Aahana Swrup
‘Haunting of the Queen Mary,’ Gary Shore’s horror film, chronicles the ghostly incidents aboard a historic vessel across two separate moments in time. After Lukas Calder showcases a newfound interest in the famed RMS Queen Mary ship, his divorced parents decide to work together on a book about the same, written by Patrick, with Anne lending her marketing expertise. However, the same brings them to the tourist spot of the docked ship, where their lives become interconnected with another family who boarded the cruise in 1938 when a dangerous incident befell the vessel, marking it bloody as a bad omen.
The dual timeline that the narrative equips leads to an invigorating storyline through increased thrill and mystery. Yet simultaneously, it can lead to some confusion, especially near the film’s end when the Calders and the Ratchs’ fates begin to entangle. Thus, the tale’s ending may leave the viewers with some unanswered questions.
Haunting of the Queen Mary Plot Synopsis
In 1938, when Queen Mary was at its peak, it was recognized as the fastest liner ship in the world. Nonetheless, the ship’s captain, Caradine, takes too much pride in the fact and puts the lives of the passengers in jeopardy by maintaining a fast speed despite possible technical complications. Unaware of the events unfolding below deck, the passengers continue to indulge in a revelrous Halloween night.
One family, the Ratchs, made up of David, Gwen, and their daughter, Jackie, manage to impersonate a first-class family and sneak into the cruise’s restaurant. While there, Jackie, who aspires to be a dancer, spots her favorite filmmaker and attempts to introduce herself to him, heeding her father’s advice to always grasp opportunities at any cost. Nevertheless, the interaction doesn’t end well and is followed by the staff discovering David and Gwen’s trickery.
Consequently, the couple is kicked out of the room while Jackie stays behind. As the situation in the ship’s engine room worsens, with steam pipes bursting, something takes over David, who suddenly starts exhibiting homicidal tendencies. After butchering Gwen to death in their room, B-747, David blazes an even bloodier path, dropping gruesome dead bodies in his wake. The night goes down in Queen Mary’s history, with numerous ghost stories spreading about the event, but the truth remains a secret.
Fast forward to the contemporary future, the Calders family decided to bring the RMS Queen Mary back to the cultural forefront and save its dwindling reputation. They came up with the idea to write a book from the perspective of a kid on the ship and explore the technical and historical aspects of the vessel. Simultaneously, they also want to delve into some of the ghost stories that surround the enigmatic ship and generate interest in the public through virtual reality tours.
As such, Anne and her son, Lukas, meet up with her estranged ex-husband, Patrick, aboard, where she meets with the ship’s captain, Bittner. While Anne gives Bittner her pitch, Patrick and Lukas take a trip to the ship’s horror house. However, after hearing eerie noises, Lukas ends up getting separated from his dad as he finds himself in a pool area, where he glimpses a young girl. Soon, the maniacal ghost of David attacks the boy, who finds refuge after Jackie pulls him into the pool, saving him from her father. Afterward, Anne and Patrick find their son soaked but blanketed under the pretense of normalcy.
The following night, Anne finds her son hanging outside his windowsill, proclaiming his hatred for the Queen Mary ship and fear of returning to it. Although Anne tries to pull her son back in, Lukas falls down the house’s second story, slamming the window on his mother’s hand on the way out. The next day, when Anne gets a message from Bittner allowing her free access to the ship for her book, she and Patrick return to the vessel at once. After last night’s events, Anne has come to realize that Jackie’s soul has switched places with Lukas on his previous trip to Queen Mary, leaving her kid lost inside the haunted ship.
Haunting of the Queen Mary Ending: Who is Haunting the Queen Mary Vessel?
The RMS Queen Mary vessel has a rich history behind it. Nevertheless, much of that history stems from brutal stories of mistakes and misfortunes. Around the time of the ship’s inception, when the vessel was still under construction, Wall Street took a sharp decline, leading to a lack of funding for Queen Mary. As such, the half-finished ship sat still for three long years until the British Government finally decided to finance its construction.
However, the ship’s tumultuous start led to a desperate need for its ultimate success. As such, the workers put in everything they had to ensure perfection. In fact, their commitment to the vessel ended up taking them a little too far.
For years, an old builder’s tale has persisted about how if one buries a person within the walls, they can achieve any project’s structural integrity. By putting a living person through immense pain as they lay entombed within the ship walls, the workers believe they will grant their ship infinite life. The engineering tradition further states that by combining a person’s pain with the ship in such a manner, the two become inseparable.
