This horror feature takes place largely on the RMS Queen Mary, the grand ocean liner built in Glasgow’s Clydeside docks in the 1930s which for many years now has been permanently moored in the harbour at Long Beach, California. In order to take advantage of both the ship’s vintage decor as well as its touristy gift shops and scale model displays, the screenwriters have crafted a plot that unfolds across two timelines. One is set in 1938 when a grisly, entirely fictitious murder takes place, while the other happens in the present day as a family interested in history and the supernatural gets caught up in the ship’s haunted legacy. The crisscrossing between the two periods is executed gracefully thanks to some nimble rhymed editing, and there’s some real dramatic heft at play here – but the bloated running time drags it down, and lots of spooky business in the back half might have been better jettisoned overboard to gain speed.
In the 1938 section, a family of grifters – war veteran David Ratch (Wil Coban), his fortune-teller wife Gwen (Nell Hudson) and their young daughter Jackie (Florrie Wilkinson) – try to pass themselves off as toffs to access the first-class dining room. When their ruse is discovered, wee Jackie manages to persuade a table of Hollywood folks to let her audition, a plea that appeals to Fred Astaire (Wesley Alfvin) who lets her perform with him. The whole dance sequence, with period-appropriate choreography and taps dubbed in post and all, goes on for ages, making this a film with the highest gore-to-dancing ratio since cult Japanese director Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris. While the band are swinging, dad David is possessed by an evil spirit and soon there is a great deal of axe murdering, shown in gory detail with the colour processed to make the blood look extra dark, toned to the deep browns of the wood panelling.
In the contemporary section, writer Anne (Alice Eve), her eight-year-old son Lukas (Lenny Rush) and Anne’s on-off boyfriend Patrick (Joel Fry) come aboard the Queen Mary so that Anne can pitch to boss Bittner (Dorian Lough) a new way to make the ship accessible to the public using computers or something along those lines. We never get to hear the details because before long the supernatural stuff starts acting up, but this is a mildly amusing in-joke as this whole film is effectively an exercise in rebranding for the Queen Mary, turning it into a horror-themed adventure experience in order to drum up visitors. Perhaps there should be a sequel that goes up a meta-level and shows us the marketing meeting in which they thrash out whether they should continue pushing the ship’s heritage appeal or go downmarket and turn it into a floating haunted-house ride. Clearly, the forces of darkness won, as signalled by the film’s nefarious refusal to put a “the” at the beginning of its title as common diction would dictate.
• Haunting of the Queen Mary is released on 9 October on digital platforms.
