I wasn’t excited to have to watch this movie. Given, it was the perfect type of flick for my Wednesday movie—iconic, old, something I’d always meant to watch—but I thought it would be dull. It’s directed by Roman Polanski who, whether you know his stuff or not, you naturally consider to be more than capable at his day job. But I thought he’d take what was intended to be a horror movie and strip all the fun from it, make it about something else entirely, like social elitism or xenophobia. I was absolutely wrong. It’s a very conventional horror movie, and it’s as scary as the damn devil.
Whether or not you’ve seen it, you probably know what it’s about, or at least how it all turns out: a young newly wedded woman discovers that her neighbours are Satanists and they’ve managed to impregnate her with the devil’s seed. This is why I didn’t think I’d like it very much: if the ending is what makes the movie so famous and that’s already been spoiled for you going in, then the journey there probably isn’t all that interesting (i.e. Angel Heart, The Village). But it was entirely interesting, and I enjoyed this one more than any of the Wednesday movies so far.
What’s so great about it is that you constantly doubt whether Rosemary’s creepy neighbours are in fact evil-loving worshipers of the devil, or just a bunch of nosy old beotches. The effect is sort of lessened when you know the outcome, but it’s still effective. Up to the very end, you’re made to think that she’s not just paranoid but actually nuts. And then, then, when she discovers the coven and her husband all together, and there’s a black crib with an upside down cross hanging over it, and all these old people start shouting “Hail Satan!”—it’s holy shit creepy, people. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be the first audience to watch this back in 1968. I would have thrown up with fright, and I don’t scare easy.
The script was based on a novel by Ira Levin, whose other claim to fame is The Stepford Wives, which I read last year. It turns out he’s essentially written the same book twice. Young couple moves to a new [apartment/town.] Neighbours are so friendly as to be off-putting. The husband falls in with the [old guy upstairs/local men’s club.] Wife starts become suspicious of neighbours. Friends of wife [get killed/ are turned into robots] one by one until she’s all alone. Wife digs deeper into the mystery and learns the truth: [Satan gave her the high hard one/the local men’s club turned their wives into hot, subservient robots.] Things turn out badly for Wife. Fin.
I think Ira Levin set the template for Stephen King because there’s a lot of King-like elements in those two works (or rather a lot of Levin-like elements in King's seven-hundred and eighty-two novels). The main difference being, in a King novel, the protagonist generally wins in the end. Not so much with Levin.
Comments
I stick with my original comment.
However, I will add this:
Dave, good review. I remember watching this when I was too young. It scared the crap out of me too.
You totally spoiled that guy's entry for me. I totally thought he'd written his epic poem completely spontaneously, so moved was he by my review. I also thought that he was the one who wrote that "to everything there is a season" bit in the bible.
... that, and he takes five thousand pages to come around to wrapping it up. Christ, that guy can yammer.
>> I also thought that he was the one who wrote that
>> "to everything there is a season" bit in the bible.
> Come on. We all know that Reay wrote that.
This is true, though it's been watered down and misrepresented like you cannot imagine since then. It was originally an entire tract, and commented on given summer fashions for women, God must be male and must want other males to be really, really happy. But it went on quite a bit, citing specific women of the time, and such.
Really, you can hardly boil it down to one sentence and have it mean the same thing.
And don't even get me started on the royalty fees I haven't seen in a couple'thousand years of top ten sales...