Therefore, during the construction of Queen Mary, the workers decided to partake in this tradition, choosing Edward “Clarky” Clark as their victim. The man was a former inmate surrounded by rumors of a murderous crime. Thus, perhaps the workers latched onto this detail to ease their conscience as they gave their comrade a miserable end by burying him in the ship’s walls alive.
The tradition turns out to work in Queen Mary’s favor as the ship manages to make it through several impossible situations like the World War. Yet, after the mishap in the ship’s engine room in 1938, something snapped within Clark’s connection to the ship, allowing his ghost to escape and latch onto the nearest person it could find: David Ratch.
As a result, Clark, controlling David’s body and mind, goes on a bloody rampage, butchering people left and right, including David’s wife, Gwen, and their kid, Jackie. Still, the ship’s captain, Caradine, was aware of the bleak past behind his vessel and immediately started hunting the possessed individual. If Clark’s ghost manages to escape from Queen Mary’s vicinity, the ship will lose its protection and promptly hurl toward destruction, taking its passengers down with it.
In the end, Clark tries to escape through one of the lifeboats, but Caradine catches up to him in the nick of time and shoots him dead. Afterward, the Captain kills himself as well, devastated by his actions. Nevertheless, by then, the damage had been done, littering the ship with the ghosts of Clark’s victims, including Jackie, who goes on to ruin the Calders’ lives.
Does Anne Rescue Lukas?
The film’s second timeline, involving Anne, Patrick, and Lukas, mainly focuses on the parents’ attempts to save their son from within the ship’s confines. After the incident at Anne’s house, she learned that the person in her house, inside her son’s body, was actually Jackie. While Lukas had been trapped inside the swimming pool, Jackie had taken hold of his human flesh, rendering the boy’s soul to wander around the ship alongside the other dead people.
Once Anne learns the same and receives the opportunity to return to the ship, she has to take it. However, Bittner only invited the family on the cruise, allowing them free access, under the assumption that they would bring their boy along. Bittner, also privy to the ship’s secrets, wants to retrieve Jackie’s soul to ensure she doesn’t spill the ship’s secrets to the outside world. Yet, since Anne and Patrick don’t bring Lukas with them, the same isn’t likely to happen.
Therefore, Bittner tries to get rid of the Calders, affording them one last night aboard the ship. Despite only spending hours on Queen Mary, the couple run into plenty of supernatural interferences in their search for their son’s soul. From creepy hands emerging from cellphones to a lady in white singing her woes to the piano, Anne and Patrick live through it all until they finally discover the sealed first-class swimming pool where Lukas got abducted.
Ultimately, Anne and Patrick get separated, haunted by the numerous souls that reside within the ship, clawing for a way out. Under such overwhelming circumstances, both individuals give in to the horrors and surrender their bodies to the ghosts of David and Gwen. The next morning, the duo leaves the Queen Mary with Anne and Patrick’s bodies in their possession.
Finally, David and Gwen wronged all those years ago in 1938, can return to their daughter, who is currently living inside Lukas’ body. Within the span of two days and one night, the Ratchs manage to flip their lucks around and swap lives with The Calders, now stuck inside the haunted vessel.
Do David And Gwen Reunite With Jackie?
The emotional conclusion to the Ratchs’ stories can only come from their family reunion. David and Gwen dearly care for their kid and want to see her happy and satisfied. In their life in their 30s, the parents do their best to give Jackie a rich and comfortable life, even putting their own dignity on the line for it.
In fact, David, who had always taught his daughter to grasp opportunities but never beg for them, takes a pleading tone when addressing the man who has the power to make or break Jackie’s dreams. Likewise, until her dying breath, Gwen tries to shield her daughter and keep her protected. As such, when Jackie meets a bloodied end at her father’s hands, it seems a cruel fate for the family.
Nonetheless, the Ratchs get a second chance at happy endings once they claw their way out of the cold afterlife and into the world of the living. Yet, one pesky pebble lies in their path. The night before David and Gwen possessed Patrick and Anne, the former woman had learned about Lukas’ fate at Jackie’s hands. While Anne reports her son’s fall to the police as an accident outside of her control, her neighbors pitch a different story.
According to Anne’s neighbor, they saw the woman dangling her kid outside the first-floor window and releasing him into his fall. In reality, after Anne learns that Jackie has condemned her beloved Lukas to a life of damnation, she is unable to control her anger and grief, and she decides to end the girl’s life. For the same reason, the couple hadn’t brought Jackie/Lukas with them on their second trip to Queen Mary.
In the end, as soon as David and Gwen exit the ship, with plans to uncover Bittner for his vessel’s dark secrets, the police arrive on the scene and take the couple into custody for their own kid’s deaths. Ultimately, the Ratchs’ fate remains doomed, and Queen Mary continues flourishing.
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