrands' movie is as weak as everything else about it.

Farrands' screenplay elevates that rumor to fact, and then it solidifies that purported fact as the only thing worth knowing about Tate. The movie's version of Sharon (Hilary Duff) continues to have such prophetic visions in the summer days of 1969 leading up to the murders. After a prologue showing Sharon relaying her dream, the movie proceeds to a shot featuring the camera hovering around the grounds and through the house in the Hollywood Hills where the five bodies would be found. We see the bodies here—bloody and helpless. Whatever horror and disgust we might be feeling about the reality of that scene, though, is soon transferred to the movie itself.

The story proper begins a few days before the murders, with Sharon arriving home with her friend Jay Sebring (Jonathan Bennett)—the friend from the dream a year prior. Waiting for Sharon are her friend Abigail Folger (Lydia Hearst) and Abigail's boyfriend Wojciech Frykowski (Pawel Szajda), who's a close friend of Sharon's absent husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski (Polanski is repeatedly mentioned but never seen, except in actual footage of his and Tate's wedding, which simply adds to the discomforting level of exploitation going on here). Also on the grounds is Steve Parent (Ryan Cargill), the house's new caretaker, who lives in a trailer on the property.

There is no real plot of which to speak, because the remainder of the story is a creepy kind of game—waiting for the inevitable. During the day, Sharon becomes impatient with her company and occasionally has discussions about fate. At night, she senses the presence of people in and around the house.

Farrands plays those moments exactly as one would expect, with Sharon wandering around the house in the dark, as real or imagined shadows pass. The filmmaker constantly toys with the idea that Charles Manson (Ben Mellish) or other members of his murderous "family" are entering or already inside the house. The orchestrator of these and other killings is presented as an almost supernatural presence, whose music blasts from a reel-to-reel player that turns on by itself. It's probably better not to get started with the implications of this portrayal, but they certainly are in line with the movie's misguided attempt to inflate these senseless crimes to some metaphysical level of import.

We know what will happen, both from actual history and from that earlier establishing shot of the aftermath of the murders. Based on Farrands' reliance on horror-movie clichés, we also sense that the murders themselves will be re-created at some point. They are, with aggressive editing and sickening close-ups of violence, but then, it turns out that the sequence of the murders as they probably happened is simply one of Sharon's dreams. Her friends see her as paranoid, and the movie turns her into a tragic prophet of doom. Either way, she's not an actual person here. Around this point, we also realize that we're going to have to go through the whole process leading up to these murders—or some version of them—yet again.

To be fair, Farrands doesn't show the crime again, but he makes an arguably worse decision during the climax. The Haunting of Sharon Tate finally builds up to an alternative history. In its climactic sequence, the movie presents a fantastical undoing of the crime, which is meant to make us think about parallel universes or some metaphysical junk of the like. Instead, it just comes across as judging the victims' inability to save themselves.

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