I have long said that the best horror films are more about legitimate, actual fears than whatever weird and monstrous stuff is happening onscreen. Zombies? Fear of mindless groupthink and pandemics. Vampires? Sexual deviancy. Werewolves? Loss of control. I would even argue that starting with 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby and including The Omen and the film often called the scariest of all time, The Exorcist, there was a nice set of films that were on the surface about the end times and demonic possession but more accurately reflect the fears that parents have about their children: what if they aren’t good or healthy or something along those lines? What makes Rosemary’s Baby different from the other two is that this film reflects more the concerns of a woman pregnant with her first child whereas the others deal with the actual children. We don’t really even see Rosemary’s baby.
Oh, Rosemary’s Baby was also directed by Roman Polanski, and given that man’s own history with consent…well, maybe this film has issues not that far off from the ones that Polanski’s Chinatown might provoke.
Actually, before I go too much further, let me say a little about my experience with this particular film before I ever saw it. I recall that a local TV channel often ran cheap horror films on a weekly basis, and some films popped up rather often. Jumpy kid that I was, the ads for these things kinda scared me, and one of them was Rosemary’s Baby‘s made-for-TV 1976 sequel called Whatever Happened to Rosemary’s Baby?, and all I remember about that film was an ad where a man’s eyes glowed green with all the finest special effects technology the 1970s could spare. I’ve never seen it. I likewise remember reading a MAD magazine parody, mostly because it suggested that for the dream sequence where Rosemary is impregnated by the devil, that the woman onscreen is probably a body double since she doesn’t seem to have Mia Farrow’s overall figure. There. That was my only experience with this film prior to watching it for the first time a few years ago.
When I finally did see it, I unapologetically loved it.
For myself, my preferences for horror have always fallen into the realm of the psychological. Rosemary’s Baby is a horror film of that stripe. There are some glimpses of the devil, seen mostly in a very trippy dream sequence. The baby himself, who famously has his father’s eyes, is, as I said above, never shown. The film has a grand total of two deaths during the entire runtime, and one of them happens off-screen. Arguably, the second does as well, but the body of that victim, a woman by the name of Terry (Angela Dorian) from Rosemary’s apartment building, is shown after she took a fall from the upper levels. Why did she fall? Well, the film never says directly, but she was staying with the Castevets (Sidney Blackmer and Harold and Maude‘s Ruth Gordon), and since these two are the leading Satanists in the cult that wants Rosemary to have the devil’s baby, I think I can make some good guesses as to why she jumped and/or fell.
For me, though, it’s the Castevets that make the film. There are different kinds of cinematic evil. There’s the blatant evil of a monster like Chinatown‘s Noah Cross or a literal monster from countless other horror films. There’s the banal, everyday face of evil like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where the evil is disguised as someone whose job is to maybe theoretically help people. But then there’s the Castevets, and they probably could be best described as representing the obnoxious face of evil. Blackmer’s Steven (later revealed to be an alias of sorts) is more of a know-it-all, but he spends more time with Rosemary’s actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes), an aspiring actor’s whose career takes off at about the same time Rosemary gets pregnant, than he does with Rosemary. His wife Minnie is a different story, coming across as pushy and insistent and always hanging around. I suspect many of us have met a Minnie Castevet at some point in our lives, but they’re more annoying than evil. Heck, at the film’s conclusion, Minnie even offers Rosemary a nice, normal cup of tea and seems almost kind about the whole thing after giving Rosemary who-knows-what sort of drinks with different substances in them to make sure the pregnancy runs smoothly.
By the by, the fact that Guy sold his wife out for some acting roles, something about that seems even more wrong than it should be, and I am considering that Guy initially claims he and Rosemary conceived while she was unconscious, something I didn’t make much notice of the first time because of everything else that was happening in this film, and yet another reason to be reminded of the reason this film’s director suddenly moved to France decades ago. Overall though, Guy is not a good husband.
But the real terror in the film is a simple one: Rosemary has no idea what is going on. Guy, the Castevets, this doctor they all insisted she see for the pregnancy (Ralph Bellamy), and a whole lot of other people, many that she barely knows, seem to have all kinds of tips and pointers for her that have nothing to do the more conventional advice her longtime friends and former doctor all have. Strange things are happening around her, and Rosemary is largely concerned a cult is going to steal and murder her child with her husband’s approval. I’m not a woman, I have no children, and the likelihood of my having any children any time soon is pretty much zero, so I can only imagine a lot of women go through this when they are pregnant for the first time. Their bodies are changing, and let’s face it, that’s probably the sort of thing where the only way to find out what’s going to happen is to actually experience it. And since it appears that none of the people advising Rosemary are either women or, in the case of the handful of women Minnie seems to know, even seem to have kids of their own, that says something else about why Rosemary should be so suspicious.
And it’s all for naught. She gives birth to the Devil’s baby, and quite frankly, for all that she is horrified, she also is the baby’s mother, and she ends the film comforting her child. That said, when the old timers in the Castevets’ apartment start up with the “Hail Satan!” stuff, it seems rather silly after the largely tense drama of the rest of the film. A strange dream sequence here and there aside, this is a film that is largely grounded in Rosemary’s own consciousness. It’s the very mundane things (if a satanic cult and any weird spells they might cast can be said to be “mundane”) that worry her, even as her closest friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) dies under mysterious and surprising circumstances and the actor Guy was understudying for sudden blindness just can’t be explained in any rational way. Polanski knew how to create tension without the overt Satan worship, and I suspect producer William Castle, a man who knew how to create solid tension and scares on shoestring budgets, could have been a big help there, but once it gets to the final reveal, yeah, it doesn’t work for me as well.
By the by, Polanski got actor Tony Curtis to play the blind actor. He never appears on screen, and he’s uncredited. But the purpose of his casting was to have him talk on a phone to Rosemary, and Farrow’s look of confusion over his bizarre story of sudden blindness is genuine: no one told her it was Tony Curtis on the other end of the line, and she looks the way she does because she can vaguely recognize the voice but can’t put a name to it. That’s actually rather clever, and just a good example of how this film creates the psychological horror that it does.
You know, until an old man leaps to his feet to happily proclaim it’s a new year one because God is dead.
NEXT: Hey, if parenting is scary for adults, growing up can be pretty stressful for kids too. Anyway, that’s the bridge I am using to get over to the next film in the countdown, the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out.
0 Comments