Rosemary's Baby (1968) - Roman Polanski
Related: Roman Polanski - horror film - pregnancy - 1968 - psychological horror
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Description
Rosemary's Baby is a 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin. The novel was a best-seller, and was adapted as a 1968 feature film directed by Roman Pola?ski and starring Mia Farrow as the wife, John Cassavetes as the husband, and Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer as the neighbors. Gordon won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the film. There is a popular rumor that Anton LaVey appears in the film as Satan, but he had no involvement with the production.
This film was Robert Evans' first big hit running Paramount Pictures. He was closely involved in the production, and numerous times had to deal with Mia Farrow's precarious relationship with then-husband Frank Sinatra. Farrow and Sinatra divorced soon after the film was completed.
A sequel titled Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby aired as a made-for-TV movie in 1976. Another sequel, called Son Of Rosemary written also by Ira Levin was published in 1997. There were rumours that they would shoot this novel too, but it never came to happen, though the book did appear to have been specifically written with the possibility of turning it into a film, in that Cassavetes, Gordon and Blackmer's characters did not appear. (All three actors were deceased by at the time of the book's publication.) Levin dedicated this book to Mia Farrow.
The story follows a young woman and her husband after moving into a New York City apartment next door to enthusiastic, oversolicitous neighbors. The couple want to have a baby; one night the woman has a vision that she is being raped by some demonic presence, and later she finds out that she is pregnant. The woman begins to lose weight instead of gaining it, and comes to suspect that her neighbors are part of a Satanic cult with designs on her as-yet-unborn child, and that her husband is working with them.
An increasingly disturbed and unstable Rosemary becomes convinced that she's carrying an unholy presence, and the efforts of her husband and neighbors to help her are in vain; until the end, where she's revealed to have been exactly right. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary's Baby [Feb 2006]
Psychological terrorism and supernatural horror have rarely been dramatized as effectively as in this classic 1968 thriller, masterfully adapted and directed by Roman Polanski from the chilling novel by Ira Levin. Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is a young, trusting housewife in New York whose actor husband (John Cassavetes), unbeknownst to her, has literally made a deal with the devil. In the thrall of a witches' coven headquartered in their apartment building, the young husband arranges to have his wife impregnated by Satan in exchange for success in a Broadway play. To Rosemary, the pregnancy seems like a normal and happy one--that is, until she grows increasingly suspicious of her neighbors' evil influence. Polanski establishes this seemingly benevolent situation and then introduces each fiendish little detail with such unsettling subtlety that the film escalates to a palpable level of dread and paranoia. By the time Rosemary discovers that her infant son "has his father's eyes" ... well, let's just say the urge to scream along with her is unbearably intense! One of the few modern horror films that can claim to be genuinely terrifying, Rosemary's Baby is an unforgettable movie experience, guaranteed to send chills up your spine. --Jeff Shannon for amazon.com
See also: 1968 - Roman Polanski - horror film - pregnancy
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