“Rosemary’s Baby”: Horror and Feminist Horror

The cult classic “Rosemary’s Baby” (Polanski, 1968) purposefully chooses not to feature any real scenes from the movie, as is the case with all the best movie posters. A jealous, sickly green resembling Western rationality’s stomach lining more than any blue-sky Americana frames the silhouette of a pram sitting like an ossuary on an exorcised patch of rocky terrain. With her nose tilting to rhyme with the Paramount logo, Mia Farrow’s face, that ethereal suburban saint, looms behind it in martyr-sleep, mindscape as landscape. Lean and austere, the tagline exhales, “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby.”

However, in New York, prayer is not exactly Uncle Sam. By the time the curtains rise, that baby is already a prime example of biopolitics; he is a marked man (or devil-man) from the moment of his conception, having been raped by Rosemary by “someone inhuman,” specifically the devil. If Simone de Beauvoir had not been busy writing “The Second Sex” (2011) about how motherhood can be a mystification, she might have taken issue with this blatantly Faustian take on birth and riffed on domestic bliss.

Could that tagline also be a clever marketing strategy that doubles as a cultural provocation, a tongue-in-cheek prayer for Rosemary’s (famous) business plan to succeed? After all, the movie was Roman Polanski’s call to America, a calling card sent from his protracted exile via Kraków, Paris, and London. He arrived at thirty-four, looking like a Hollywood prodigy trying his hand at the industry. Polanski was already known for his spine-tingling, suspenseful films, think “Knife in the Water” (1962) or “Repulsion” (1965), that combined psychological suffering with arthouse legitimacy. Even his earlier campy romp, “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (Polanski, 1967), was rife with gore, gothic exaggerations, and gags.

He does, however, have a keen sense of dialogue and tension in “Rosemary’s Baby,” directing whispers, gestures, and silences until they make the audience shudder with fear. The film’s core horror, a woman trapped by the polite fiction of her prescribed role, a prison masquerading as middle-class bliss, is revealed when Farrow (always bold) steps out of the soap-paneled suburbs and into the undead limelight. In a way, it is the realization of de Beauvoir’s nightmare: motherhood reframed as possession rather than freedom, domesticity as a cage, and wifehood as a trap.

In the same year that “Sgt. Pepper” featured Crowley on its cover, a nod to the counterculture’s occult vibe and its pervasiveness in popular culture, the film proved to be a cultural virus that spread through living rooms, occult bookstores, college campuses, and suburban theaters. It cleared a way through the murky waters of Hollywood to give rise to imitators such as “The Exorcist” (Friedkin, 1973) and “The Omen” (Donner, 1976), a whole demonic cottage industry, if you will, complete with pulpy imitators, late-night radio chatter, and paperback tie-ins.

Although “Rosemary’s Baby” is essentially the origin story of the Antichrist, it plays like a relentless psychological thriller, taking advantage of real human terrors like gaslighting, alienation, and bodily violation. Polanski’s genius, however, lay in the way he sowed doubt like seeds. His later Oscar-nominated script was a metronome of paranoia, keeping the uncanny from straying too far from the everyday by connecting each shock to a plausible plot point.

Behind the scenes, the studio machine’s instincts, negotiations, and outright bets were just as daring as the final product. Paramount’s new production vice-president, Robert Evans (1994), who personified the swagger and contradictions of Hollywood’s changing era, approved this gleefully monstrous project.

The story of Evans’s ascent reads like a Hollywood legend: born in 1930 in New York, Norma Shearer discovered him and then Darryl Zanuck by the pool. He then went from a fortunate break in women’s fashion to the film industry, where his hustler charm and matinee-idol appearance catapulted him from small acting roles to a position of actual power. He scoured scripts “for the unexpected,” not prestige, but the kind of jolts that scared audiences and sold tickets (Biskind, 1998). Paramount? Totally dead last when he showed up.

Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby” is all satire, horror, and suburban dread. Polanski called it “a syrupy Doris Day number.” By four, pages everywhere, he was hooked. Signed immediately, it screamed his brand of threat and alienation. Evans proved he could combine personal seduction with professional foresight by luring a young auteur with a carrot and then delivering hell.

