Item: The Haunting of Sharon Tate
Rating: 5
Author: Eric Walkuski

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

PLOT: In the days leading up to her murder, actress Sharon Tate has upsetting premonitions of the night she and her friends will fall victim to the Manson Family.

REVIEW: With so many movies out there – and still to come – about Charles Manson, his followers and the horrors they inflicted upon an unsuspecting Hollywood in 1969, it's perfectly natural to wonder if there's anything new to say about the twisted "family" or their victims. When THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE was announced, it seemed to signal that, for better or worse, there was a fresh angle being taken to the tale, one focusing on Manson's most famous victim, actress Sharon Tate. The angle being taken by director Daniel Farrands is that Tate had premonitions of her and her friends' doom and spent her final days on Earth living out a series of standard issue horror movie sequences, populated with looming specters and harrowing nightmares. This is an idea that struck plenty as being rather grotesque; wringing cheap thrills out of what was, after all, an unthinkable crime, the murder of a pregnant woman along with several other innocent bystanders. The reality of the situation was lurid enough, did it need to be given added B-movie cliches?

THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE ends up being a mixed bag on the tasteless front. While not as exploitative as initially feared, it still seeks to mine the real-life tragedy of Tate and her friends' murders for jump-scares and sequences that would feel more at home in any given Old Dark House movie. And while Farrands gives the movie a bit of an INGLORIOUS BASTERDS-like dose of alternate history to make things more palatable at the end, hence making us feel better about watching what unfolds, there's little question SHARON TATE exists to give us the same guilty pleasures as does any other horror flick, tragedy be damned. (Naturally, SHARON TATE would be far from the first movie to seek to make an entertaining product based on historical horrors, but let's not get into that now.)

The film definitely has a bit more of a ruminative approach than one might expect, even opening with that old dependable "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" Edgar Allan Poe quote, the same that opened The Fog almost 40 years ago. That sets the tone for the movie, which presents Tate, played well by Hilary Duff, as regularly wondering if life is a series of coincidences or if there's such a thing as fate; furthermore, are there different versions of the lives we live? (In reality, Tate did evidently have a frightening dream where she saw her own dead body, two years before the Manson Family came for her.) Most of the movie is watchable if a tad ponderous, devoted to Tate chatting idly with friends or wandering around her foreboding home being spooked by various unseen things. In typical horror movie tradition, every single creak in the house earns an investigation by the tentative woman, with several sequences devoted to Tate simply peering into rooms worriedly. Charlie himself even pops over once or twice, just to linger around creepily, while more predictable sights like blood-filled bathtubs or mangled corpses take up the screen, the music going "PANG!" and Tate waking up screaming again and again.

The majority of this is directed competently by Farrands, who knows his way around a horror movie (he's a longtime horror movie documentary filmmaker), but while the events are presented in satisfactory terms, seasoned viewers of this kind of stuff will have seen it all before. The majority of the film could reasonably be about any woman who fears she's going mad within her own house. But as SHARON TATE's horror movie tropes grow more formulaic, and we count down to that fateful night – the main event, as it were – we have to wonder if we're going to get just another vicious dramatization of the massacre, or if Farrands is building to something less expected.

SOME SPOILERS AHEAD! The answer is both! I feel like I can't talk about this movie in full without revealing something about the third act, so avoid this paragraph if you want to know nothing at all. What I'll say is, SHARON TATE takes a surprising turn during its conclusion, envisioning the events as a home invasion thriller in the same vein as, say, THE STRANGERS, or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, with Tate playing the role of take-charge heroine who is able to go toe-to-toe with the creeps. Suddenly, the tables are turned on Tex Watson and crew. This places the audience in a rather awkward predicament; on the one hand, you're given a new version of an infamous occurrence, so it's not just another depiction of the murders (although Farrands does allow himself to give us a look at the "real" thing, during one of Tate's dreams). On the other hand, this playing at fantasy makes the film feel even more disconcerting, taking an agonizing situation and twisting it around so we the audience can cheer on as the heroes fight back valiantly, even though we all know what really happened. Is it all a dream? Does it matter? I'm sure it's intended to be taken as an empowering what-if? scenario, and I wasn't offended as much as I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. It'll be interesting to see if others don't take kindly to SHARON TATE's brand of fan-fiction. END SPOILERS

Duff acquits herself well here, even if it's not exactly always easy to buy her as Sharon Tate. At the very least, in the scenes where she's fretting over her troubling dreams and feelings, Duff assuredly sells the overwhelming fear and paranoia Tate is experiencing. The former Disney star will have more than her share of doubters as she tackles a part that is incredibly hard to play, but for my money she does everything she can with the role, which requires her to really turn it up to 11 at several points. A surprisingly good performance in a movie with surprises that aren't always easy to swallow.