You may have read of the controversy lately surrounding Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and its provocative depiction of serial killer Ted Bundy, but as we move further into 2019, you can expect the discourse to shift its focus to Sharon Tate. With the fiftieth anniversary of Tate’s murder at the hands of the Manson Family landing this August, several new projects portraying the actress are on the way, perhaps the most contentious of them all being The Haunting of Sharon Tate, which has just seen its second trailer drop online.
Like Extremely Wicked, Daniel Farrands’ upcoming film features a former Disney Channel star in the lead role (in this case, Hilary Duff) for a story that’s said to offer a “reimagining” of Tate’s final days. The movie reportedly takes inspiration from an interview published a year before her death in which she recalled having dreams of ghosts haunting her house, and if the new footage is anything to go by, then the film is set to build on these dubious origins with various jump-scares and scenes of a spooky tape. In other words, it looks like a fairly conventional 2010s horror movie, which make its roots in real life tragedy feel pretty damn iffy.
Needless to say, the work has already received some backlash, with Sharon’s own sister Debra Tate condemning the project as “tasteless,” despite giving her blessings to at least two other 2019 releases that portray her late sister – namely, the Kate Bosworth-led Tate, and the one you’ve probably heard the most about, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Regardless, we’ll see if The Haunting of Sharon Tate can find its defenders when the film hits theaters later this year on April 5th.
Published: Feb 5, 2019 01:54 pm