Later, he quipped that finding the movie was “like flipping the lights on in a dark studio.” Suddenly, Paramount had swagger and a belief it could outshine the rest. The edge mixing box-office smarts with arthouse chills, the New Hollywood playbook.

It reshaped Hollywood and paved the way for “Midnight Cowboy” (Schlesinger, 1969), “Five Easy Pieces” (Rafelson, 1970), “MAS*H” (Altman, 1970), and “A Clockwork Orange” (Kubrick, 1971). Its cloud stayed in “Chinatown” (1974), Polanski and Evans’ dark noir of women victimized by chance.

The monstrous birth marked a new era: studios courting fear, discomfort, and the grotesque as art (Cook, 2000). Paramount is baptized in abjection. Evans pursued Polanski, whose previous film “Repulsion” had already explored a Gothic maze of a woman’s mind, mapping psychosis with an almost clinical intensity (Polanski, 1984), and subtly dropped horror hacks like William Castle, whose gimmick-driven films once defined the genre (Landis & Clifford, 2002).

Polanski changed his ski jacket for Levin’s book by evening, succumbing to its mysterious appeal. “At first, I thought they had made a mistake,” he stated, until the definitive show pulled him into his sense of suffering. The screenplay, as meticulous as a Swiss watch with its gears turning in perfect suspense, made it to Oscar territory, validating both the director’s intuition and Evans’s risk in a new horror genre. It was also the first time Polanski had adapted someone else’s story (Sandford, 2007).

Naturally, Levin’s thriller mastery helped. He fused mundane domesticity with existential tremors. Stephen King hailed him as “the Swiss watchmaker of suspense” (1981). From “A Kiss Before Dying” (Levin, 1953) to “The Boys from Brazil” (Levin, 1976) and “The Stepford Wives” (Levin, 1972), every twist landed with shocking yet inevitable impact.

Without even feigning modesty, Levin boasted that the “Rosemary’s Baby” film was “the most faithful adaptation of a novel ever to come out of Hollywood,” a claim that seemed to be equal parts arrogance and pride. Saying something like, “We made the waffle exactly like the waffle’s blueprint!” at the studio debut, a statement that was oddly subversive in a field that relies heavily on change and comically literal.

Even the Time magazine cover with the headline, “IS GOD DEAD?” fixed the narrative in a particular cultural moment, to whole dialogue passages that were unaltered from page to screen. The film is a mirror so exact it could practically make the novel redundant, a cinematic copy that risked eclipsing its source material in sheer fidelity; Levin once joked that by the end, only one of them might be necessary. Hollywood slavishly copying a book only to leave it unused is a clever little paradox demonstrating how reproduction can preserve and erase its source.

The film literally begins and ends with an aerial helicopter view of Manhattan, transformed into a terrifying kingdom straight out of a fairy tale (no princesses, just towers that loom and shadows that stretch across the skyline like claws) (Farber, 1971). That expansive view is akin to the beast’s eye, looming over its victim with omniscience, turning the busy city into a chessboard awaiting sacrifice (Sterritt, 2019). Gershwin possessed by demons is a haunting wordless lullaby that floats in, magical but ominous, combining the dread of a requiem with the sweetness of a nursery rhyme.

Cut to Rosemary’s new digs, apartment 7E, a suburban nightmare with creaking pipes and fake security in pre-war brick. Lesson: trust no one, not even the walls, which breathe and thrum with secrets (Morrison, 2007).

The ambitious young couple with big dreams, Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, were transplanted from Omaha and Baltimore. Their Midwestern optimism clashed with the cynical pulse of New York. John Cassavetes’ character Guy is a melancholy actor who only gets bit roles. His big break was selling Yamaha motorcycles on television, which was a form of ambition disguised as embarrassment, and where selling machines was more valuable than art.

Rosemary, a blonde pixie with an absurdly posh accent that makes her sound like she is from a finishing school, is bright and earnest, whereas he is depressed. She is the epitome of the ideal housewife, painting walls and setting furniture as though she were creating the set for her own prison. She exclaims to anyone who inquires, “He has been in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross, and many TV plays and commercials.” This statement is rife with irony and tragic foresight, especially considering that it comes shortly after Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique” (1963) warned of the prison of domesticity.

