Rosemary’s Baby 1968

Cast:
Mia Farrow – Rosemary Woodhouse
John Cassavetes – Guy Woodhouse
Ruth Gordon – Minnie Castevet
Sidney Blackmer – Roman Castevet
Maurice Evans – Edward ‘Hutch’ Hutchins
Ralph Bellamy – Dr. Abraham Sapirstein

“Rosemary’s Baby” is one of the best horror films ever made. This isn’t because it’s going to scare the pants off you with a series of sensational jolts. This isn’t the shallow, gimmicky kind of horror movie we mostly get these days, and it isn’t the traditional old-fashioned horror film of an earlier era. This is a movie that came out during a period of transition in Hollywood.

The old production codes were breaking down and films could suddenly be more true to life in the way they showed how people really lived, acted and talked. 1968s “Rosemary’s Baby” is a more sophisticated, less elegant thriller of the kind that Alfred Hitchcock patented, but it displays much more class and intelligence than the horror movies that would come out in its wake. Popular ’70s films such as “The Exorcist” and “The Omen” are the prodigy of “Rosemary’s Baby,” but offer far less nuance and much greater vulgarity. What we get here is a more naturalistic depiction of modern life, but without the crassness that would soon explode into American cinema.

Most of the credit for what makes “Rosemary’s Baby” such a successful film goes to Roman Polanski. Polanski is a master at conveying to an audience not just a sense of the uncanny but a vivid depiction of it. His earlier films like “Knife in the Water,” “Repulsion” and “Dance of the Vampires,” display the talents that would come to such a controlled mastery in “Rosemary’s Baby.”

Polanski very faithfully adapts Ira Levin’s novel to the screen so that the viewer is, just as the reader was, free to interpret the eerie events of the story as either reality or a depiction of an isolated woman’s decent into madness. At the same time the picture can be taken as a black joke on the human male’s fears of the changes a woman goes through during pregnancy, both physically and emotionally. But Polanski seems most interested in presenting a normal world, in this case Manhattan in the mid 1960s, and then through subtle cinematic techniques get an audience to actually believe that the hysterical, fantastic ravings of the heroine could be true. It is this tour de force exercise in suspension of disbelief that makes the film a classic. The horror films that have come since have had to ratchet up the shock effects in order to thrill more desensitized audiences, but this deliberately paced film reminds us of how much better it is to leave things to the imagination of the viewer. That is where films really come alive and remain so.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is Polish director Roman Polanski’s first American feature film and his second, scary horror film – following his first disturbing film in English titled Repulsion (1965) – about a mentally-unstable, sexually-terrified woman (Catherine Deneuve) left alone in her apartment. Three Polanski films served as a trilogy (of sorts) about the horrors of apartment-dwelling: Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976).

Polanski served as the scriptwriter and based the darkly atmospheric film upon Ira Levin’s best-selling novel of the same name. [Levin also wrote another horror tale about voyeurism in a Manhattan apartment building that inspired the film Sliver (1993), starring Sharon Stone, and he wrote a terrifying sequel to the original film titled Son of Rosemary (1997), but it has not been made into a film yet.] The film was produced by Paramount Studios and veteran, low-budget horror film maker William Castle, best known for gimmicky, cheesy films such as Mr. Sardonicus (1961), Homicidal (1961), House on Haunted Hill (1958), Macabre (1958), and The Tingler (1959).

The creepy, eerie gothic film is about a young newlywed couple who move into a large, rambling old apartment building in Central Park West, and begin a loving, post-honeymoon period. They become friendly with the eccentric next-door neighbors, an overly-solicitous and intrusive elderly couple (members of a coven), and soon the husband’s acting career turns promising. But after a nightmarish dream of making love to a Beast, the paranoid, haunted, and hysterical woman believes herself impregnated so that her baby can be used in the New Yorkers’ evil cult rituals. [Polanski deliberately presented the film with enough ambiguity so that the viewer is never quite certain whether Rosemary's experiences are truly supernatural or just fabricated, imaginative hallucinations.] The creepy film ends with the devil’s flesh-and-blood baby being cared for by the mother! The incredible irony of the film was that the plot would be similarly played out a year later – Polanski’s pregnant actress/wife Sharon Tate would be terrorized and murdered by the strange cult of Charles Manson followers in her Benedict Canyon home.

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