Rosemary's Baby

            Horror films are dotted with bizarre experiences during what can or could be any given day. After all, it is not everyday when a six-foot-tall man wearing a hockey mask and brandishing a machete as his toy chases teenage campers to their deaths nor does the story always have to be set in a hilly small town. To this day, we are “freaked out” by normal people who see unusual things such as the little boy in The Sixth Sense who sees dead people and is constantly abused by them, leaving him with scars and also nearly dead. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is labeled as a horror movie because it can be set anywhere, contains a body count, and withstands the test of time.

            Rosemary’s Baby was set in New York City to the inharmonic song patterns of Rosemary herself, sung by Mia Farrow and the views of the older Victorian apartments surrounding Central Park. As she and her husband Guy Woodhouse (John Cassevetes) search for a new apartment to call home – for the time being, they notice the signs of wear and tear to the property: chipped floor tiles, cracked walls, and unpainted plaster on the hallway wall of the seventh floor. The place they call home is one where an older lady had deceased inside a few days earlier after lying in a coma for weeks; the first thing Rosemary attempts to do is to brighten the place by placing colorful furniture and planning a nursery in hopes of an upcoming pregnancy. During the time after her death, Mrs. Gardenia may have left her ghost in the apartment to scare off the new tenants or perhaps she indulged in Satanism with her neighbors while alive because of the black curtains. The Woodhouses’ neighbors, Roman and Minnie Castavet, seem to be interested in the new couple for more than mere company: little did Rosemary know that the baby she would later conceive was that of Satan himself, not Guy.

            The movie did not really have much of a body count aside from Terry and Hutch’s deaths because it focused so much on Rosemary’s weight loss and depression during her pregnancy and Minnie Castavet intruding at all hours, giving her a concoction instead of pills to take on a daily basis. Terry’s death was ruled a suicide as a result of jumping from a seventh floor window in the Castavets’ home. She also wore that same grotesque charm that Rosemary would eventually receive from Minnie as a “good luck charm”. This “charm” was actually the Devil manifesting himself inside the root in search of the perfect woman to bear his child, which turned out to be Rosemary. Once leaving Rosemary’s apartment and suffering from a stroke, Hutch dies three weeks after  entering a coma, yet one of his final deeds was an anagram for Rosemary to realize that Roman is the son of Adrian Marcato, a famous warlock who was attacked and nearly killed from declaring he was the Devil. Upon this realization, she tries to tell Guy to sever all ties with the Castavets because they are affecting their lives negatively and the upcoming birth of her baby the Anti-Christ. In a sense she loses the child because it does not have Guy’s features, but Rosemary is still a mother to him despite her newfound knowledge.

            As scary as mothering the Devil’s child sounds and is, Rosemary’s Baby seems a bit dated with Guy’s constant references to Rosemary as a “dumb b**** who needs guidance” similar to a small child. Also, who is going to be dumb enough not to seek a second opinion regarding the life she is carrying for nine months? Guy could have not only been arrested for torture, but also for raping her! Granted, the movie could have been made anywhere and someone can even play the same waif as Rosemary, but no one would really want the role of a naïve woman. Fortunately, times have changed for the better meaning the “waif” is a major character in later horror films.

It may not have been a slasher film as of late nor a “kill or be killed” movie, but Rosemary’s Baby scares the viewer into thinking this could very well happen to anyone. Just because only two people died in the film does not make the movie less a classic; instead it symbolizes death can happen in another way than the coma or suicide because upon learning her baby was Satan’s offspring, Rosemary’s spirit dies and is forever shattered by mothering the Anti-Christ.

                                                                                                          

Works Cited

Glenn, Frederick. The Devil Turns Thirty: Rosemary’s Baby and the Manson Family Murders. Rosemary’s Baby 30 year anniversary. http://thetake.com/take/html/tendllr.html

All Movie Guide.  Rosemary’s Baby. http://allmovie.com/cg/x/dll

Dirks, Tim. Review of Rosemary’s Baby (1968). http://www.filmsite.org/