Despite the peeling hallways and the eerie remnants of the previous tenant, Mrs. Gardenia, whose death lingers like a bad odor, she convinces Guy to move in when an apartment in the dilapidated Bramford becomes available. At first, she is sincere. “Don’t you want to move in anyhow?” The innocent couple is placed in a haunted (or at least eerie) house with a classic setup, where the wallpaper hides rot and all the neighbors smile too warmly.

According to Rosemary’s friend, Hutch, a pulp adventure story writer, the Bramford is essentially a haunted mansion. This structure was built not for habitation but for staging tragedies. As if the walls themselves gathered human misery like wallpaper glue, its history is replete with gory incidents, including strange accidents and unexplained suicides. Guy dismisses Hutch with the haughtiness of someone who believes that bad omens are only found in paperbacks sold in train stations, so his warnings are ignored. Why worry about horror story tropes from a boys’ adventure writer? Burying your head in the sand will not help, though, because dread does not go away just because you do not call it that (Kael, 1968).

When the front door closes, Rosemary and Guy’s home becomes a living horror museum where they have established themselves. The interiors were filmed in Paramount’s lot behind the scenes, but when you look out the window, you are looking at Dakota, that magnificent Gothic building from the 1880s that would later be the home of John Lennon. With its pointed gables and dark stonework, it towers over Central Park like the set of an urban fairy tale (Goldberger, 2005).

The Castevets, an age-defying couple whose primary pastime is terrorism via banter, live next door at 3E. Roman (Sidney Blackmer) and Minnie (Ruth Gordon) are a couple whose interactions are brimming with the overfamiliarity that suffocates more than it charms. The Castevets are literally “neighbors from hell,” a cosmic joke that is too direct to be humorous but too sinister to ignore. Rosemary initially believes they are just pushy empty nesters, the kind of couple who have adopted strangers as pets after being deprived of children (Hawkins, 2000).

Minnie is crowned in a fluffy white hairpiece that looks as though she has been lacquered in kitsch and dipped in coconut, while Roman struts around in a pink pin-striped suit with a red bow tie, a peacock’s plumage for a man who enjoys his own theatrical villainy. Believing that food is the best path to a soul, they carry Pyrex around like holy relics and cart around casseroles with the fervor of home-cooking cultists (Fischer, 2002).

They are hunched over in tragic misery when we first meet them: “That is not possible. That is a mistake,” as though trying out for a sitcom grief scene written by someone who has only heard tragedy through a thin wall, Minnie sputters in a torrent of New York meets Hollywood jargon. Their portrayal of grieving best friends is so convincing (he just died, how could it be suicide?) that Rosemary is not aware of their quick changes in tone when the camera cuts. Their grief immediately transforms into something cunning and prepared, as if the actors were satisfied with their performance.

Except for Rosemary, almost everyone is acting by this point. Or are they caught between stagecraft and sincerity in a genre-less drama? Every smile masks a darker intent — paranoia reigns, turning the mundane into sinister pantomime (Kolker, 2011). Polanski shows you that everyone else might as well be acting, with their smallest gestures suddenly reading as loaded cues in a hidden script, once Rosemary begins to suspect conspiracies (“plots against people,” she frantically tells a doctor).

One such scenario occurs when the Woodhouses and Castevets meet: outside the Bramford, a crowd has gathered around the body of Terry, a young girl Rosemary recently made friends with in the laundry, whose brittle optimism just moments ago felt like a relief from the stuffy atmosphere of the building. The Castevets’ grief was pure theater, treating Terry like the granddaughter they never had. Their screams and timing cry community play, not actual mourning. To Rosemary, Terry is only another unsteady saint, but to us, Terry acts as a mirror, showing the weakness of Rosemary’s own case and indicating her possible fate (Bailey, 2010).

