The Slowly Spreading Undertaste
When films become classics, even when they deservedly become classics, it cannot help but have a distorting effect. It’s not so much that their reputation becomes inflated, it’s more to do with our being encumbered by knowledge. We learn about them by osmosis, we become primed even before we’ve seen them ourselves, our expectations set. Like going back to listening to ’Stairway To Heaven’ as if it were just a song, overcoming the weight of that requires a mighty effort of will.
So let’s try a mental exercise which may rectify this, at least a little. If you started watching ’Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968) outside of any context, at what point would you realise it was a horror film? The opening theme, ostensibly a lullaby but with something sinister lurking in it, that might be a tip-off. But still a long way from the sturm-und-drang of, say, Hammer film soundtracks. It’s something you’re more likely to notice, at least consciously, in retrospect.
Events are set in a recognisable location, Manhattan, and filmed naturalistically, with long takes, conversational dialogue and – perhaps most of all - minimal music. (The way the infamous dream sequence opens with only a ticking clock is particularly effective.) Unlike superficially similar films like ’The Omen’ or ’The Exorcist’, supernatural events either happen offstage or are interwoven with those dream sequences. The first sign of diabolic goings on, the sideboard in front of the closet door, is played out without a single string murmur. It’s only that the film is bothering to show you this, that you know to look for significance in it.
Ira Levin, who wrote the source novel, said ”the most suspenseful part of a horror story was before, not after, the horror appears.” (I’ve not read this, but the film is supposed to be more faithful to it than is usual.) So what better way to rack up that suspense than to save that horrifying reveal for the very last scene?
The film is epitomised by the drugged dessert Rosemary’s given to eat, which she complains has a “chalky undertaste”. That bad undertaste is at first faint, but grows more and more unavoidable as the film progresses. And part and parcel of that is the slow reveal, that we accumulate more and more small clues till we figure what’s going on.
And the idea that Satanists might live not in a film world but in our reality, and sometimes share our domestic concerns such as not staining the floor, has reach. We can avoid going to remote castles or dark woods as a way to stay away from the horror. But it won’t help us. It’s already here, in our world, casting a web we haven’t noticed yet.
The film expects us to work as detectives, to note seemingly innocuous details such as that covered closet or a lost glove, and put them together with others not revealed until some time later, without any of this being laboured. In a time before home recordings, when movies were mostly only watched once. I was first shown it by a friend, who described it as “good but slow”. Yet my experience was the opposite. Watching, you can’t break your state of high alter, no matter how innocuous the scene seems. You know you can’t afford to pass over any detail.
True, we’re not told everything. We don’t know for example whether the first victim did commit suicide to escape her fate, or refused her role and so was bumped off. (I’d guess the second as her suicide note doesn’t grass up the Castevets, but it’s not something we’re told.) But we put together enough of these details to work out the plot, in both senses of the word. Another film might try to generate creative tension over whether Rosemary’s sussing out the plot or simply losing it. Here, we know from early on ill deeds are afoot.
”Don’t Read Books”
One reason our witnessing is partial is because we only see what Rosemary sees, with virtually the whole film shown from her perspective. Several times she makes phone calls without our seeing the person on the other end, highly unusually for popular cinema. Now characters in horror films are normally a step behind the more savvy audience, and their slowness can become tedious. “Why do the killings keep happening every time there’s a full moon?” they ask uncomprehendingly, while we throw things at the screen. But here that’s turned that into an advantage.
Guy, her husband, has his list of actorly achievements reiterated, emphasising its meagreness. So he gets caught up in the plot early, when they offer his acting career a black magic boost. He’s depicted less as a bad character than a weak one, easily swayed. When he gets given the part he’s sought he rehearses laden down with some highly symbolic crutches. He tells Rosemary she’s not been hurt, “not really”, a claim he seems to have bought into himself, despite using a definition of “hurt” other than the one most commonly used. A fool and his virtue are easily parted.
But crucially, Rosemary is barely any stronger. We do much better with the information she’s given than she does. And this is cemented by the ‘dream’ sequence, where undrugged by dessert, we’re perfectly clear that much of what we see is for real. Having only just written about Carroll’s Alice, Rosemary isn’t unlike her. Both strive to please others in a world they don’t understand. When she goes back to the regular Doctor, she’s so panicked and prattlesome no wonder he doesn’t believe her. In modern-day Manhattan, no-one will believe you when you scream.
One thing we are now very much too aware of is the ending. At the time, seeing the Satanists succeed must have seemed all but unbelievable to audiences. Films simply didn’t finish that way! Rosemary has assumed her baby’s being spawned as a sacrificial offering. On discovering he’s actually Satan Jnr. she’s at first horrified but gets persuaded by the serpent-tongued Roman to look after him anyway.
