Rosemary’s Baby Is Still Chilling at 50
Examining a horror story that may as well have been written today
The world is full of people who will go to any length to control women. It was true when my grandmother, as a young woman with a father who greeted every boyfriend with a shotgun, went off to join a convent of Hungarian nuns just so she could get away. (She promptly quit, moved away without telling him, and some time later invited him to her wedding to a Chinese man. This is the origin story of our Cuban and Chinese family’s Hungarian chicken salad recipe.)
It is true today, as legions of anti-reproductive rights groups besiege legislatures and harangue them into revoking a woman’s right to health care access, as private schools force young women to advertise when they are menstruating and Southern Baptists have started to lose patience with the elders who argue a wife should respond to her husband beating the shit out of her by being submissive.
And it was true in 1968 when Rosemary’s Baby debuted, telling a story of paranoia and body horror that for all of the above reasons is still too damn real.
The best horror gets at something deep and digs in its hooks, but gradually. In that regard, it’s easy to see why Rosemary’s Baby is still essential viewing 50 years later.
A Timeless Paranoia
Minnie: “Are you pregnant?”
Rosemary: “Well, no, not yet. I hope to be, as soon as we’re settled.”
Minnie: “Wonderful, well, you’re young and healthy, you ought to have lots of children!”
The Woodhouses, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her handsome new husband Guy (John Cassavetes) move into a high-rise apartment in New York. They are the quintessential young yuppie couple, fresh-faced and naïve and just entering adulthood. Their neighbors, the odd Castevets, Minnie and Roman (played respectively by a delightfully eccentric Ruth Gordon and a suspiciously avuncular Sidney Blackmer) ply them with kindness and concern. Guy’s fledgling acting career isn’t much to speak of, and Rosemary wants a family.
It isn’t long before Rosemary finds herself trusting the Castevets too much. In the novel on which the movie is based by Ira Levin, the sickening twist of the plot is kept under wraps until the very end of the story. That just isn’t how writer/director Roman Polanski—and we’ll get to him—wanted to play it. It is clear, right from the get-go, that when Rosemary awakens from being drugged by Minnie’s “chocolate mouse,” that she’s been impregnated by none other than Satan. We’re watching the utter inevitability of her situation play out, aware of how hopeless it is all the time.
Rosemary’s Baby debuted at a consequential time in the women’s lib movement and also during major post-war tension about the nuclear family and the backlash against how much it locked women into a situation where they were expected to subordinate their bodies and their ambitions entirely to a man’s whims. The prior year saw the national conference of Students for a Democratic Society issue a report that, in essence, described the relationship of men to women in much the same way colonial powers had toward the people they oppressed. Women’s liberation groups like Boston’s Bread and Roses formed, and the same year the film came out, activists protested the Miss America pageant. It was clear both that a new, post-Suffragette chapter in feminism was being written and that the comfy, all-but-assumed path a women should take—basically, to make herself the helpmate of a man and yoke all her hopes and dreams to his convenience—was being questioned.
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