When they first meet, Rosemary swears that Terry looks like actress Victoria Vetri, which blurs the distinction between the diegetic world and our understanding of casting. It is a delicious meta-layer. As it turns out, Vetri (billed as model Angela Dorian) plays Terry. Her career was entangled between the transient currency of on-screen appearances and the flimsy glamour of covers. Although Terry denies being the actress, the camera is winking at us, tightening the noose of artifice while letting the audience in on the joke. It is a quadruple-reverse mirror: an actress portraying a character who is not herself, incorporating the logic of disguise into the storyline like a nefarious trick.

Terry looked like a star, but Levin’s book only hinted at that; Polanski uses the power of illusion and resemblance in film as a weapon. Even a man as talented as Guy could not survive the level of performance, an acting matryoshka, because the Bramfords’ real theater makes his TV ads seem like child’s play.

What does a name mean? A lot, considering that each syllable in this film has a symbolic weight that permeates the larger meaning structure of the film. Roman Castevet practically cries out for interpretation, beckoning the in-depth examination typically found in myth or literature.

“Roman” evokes empire, church, and patriarchal weight before he moves. “Castevet” hints at caste and state — hierarchies, power, and invisible ceilings. Polanski even questioned Levin about whether “Roman” was a cunning reference to Cassavetes or himself. However, Levin grinned, the authorial smile that conceals as much as it discloses (Cronin, 2005).

Roman seems like a portent, a name that simultaneously functions as fate and foreshadowing. He is the patriarchal leader of the cult and an elder statesman of Satanism, ruling with the authority of a bishop and the ferocity of a mob boss.

Both fans and critics have raised their eyebrows at that name, enjoying its excess and questioning whether its weight was deliberate (Kael, 1968; Pinedo, 1997). As if the letters were occult symbols posing as a last name, you could almost anagram it into objects or picture Levin writing “CAS-TEVET” as a secret code. In any case, the name emphasizes the film’s themes of control, authority, and class while highlighting how dominance can taint language itself in this world.

Speaking of on-set drama, it was also a powder keg, a volatile mixture of artistic temperaments, egos, and aspirations that could hardly share a room without igniting a fire. Before insisting on Cassavetes, whose brooding realism promised a sharper edge, Polanski had considered Jack Nicholson, whose simmering menace was starting to register, and Robert Redford, the golden boy of American cinema, as Rosemary (Park, 2012). Polanski had envisioned Tuesday Weld’s combination of innocence and volatility as the perfect vehicle for his vision (Oleksiak, 2015).

With every line reading and camera angle, Cassavetes, who was also working on “Faces” (1968) that year and had the passion of an auteur himself, and Polanski clashed like fire and water once the filming process began. In the pivotal apartment scene, Farrow (1997) describes a nasty incident: Polanski yelled, “John, shut up!” with the rage of a man who tolerated no dissent after Cassavetes openly questioned a blocking decision with the impatience of a director posing as an actor.

The crew was frozen for a moment, as if Bramford’s walls had closed in on them, and the air became motionless. It was all testosterone. Like a referee’s whistle in a cruel game, Gordon had to break the silence with a sharp “Knock it off!” Throughout the remainder of the shot, both men raged, brewing animosity that permeated the scene’s mood.

Later, Polanski minimized Cassavetes’s work by saying, “He only knows how to play himself.” He dismissed him with casual cruelty, treating performance as a tool, not calling. Cassavetes said, “Sure, he is an artist… but it is not art.” It was a slight at Polanski and Hollywood. Their dispute garnered media attention with columns holding onto every minute, but the pressure fueled the movie’s vitality and gave it a spark.

It gained strength and purpose from the tension, which imbued every frame with the feeling of invisible conflict simmering beneath the surface (Cowie, 2012). The movie itself, in which Rosemary’s body, her agency, and her very narrative are torn apart by forces that believe they own her, is reminiscent of the real Rosemary having to endure a tug-of-war over her story by two hypermasculine artists (West, 1999).

