IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 18th August
Seen: 3rd November
Some horror films are incredibly simple, a basic plot and setting that means you just get to sit back and enjoy the terror as it unfolds. Think of things like the first Halloween movie, a film that’s scary almost entirely because of its intense commitment to pure simplicity. You instantly know the characters, the setting and the stakes in a way that allows the scares to actually work considerably well. Some horror films require a little bit of thought to follow, maybe they’re playing with some darker heavier ideas than normal that need to be thought about in order for everything to make sense, like how Get Out works so much better when you understand the racial politics behind it all. Then there’s films so complicated they feel like they require an instruction guide just to understand what the hell is going on, or as I like to call those films “Pretentious as fuck”, which is pretty much the central feeling you get with something like Haunting of the Queen Mary.
Haunting of the Queen Mary takes place over 2 timelines, the first is in the 1930s during a voyage where things go horrifically wrong that lead to several people on the ship being brutally murdered. The second timeline is the current day where a family is looking into what happened on the ship back in the 1930s while being haunted by the ghosts from the 1930s plotline and being put in severe mortal danger themselves. The film leaps back and forth between these timelines seemingly at random for no particular reason, culminating in a moment of… uh… something, it’s a very strange dreamlike ending that probably makes sense to the person who wrote it but god forbid you try to understand it on a single watch.
In terms of general scary imagery, Haunting of the Queen Mary definitely delivers on pushing out enough creepy and strange imagery to get a few good jolts out of the audience. The effects work that make up all the assorted ghosts and gross corpses that litter the film are absolutely terrifying to look at and when this film wants to engage in a moment of shocking violence in order to scare the viewer (like a scene where someone bloodies themself up by smashing their head into a piano), it manages to look pretty upsetting which does the job that the audience requires. It’s not afraid to be as bloody and twisted as it can be which makes for some great moments of shock every now and then. What it doesn’t do is effectively scare, it just shocks.
Shock is a very different feeling from being scared, shock implies surprise and a sudden jolt while scares require actual tension and that’s one thing that Haunting of the Queen Mary just doesn’t have at all. There is no real sense of underlying dread because in order to have that sense, you have to be able to tell what the fuck is going on, and guess what? That’s not really possible. Part of this is just down to how the time jump is handled, namely there is no real substantial visual difference between things that happened in the 1930s and things that happen in the 2020s, there’s no filter to make one of them look older, the ship doesn’t look more decayed in one of them, the people dress in a similar enough manner that it’s hard to tell them apart, it becomes an actual chore to figure out just when each scene is happening.
Once you do work out just when each scene is happening, you then have the extra chore of working out what the hell is going on in the two different storylines. It’s just a set of violent events that happen on the ship in two time periods with two families. There’s no real connection between the two time periods, you could’ve (and probably should’ve) removed one of them and lost nothing of actual substance to Haunting of the Queen Mary. One family is just looking about the boat with their kid who keeps wandering off in a way that’ll be part of a big reveal at the end, the other family try to get their daughter noticed by a talent scout on the ship who happens to be there with Fred Astaire (yes, Haunting of the Queen Mary features a Fred Astaire character and yes he dances… no, he’s not as good as the actual Fred Astaire) and that’s kind of it. Some weird shit happens in some of the rooms, some dramatic moments that manage to pull on what I assume was a heartstring but beyond that, who the hell knows what happened here!?
It feels like the confusion is an intentional element, like you’re meant to walk out of this curious about the mystery of the Queen Mary so when they inevitably try to come back for more then they can say they were answering the questions they secretly set up but they didn’t set up any questions, they just did weird shit without purpose or a reasonable structure that was in any way possible to follow. It feels like Haunting of the Queen Mary had a bag of ‘shit that happens in horror movies’ tiles and pulled them out one by one without bothering to make any connective tissue, everything just kind of happens and the audience is expected to deal with it. It’s a film that feels like it needs to come with pop-up information bubbles to explain why shit is happening, which is not a good film to make!
To be kind to Haunting of the Queen Mary, it does look genuinely fantastic. They clearly put a lot of work into making sure that every single shot looked as glorious as possible, they stylised the hell out of certain moments and there are more than a few times where you can tell the cinematographer was having a blast figuring out how to present some of the scarier imagery. It’s a really nice looking film even if it all looks like it takes place in the same time period (again, it does not) and if all you want is a film that technically looks good and provides form moments of visual horror then sure, I guess this might do the job in a pinch but just be prepared to not give a crap about it by the halfway point.
Haunting of the Queen Mary is a film that it would be so much fun to like if you could just understand what the fuck they were trying to do. It’s a film that seems so sure it’s doing something cool and different but really, it’s just being a pretentious bore that can’t tell a proper story. Sure, you can do some cool nightmarish imagery which is certainly a helpful element to have when making a horror film but if you’re going to do that, you might want to be able to tell a good goddamn story or you’re wasting everyone’s time.
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