SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

By: Annie Nocenti
November 4, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

ROSEMARY’S BABY | d. ROMAN POLANSKI | 1968

In the hierarchy of fear, Rosemary’s Baby is a study in the silent scream. The saccharine “la la-la la-la” melody of the opening soundtrack is infantilized and discordant. The title sequence is baby (and Barbie) pink. It’s the la-la-la song of a child sticking their fingers in their ears to ignore reality.

A young couple moves into their first home, a foreboding fortress of an apartment building. Rosemary (Mia Farrow) skips into the story, a guileless, childish pixie. Her hubby, with the generic, non-person name Guy (John Cassavetes) is an aspiring and perhaps talentless actor, and his first lines are fanciful lies. The stage is set with an easily cuckolded wife and a hustler husband ready to make a deal with the devil for fame.

The building manager explains how the large apartments were divided, giving hints of secret doors and partitions. A worker stands in the hall with a hand-crank drill, as if making a new peephole. Missing floor tiles allude to a dead body and Rosemary’s friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) tries to warn her of the building’s dark history of witchcraft and devil conjuring before he mysteriously falls into a coma. “It’s where the Trench Sisters conducted their little “dietary” experiments…” he informs Rosemary and Guy. (The sisters cooked and ate children).

All these casual, creepy clues seep silently into Rosemary’s imagination. The nosey neighbors slither into her life like spiders, delivering her potions and stinky charms. The opening of the film is drenched in foreshadowing, then shifts into the mundane chores of homemaking. Nevertheless, a new coat of white paint fails to whitewash dread.

The premise of the Ira Levin book is that Rosemary’s belly grows with the devil’s baby. As adapted for film by director Roman Polanski, the devil is, quite possibly, Rosemary’s husband Guy. Just how ambitious is he? Guy’s windfall of acting luck is built on the tragedy of others. He wins a part when an actor mysteriously goes blind. The film is largely from Rosemary’s point-of-view. The camera, as Rosemary’s eye, yearns to see things just off-screen and hear whispers out of earshot, as those around her seem increasingly to be in cahoots. Did a drugged Rosemary have a tryst with the devil, or is she just terrified of adding a baby onto this shaky ship? The power of Rosemary’s Baby lies in how Polanski gives the viewer a careful out. While seeming to be a demonic horror film, it’s also about the lousy contract of complicity given to women in 1960s marriages—stay home, make babies, cook and clean house, don’t question whatever shenanigans your husband is up to.

Rosemary’s empowerment comes in bits of percolating fear. In the language of screen terror, her face flickers with silent moans, cries and whimpers. The occasional yelp, yip and sob. As the witchy potions and toxic devil baby sicken her, her face flickers with anxiety, despair, jitters, trepidation, revulsion… and finally, panic. Rosemary’s full awakening comes when, hiding from her husband, she uses the point of a large kitchen knife to stop the empty, creaky baby cradle from rocking. The underlying scream the viewer has been waiting for comes as a piercing shriek when Rosemary first lays eyes on the baby who seals her fate. Mother of the devil? Or simply the lot of an old-fashioned, pre-feminist marriage? Polanski wisely lets you decide.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

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