Hilary Duff Starred In One Of Metacritic’s Lowest-Rated Horror Movies

Movies and TV shows about true crime can be hit or miss, to say the least; sometimes, the families of real killers accuse the project of exploitation, and other times, it’s just insensitive (though that first thing can certainly fall into the latter category, and typically does). That’s what makes former Disney teen idol Hilary Duff’s 2019 film “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” so baffling. Not only is it based on the very real murder of Sharon Tate at the hands of Charles Manson and his followers in her Hollywood home in 1969, but it has Duff, as Tate, playing the murdered woman’s ghost as she relives the events of the horrific Manson killings. 

“The Haunting of Sharon Tate” is, to put it lightly, a bizarre movie, and though it’s not Duff’s fault that this misguided project is pretty bad, the evidence of its numerous failures as a movie (and retelling of Tate’s death) is evident in its Metacritic score. The movie only earned a score of 8 (out of 100) on the review aggregation website, though it’s not the horror movie with the lowest ranking — that dubious distinction belongs to the 2005 movie “Chaos,” which has a 1. (Woof.) So what did critics say about “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” when it came out, and what did Duff do after this disastrous movie got terrible, terrible reviews from said critics?

With a Metacritic score of 8, it’s safe to say that “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” got genuinely dismal reviews from critics. At The Playlist, Charles Barfield honed in on the film’s director Daniel Farrands, writing, “Farrands proves he’s no Tobe Hooper, but he might not even be Tom Six. What he ultimately crafts is a terribly foolish movie featuring wooden acting, a disgusting premise, and none of the redeeming qualities that even the most repellant exploitation schlock film might offer. Stay away at all costs.” For The AV Club, Katie Rife was similarly blunt: “The worst part of ‘The Haunting Of Sharon Tate’ is how seriously it takes its ham-fisted themes of fate and the nature of reality; the movie opens with an Edgar Allen Poe quote, for f***’s sake.”

Sheila O’Malley got right to the point in her review for RogerEbert.com, calling the movie “appalling from start to finish,” and Owen Gleiberman at Variety expressed roughly the same sentiment, writing, “The movie’s petty folly — its failure of imagination and morality — is that it actually goes out of its way to turn the Manson murders into schlock horror.” Frank Scheck, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, didn’t mince words, saying, “Starring a miscast Hilary Duff in the title role, ‘The Haunting of Sharon Tate’ deserves the instant obscurity for which it is certainly destined.” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called the movie “a cheap revenge fantasy that suggests its subjects only died because they couldn’t see the writing on the wall,” and William Bibbiani tried to be “optimistic” at TheWrap but still came up short: “‘The Haunting of Sharon Tate’ is an astoundingly tasteless motion picture, perfunctorily produced and insensitively conceived … It’s far too early to call ‘Haunting’ the worst movie of the year. But if it’s not, it’s going to be a rough 2019.”

As of this writing, Hilary Duff’s last big-screen venture was “The Haunting of Sharon Tate” — which I think I’ve conclusively proven just absolutely sucks, at this point — but the good news is that she’s stuck around on the small screen. From 2015 to 2021, Duff starred in the comedy series “Younger” as Kelsey Peters, a young publishing maven living in New York who ultimately finds out that her coworker and best friend Liza Miller (Sutton Foster) isn’t a fellow 20-something, but a 40-year-old mom who had to lie about her age to get a publishing job after leaving the industry years beforehand and going through a divorce. This had some overlap with “The Haunting of Sharon Tate,” so at least Duff had “Younger” — a charming, extremely fun show created by Darren Star, the man who would go on to bring us the horror that is “Emily in Paris” — and “Younger” ended after seven successful seasons. Sadly, Duff’s next project never reached “Younger’s” heights.

From 2022 to 2023, Duff led the spin-off “How I Met Your Father” — obviously a spin-off of “How I Met Your Mother” — as aspiring photographer and hopeless romantic Sophie Tompkins, with the older version of her character portrayed by Kim Cattrall. The series was ultimately canceled after just two seasons, but Duff will probably land on her feet. Let’s just hope she doesn’t pick another project like “The Haunting of Sharon Tate.”