When I was a kid, I caught an episode of Unsolved Mysteries that delved into the mysterious happenings aboard the RMS Queen Mary, a luxury ocean liner that spent several decades (the mid-’30s through the late ’60s, to be precise) traversing the Atlantic Ocean. According to Robert Stack and company, the ship was positively teeming with ghosts, some of which could still be encountered if one were to travel to Long Beach, CA, step aboard, and go poking around in its cold, steel belly.
Well, a year or two later, my family took a trip to Los Angeles, where my parents excitedly announced that we were going to see the same “haunted ship” that I’d seen on Unsolved Mysteries. The tour we took aboard the Queen Mary was, in retrospect, clearly manufactured in a few ways (ghostly “faces” randomly appearing in mirrors, spooky noises coming from behind closed cabin doors, shit like that), but the ship itself was also quietly terrifying. Bad vibes, top to bottom. The Queen Mary felt like a haunted place, and I wanted outta there as quickly as possible.
All of which is to say: thanks to that little family vacation, I find myself unreasonably excited about Haunting of the Queen Mary, a horror film from Dracula Untold director Gary Shore and (among others) the producers of The Woman in Black. The film’s just-released trailer reveals that they actually filmed this bad boy aboard the Queen Mary, and from where I’m standing this footage definitely captures the undeniable chilliness of the place.
Take a look:
Starring Alice Eve, Joel Fry, Nell Hudson, William Shockley and BAFTA award-winner Lenny Rush, Haunting of the Queen Mary is, according to its press release, “a psychological horror which explores the mysterious and violent events surrounding one family’s voyage on Halloween night (1938) and their interwoven destiny with another family onboard the infamous ocean liner present day.”
In addition to capturing the inherent freakiness of its setting, Haunting of the Queen Mary also seems heavily inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Using the Queen Mary as a sort of floating Overlook Hotel for the setting of your horror movie strikes me as a very good idea, indeed, and I’m curious to see just how many similarities these two films share.
When can we do that? Very soon! Vertical Entertainment drops Haunting of the Queen Mary into theaters and On Demand on August 18th. That’s right around the corner! I was, admittedly, unaware that this movie was coming until catching the trailer above earlier this morning, but I’m excited to check it out when it pulls into port. See ya down at the dock?
