with Dmetri Kakmi

Rosemary’s Baby

USA 1968

Director: Roman Polanski

Cast: Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Maurice Evans, Satan (offscreen)

Rosemary’s Baby is the second of Roman Polanski’s so-called “apartment trilogy”. The first is Repulsion (1965) and the third is The Tenant (1976). In each an individual comes to a kind of self-realisation or transformation in a sinister, imprisoning apartment. 

Repulsion traces a woman’s descent into madness in the face of unwanted masculine attention. In The Tenanta man merges a fragmented personality with that of a dead woman. What is going on in Rosemary’s Baby?

Based on Ira Levin’s bestseller of the previous year, Rosemary’s Baby is the grandmother of the modern horror movie. The film’s instant success made the title part of the English language. All you have to do is say “Rosemary’s baby” to give rise to images of a woman giving birth to Satan’s brat. 

Adrian Woodhouse, Rosemary’s son and no less than the Dark One’s sprogling, walked among us almost a decade before The Omen (1976) spat out Damien Thorn. (Aside 1: the question of why Beelzebub’s sons [has there ever been a daughter?] always have effete names keeps me awake at night. Surely one would be more afraid of a Jayden or a Shazza.)

For the sake of context, we ought to mention that the groundwork for urban satanists was laid down by Val Lewton in The Seventh Victim (1943). In fact, it’s likely Polanski’s elderly upper westside coven slummed it at orgiastic sabbaths with the younger set in Greenwich Village in the aforementioned cacodemonic composition. Nudity, they say, is the great equaliser and satanists are nothing if not egalitarian.

Released two years after Time magazine’s contentious “Is God Dead?” cover (it is seen briefly in the movie), Rosemary’s Baby is an inverse nativity story for godless times. The birth of the son of darkness, instead of the son of light. The Virgin Mary is here supplanted by second wave feminism’s new woman—an ephebic young stripling who is impregnated by dark forces and must carry to duration the pregnancy, literarily, from hell. No Magi bearing gifts for Rosemary Woodhouse, but a gathering of doddery perfectly respectable looking old foggies lodged in the best real estate in Manhattan. Devil worship obviously pays.

It is important to note that, unlike Nazarene Mary, Rosemary did not consent to get humped by the Beast. That decision was taken out of her hands by the coven to which her husband Guy delivers her for the promise of thespian success. Satan comes to Rosemary, so to speak, while she is semi-conscious in a disconcerting date-rape scenario that is reminiscent of Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare” (1781). 

It appears a greater, though oppositional, masculine will is imposed on Mary and Rosemary for the benefit of patriarchal world dominion. Worse, both women are reduced to an incubator for a supreme cause to which she will be an addendum. No wonder feminism was invented. (Aside 2: this probably accounts for why Damien’s mother in The Omen is a jackal. The Devil couldn’t find a woman to say yes to such inordinate demands, without a Gucci handbag or Christian Louboutin cha-cha heels thrown in to sweeten the bargain.)

All this gives rise to a tour de force of paranoia and uncertainty as Rosemary finds that neither body nor life are her own. She goes into free fall and is deemed unstable. Yet when the appalling babe is delivered, her natural instincts kick in and, like a good mamma, she embraces her responsibility to Satan’s spawn. The wrong thing to do, in this instance, is the right thing. And damn the world!

One of the film’s great strengths is the sheen of placid normality. Even of a certain stultifying banality. As Rosemary and Guy settle in to seemingly conventional lives in the ornate Bramford Building (actually The Dakota Building) everything seems legit and above board—until it’s not. There is a shift. Suddenly, corridors are too long, narrow and echoey. The old-fashioned lift distantly clangs and creaks from one lonely floor to the next. Closed apartment doors are ever watchful and elderly neighbours, especially Minnie and Roman Castevet, are too nosey for comfort.

If Satan is not manifest in the film, surely he is present whenever Ruth Gordon as garrulous Minnie Castavet is on screen. Behind the sweet little old lady act is a calculated malevolence and sinister intent that is straight out of a corporate HR department. (Aside 3: Diane Wiest is equally as chilling in the same role in the unnecessary prequel Apartment 7A [2024].)

Women have always been primary subjects in horror. I’ve argued elsewhere that horror is largely a female genre. Whether victim or victor, women are simply more interesting to watch in extreme, terrifying situations. In Rosemary’s Baby, the titular woman’s presence helps to highlight a fascinating horror sub-genre. Male fascination with female fertility.

In the years after its release, Rosemary’s issue will pave the way for It’s Alive (1974), Demon Seed (1977), The Brood (1979), Xtro (1982) and any number of other testaments to women giving birth to monsters. The notion that a woman gestates life in her womb and pumps out a fully formed being simultaneously captivates and horrifies men. Try as they might, it’s something they will never do. To man, woman is a witch or an alchemist who absorbs life’s basic matter and turns it into gods or ogres. What’s more, the doorway through which this miracle occurs, her pudenda, is the obscure object of his life-long desires. Rosemary Woodhouse belongs to that feared yet celebrated cadre.

Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Woman in the Well, The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). He is currently working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.