All that backstage buzz fuels the film’s genius: terror thrives not in castles but kitchens, clinics, and apartments; horror is made domestic. With a salesman’s shrug, the Bramford agent quickly reduces art to commerce by telling Guy, “TV is where the money is and the artistic thrills, too!” Guy jokes. (Gotcha.), a line that exposes his readiness to compromise for success while also making fun of him. However, “Rosemary’s Baby” does deliver art, elevating pulp horror to a level of sophistication and eeriness (Wood, 2003).

The scares in this high-art horror film are rooted in the betrayals of love, trust, and the tenuous safety of home rather than in cheap shocks. As Rosemary puts it, “Alive,” quoting “Frankenstein” (Shelley, 1818), the monsters in this scene feel, well, alive, breathing with the uncanny realism of friends and neighbors who become evil once the mask is removed. Every smile and gesture in the film becomes loaded with menace, creating an unforgettable portrait of a domestic woman pushed to the brink.

This storyline, which turns the mundane routines of domestic life into a trap, is the epitome of the second-wave nightmare: the housewife betrayed by society, institutions, her husband, and even her own body. When Friedan wrote about “the problem that has no name,” suburban wives who remained silent were vilified and given horns and claws in the most literal way imaginable. Rosemary’s life as a devoted wife and soon-to-be mother is flipped upside down, and her aspirations for a family are used against her.

Like children on a haunted rollercoaster, we race through paranoia, terrified and excited at the same time, never knowing where the next turn will take us. Levin finally delivers the climax: “A tail! The buds of his horns!” The baby is displayed in its black velvet crib, the horrific revelation we have been awaiting, a conclusion that seems both inevitable and unachievably hideous.

Polanski then pulls the last switch, never showing us the demon child itself, depriving us of the anticipated spectacle and instead using absence as the most terrifying image of all. Only Rosemary’s reaction is visible to us; as her face registers the unimaginable sight, it transforms into a true canvas of terror (Rebello, 2012).

When she finally gets a glimpse of the newborn, she yells, “What have you done to his eyes?” but the camera stays on her terrified face, depriving us of the voyeuristic pleasure of confirming the monstrosity. Only in her (and our) minds does the demon exist; it is called forth by suggestion, by the trembling edges of her horror, and by our own imagination, which fills in the gaps more brutally than makeup ever could (Newman, 2011).

Polanski accomplishes something delectably twisted by making us adopt her viewpoint; we are imprisoned in her stare, caught in the same tunnel vision that renders incredulity impossible. Whose eyes have been altered? Rosemary screams, as though the words are addressed to the world that deceived her and the infant. By the end, it is obvious: hers, as well as ours, since the movie has changed how we think about motherhood, family, and the home.

This drastic change makes paranoia the real monster, and the horror lies not just in the creature but also in the perspective. We are tricked into seeing through Rosemary’s scared eyes, and perhaps the last cut prevents us from turning away because the camera has already taught us that the world is irreparably tainted.

“Rosemary’s Baby” is more than just campy occult entertainment. It practically screams when viewed through the prisms of second-wave feminism and biopolitics. It is where Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower fits in like blood on the page: In the same way that Foucault characterized governments controlling bodies and births, Rosemary’s pregnancy and child are treated as entities to be controlled by invisible leviathans (her husband, doctors, and neighbors). Every doctor she encounters and every man in her immediate vicinity skillfully runs her life to suit their objectives.

The film is also rife with feminist uprising. The nightmares of the suburban housewife are fully realized in 1968, the year after Friedan ignited the match to suburban complacency. Patriarchal schemes destroy Rosemary’s role as the submissive wife; she has no control over her own womb. The American Dream is raped by the cult elders, who resemble a ridiculous old-boy sorority. It is not subtle; the turmoil of that year permeates every scene in the movie. Questions like “Who owns life?” and “Who holds the power over birth?” are present in every shadow in 7E, every chant, and even every “Pray for Rosemary’s Baby” sign.

“What have you done to my baby’s eyes?” is the last cry, and it sounds like a feminist yell. It is directed not only at Satan but also at anyone who attempted to alter Rosemary’s tale. The most terrible thing is that, as Rosemary screams, we realize that we have also changed; her eyes, which are now ours, have been altered by uncontrollable forces. The true horror is that we leave this movie with a completely different perspective on the world, filled with fear.

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