“’To 1966—the Year One!’ Unbeknownst to young Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), this New Year’s Eve toast spells doom for her and her unborn child. When the same words are repeated six months later at a black nativity celebration (it cannot properly be called a ‘christening’) held in the infant’s honor, they assume a horrifying new meaning. Rosemary’s elderly neighbors have since been revealed as a pack of Satanists for whom the year 1966 signifies the coming of the antichrist. And, as a result of their collusion with her aspiring-actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes) to impregnate her with demon seed, the antichrist has turned out to be none other than Rosemary’s Baby itself.
“The real date that’s key to understanding Rosemary’s Baby isn’t 1966 but rather 1968, the year in which the film was released. 1968 could be called ‘Year One’ of the New Hollywood. It saw the death of the long-crumbling Production Code and heralded the birth of a modern cinema, one influenced by the so-called new waves that had already swept France, England, and Czechoslovakia—violent, cynical, ribald, edgy, paranoid. Helmed by Roman Polanski, at that time one of the hottest of all European directors, and by Robert Evans, the firebrand who had just taken control of Paramount Pictures, Rosemary’s Baby pointed the way to the future of American filmmaking. The American movies of the next decade would be young, hip, urban, cosmopolitan. They wouldn’t shy away from sex, nudity, or four-letter words (all of which Rosemary’s Baby treats with sophisticated matter-of-factness). Nor would they have to earnestly and soberly pay lip service to ‘good American values.’ Rosemary’s Baby is not only a blasphemous parody of the story of the virgin birth, as many have noted; it’s also a perverse black comedy, a religious joke in which the triumph of evil over good is treated ironically.
“Rosemary’s Baby also helped bring the horror film up to date. No more monsters lurching through foggy graveyards: Polanski’s witches look like the little old lady in the apartment next door, and their victims are modern Manhattanites who keep up with all the latest fads and fashions. The film’s terrors are grounded in an everyday realism. Guy appears in TV commercials for Yamaha motorcycles and reads The New Yorker; Rosemary gets a trendy haircut at Vidal Sassoon and gushes about seeing The Fantasticks off-Broadway. The villains of this newly fallen world don’t chase their victims through Gothic ruins; they ensnare them using manipulation and passive aggression. Next to the quietly menacing insinuations of Minnie and Roman Castavet (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer), Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster look as quaint as children’s Halloween costumes.
“It’s the wicked ironical tone, though, that most sets Rosemary’s Baby apart from the horror films of the 1950s and early 60s (the schlockiest of which had been directed, incidentally, by Rosemary’s Baby’s co-producer, William Castle). Polanski’s movie is leavened by a sardonic sense of humor about itself, something absent from many earlier horror films as well as many later ones, even those it inspired. Where The Exorcist, for example, takes itself so seriously that it may strike viewers as unintentionally funny, Rosemary’s Baby sees the weird humor in its ludicrous premise, effectively inviting the audience in on its joke (the butt of which turns out to be poor unsuspecting Rosemary herself). This is perhaps why Rosemary’s Baby has aged so well over the decades, and why it remains so perennially relevant. It dares us to imagine the worst—and to laugh in horror at its coming true.” ~ Ian Scott Todd
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