And yet, paradoxically, there’s belated attempts to undo this ending, as if it’s still too much. The film is sometimes absurdly portrayed as a feminist story. Through doublethink some try to snatch victory for her from the teeth of basic observational skills. This is also due to ‘women’s issue’ themes, such as pregnancy, which people seem to perpetually confuse with feminism. If anything it’s a pre-feminist film, where Rosemary struggles for agency, without achieving any. "Please don't read books”, she’s told, “And don't listen to your friends, either.” She’s gaslit, even if the term wasn’t then in common use.
Nor does it make much sense to see the cult as a metaphor for patriarchy. Which is a set of power relations institutionalised in society, things which are unsaid because they ndon’t seem to need saying, not some conscious conspiracy. Anyway, the cult is outside of and against its surrounding society, not an example of it.
Furthermore, when looking at ‘Carrie’ it was necessary to say it was unlikely to be a feminist film, given the director’s general exploitational tendencies. Here we need to point out that director Roman Polanski is an actual rapist. (Though ironically the rape scene, shot from Rosemary’s point of view, isn’t overly salacious. At least by the general standards of popular cinema.)
And I get why people do this. It’s a great film, so naturally they look for a way it could be said to have a more progressive agenda. But what happens on the screen is what happens on the screen.
”I Don’t Believe In Witchcraft”
But mostly this baseless line of enquiry obscures that in this film age is as important as gender. There’s the scene where Rosemary insists on throwing a special kind of party where no-one over thirty is invited. But that involves a flurry of characters who are in and out the film quickly. While it’s their mutual friend Hutch, who forewarns them about the building’s history from the start, who is the only one to really spot the plot, to the point he’s the only one the cult find necessary to kill. And Hutch very much represents learning, the wisdom of age.
Famously, Rosemary says “I was brought up a Catholic. Now I don't know.” She’s also shown reading ’Is God Dead?’, a genuine cover to Time magazine. She and Guy mock older characters behind their backs. But the young couple, though ready to have children themselves, aren’t controlling their own destinies. They’re unattached particles, their movements between the two magnetic poles of Hutch and the Castevets.
The moral of the film is “guys, what if when we stopped listening to the Pope we went wrong? What if instead of becoming independent we started trusting the wrong people over thirty?” And if that’s a highly conservative message, this is a highly conservative film. Albeit, ironically, one which was watched by liberal and progressive audiences while the Catholic church clutched its rosaries.
It's a horror film cliché that the characters are first frightened, bewildered innocents, but go on to find the mettle in themselves to challenge and defeat evil. This works well functionally, it stops them all dying off within the first hour. And it can appeal to audiences. We can try telling ourselves that in their situation we’d be like that too.
And, very near the end, the film flirts with this. Rosemary escapes her captivity and uses the same secret passage they did to get into the Castevets apartment. There’s the iconic shot of her holding out the kitchen knife. She has her one – precisely one – quotable put-down, to Roman - “Be quiet, you're in Dubrovnik, I can't hear you.” (Where he’s ostensibly gone.) But we’re being set up for a fall, and the serpent-tongues Roman soon succeeds not just in beating her but drawing her into his plot.
Because we know, in our hear of hearts, we only got ahead because we didn’t eat the drugged desert, because we’re looking in from outside and Rosemary isn’t. She isn’t someone we can aspire to, but she is someone we can all too easily relate to. We’re more Rosemary than we are Ripley, even if we want to think otherwise. And the message of the film is here. For evil to succeed all that is necessary for good people to be a bit ineffectual.
But there’s another angle to it…
Through Thin Walls
The opening shot is of the couple entering the Bramford building, which from that point on has scene after scene set in it. The Count's castle features less in ’Dracula’. Viewpoints often foreground doorframes and apertures. We’re told early on that Rosemary’s and the Castevets were originally one large apartment, later subdivided. Suggesting a dissociated mind, split into separate elements not necessarily aware of their interconnectedness. Overheard through the thin partition wall, the Castevets literally invade Rosemary’s dreams. That adjoining walls becomes a permeable membrane. But, it seems, only one way. The Castavetes are like the couple’s Id, their voices seeping through.
Seen from this angle the message becomes - you cannot hold the evil at bay because ultimately it is part of you. There’s no getting off this map. And you are probably ahead of me here, but these two viewpoints align rather than conflict. Evil is not without but within. And it likes it best when we try to tackle it alone. Seek authority.
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