Rosemary's Baby

[I stayed up late one night, I was probably about ten, I knew I had happened onto something wonderful, it scared me in a much deeper way than other movies, it was great!]

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.

The big-budget horror film received two Academy Award nominations: one for Polanski's Best Adapted Screenplay, and Ruth Gordon won the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as one of the well-meaning, 'normal' NYC neighbors. Quite a few of the smaller supporting roles were played by venerable actors, such as Ralph Bellamy (as Rosemary's Dr. Abraham Sapirstein), Sidney Blackmer (as Roman Castevet), Elisha Cook, Jr. (as apartment manager Mr. Nicklas), and Tony Curtis (phone voice).

It has been said that the film, concerned with the presence of evil surrounding us in the alienated, every-day, mundane city environment, inspired and was partly imitated by one of the greatest horror films of all time - The Exorcist (1973), and numerous other films about demonic children and impregnation including It's Alive (1974), the TV movie The Stranger Within (1974), The Omen (1976) and Demon Seed (1977). This critically-acclaimed and commercially successful film was followed by an inferior, made-for-TV movie sequel in 1976 entitled Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby, aka Rosemary's Baby II, with Ruth Gordon reprising her role as Minnie Castevet.