Brian C. Wyatt: Analysis of Rosemary's Baby

“True horror is when bad things happen to good people.”
-writer’s adage

In the words of production designer Richard Sylbert, “the film opens like a Doris Day movie” of sunny normalcy which camouflages the shocking evil lurking within (Sylbert, retrospective interview, DVD). Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is not only one of the greatest films of all time it is one of the greatest horror movies of all time. What does one see in this film but the raping of a nice Catholic girl by the Church of Satan? Comparable in spirit to Polansky’s previous work Repulsion (1965) in which Catherine Denueve stars as a schizophrenic beautician who goes on a murder spree, Rosemary’s Baby doesn’t rely on cheap gory effects to elicit true horror in the audience but draws the viewer in with shots of the Black Bramford while Rosemary hums a light and innocent song masking the dangers within which await her and us.

The narrative of this film works in the context of its time: a woman’s right to self-determination and the mistrust of anyone older than 30 were characteristics of the culture of the 1960s. Also note that 1966 was the year in which Time magazine declared in its April 8th issue, “Is God Dead?” This issue is even featured in the scene in the film

when Rosemary, fleeing from the devil-worshippers next door, visiting her previous doctor played by a young Charles Grodin. April 30, 1966 saw also the founding of the Church of Satan and is considered The Year One in the calendar of modern Satanists; Anton LaVey is rumored to have worked on the film as both technical advisor and starring briefly as the Devil’s stand in while Rosemary was being impregnated, drugged for a Black Mass held by the elderly couple next door.

The narrative is also sequential in its chronology flowing in a linear fashion from beginning to end. Rosemary’s Baby is provocative on many levels besides it technical brilliance, it raises issues around abortion and a woman’s right to self-determination as “a story of violence, deceit, and misappropriation of a woman’s body by people she trusts that makes [this] pregnancy a Gothic spectacle” (Valerius 2005).

Based on the best-selling novel by Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby takes place in an ordinary seeming apartment building, The Black Bramford, a great brooding hulk set in New York City’s West Central Park area where a young married couple Rosemary (Mia Farrow), a fragile Nebraska girl, and Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes), an ambitious actor looking for his first break, are prospecting for a new apartment in which to raise a family.

Having made the acquaintance of the elderly couple next door, the Castevets, Roman (Sidney Blacknet), a world traveler since the age of 13, and his wife Minnie (Ruth Gordon), a garishly dressed woman with a powerful personality, Rosemary’s husband Guy succumbs to Satanism and sacrifices his fertile wife to further the evil agenda of the coven next door: to conceive and birth the Anti-Christ.

The editing of the “drug dream” scene in which Rosemary is raped by the Devil begins with no music score to accompany the heavy silence of action unfolding as Guy strips her naked and Rosemary begins to hallucinate. Dreaming she is on a boat and shivering in the wind, a black man at the helm tells to go down below where it’s “best” for her. As Rosemary is bound to bedposts she fades in and out of lucid consciousness until she (we?) is shocked awake by the feral eyes of the demon having its way with her.

We never see Adrian. We do, however, hear his cries from the black veiled crib next to which we see Roman attending a sort of Anti-Nativity scene replete with dignitaries from around the world. It’s the dialogue that fills our imagination, not cheap thrills and Caro syrup.

Rosemary (having dropped her butcher knife): “What have you done to his eyes?! You maniacs!!!”

Minnie (insolently): “You should see his hands!”

Laura Louise (with glee): “And his feet!”

Accepting her fate and realizing her role, Rosemary chooses to be the Anti-Christ’s mom.

“Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother.”
-Moorish proverb



Works Cited

Rosemary’s Baby. Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Sidney
Blackmer, Ruth Gordon. Paramount, 1968

Church of Satan. Official Website. 9 September 2007

Dirks, Tim. “Rosemary’s Baby.” FilmSite. 9 September 2007

Valerius, Karyn. “Rosemary’s Baby, Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects.” College Literature Summer 2005. 9 September 2007

“Polanski, Roman. Filmography.” Wikipedia. 9 September 2007