From Quentin Tarantino to Hilary Duff: why Hollywood's 'Tatesploitation' rush is wrong
Sharon Tate suffered a terrible fate, but it keeps getting worse. Hers is the most horrific death imaginable, repeatedly stabbed by Charles Manson’s followers in her Los Angeles home, aged 26, and eight-and-a-half months pregnant with Roman Polanski’s baby. Now, as we approach the 50th anniversary of her death this August, it is being restaged again and again.
The highest-profile example is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, due for release this summer, with Margot Robbie as Tate, and the Manson murders the focal point for a sprawling Tinseltown survey. Tarantino’s Manson, Damon Herriman, also plays the role in the next season of Netflix’s Mindhunter.
More awful-looking is The Haunting of Sharon Tate, which leans heavily into Tate’s rumoured (and discredited) “premonitions” of her murder, all the better to restage it as a supernatural home-invasion horror. Ex-Disney queen Hilary Duff plays Tate, and when it comes to period authenticity, judging by the trailer, no expense was, er, spent. “It’s just tasteless,” said Tate’s younger sister Debra of Duff’s movie.
Tate’s death has frozen her into history as a mere symbol representing the comedown of flower-power; the jolting realisation that hippies could kill and beautiful people could die. Tate had broken through in 1967 comedy Don’t Make Waves, playing a beach babe named Malibu. She showed comedy potential in sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies and Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, but her most substantial role was in Valley of the Dolls, playing a starlet chewed up by Hollywood. There is a possible glimpse of the real Tate in one scene where she is on the phone. “Mother, I know I don’t have any talent and I know all I have is a body and I am doing my bust exercises,” she says. After the call, she resumes her exercises for a few seconds, then flops into bed saying: “Aw, to hell with them, let ’em droop.”
Since her murder, attempts at her life story have veered towards Tatesploitation. The home-invasion angle was already covered in 2016 horror Wolves at the Door, “inspired by the infamous Manson family murder spree”. Tate’s killing was also restaged, with gruesome fidelity, in American Horror Story’s 2017 “Cult” season. And again in David Duchovny’s 60s-set cop series Aquarius, which was cancelled in 2016, partly thanks to Debra Tate’s calls for a boycott. Debra has been the custodian of Sharon’s legacy and licensing rights. She persuaded Tarantino to change the release date of his movie, originally planned to coincide with the killings. But there is yet another Tate project in the works, with Kate Bosworth as Sharon. Its co-producer? Debra Tate. At least this one aims to portray Sharon’s life, rather than her death, which would be a first.
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