This is no dream, she thought, this is really happening...
Ira Levin isn't concerned about taking things at face value, about what's on the outside, on the surface. His forte is what's skittering, squirming underneath the mask of human nature. Rosemary's Baby is notorious for its Satanism motifs, it being the definitive tale of woman becoming impregnated by Satan himself, but between the lines the real horror isn't the devil --- no, that's to stir the curiosity --- the real horror is the shattering of seemingly docile domesticity. Where the quiet muffles screams. Where the ordinary reveals its odious odor.
Levin is so good at this, masterful even. After reading The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil, I became enamored over his knack for shattering the sense of so-called "normalcy". Nothing is "normal", there isn't such a word, a feeling, and I like that Levin is blunt about that as he wriggles a little subtext into the mix. Little warnings to not trust that a neat suburban neighborhood is tranquil, or that just because Hitler is dead that right-wing Nazism can't be resurrected in his Führer's image. "Horror" as genre isn't associated with Levin, and even the man himself didn't ascribe to being a practitioner of the genre, but I do think he taps into a realistic, naked horror that explores the enduring nature of evil within ordinary settings, the type that can't be considered terrifying at first glance --- well, that is depending on what one considers terrifying.
I'm late to the devil baby party of Rosemary's Baby. A paperback has lounged about my house for years (and wouldn't you know it goes MIA when I want to read it most...), and the book isn't out of print, or difficult to find, just that I admit after partaking in super famous film adaptions first and hearing things such as "this movie is EXACTLY like the book" (see The Shawshank Redemption), that I tend to ignore the source material. I know. I suck. It pains me to even type that I have such a reflex, but Roman Polanski's 1968 film adaptation made such a deep impression on me over the years, to where reading the text felt...redundant.
For me, Rosemary's Baby as a film is ingenious and intriguing for its details. Those tiny, blink-and-you-might-miss-them details that are sprinkled throughout retain a delicious sense of unsettling ambiguity. Polanski is a terrible person (and the gross irony of him directing a film about a woman's rape isn't lost on me...), but he crafted a classic blueprint for domestic horror with this film (...and we will dare not speak of the dismal 1976 TV sequel, Look What Happened To Rosemary's Baby or the even more ill-advised 're-imagined' 2014 miniseries). It raised the bar on taking horror films from the b-movie mire into the mainstream and approaching them from a more psychological perspective where the details mattered. Details that would take on larger, more unnerving forms and meanings of uncertainty to where, by film's end, everything is not what it appears to be --- while being exactly what it appears to be.
I never watch this movie the same way as I did before. I'm always finding something new that I missed, some little quote spoken that takes on new meaning or those fine-tuned little visual details that spring up to change my perspective or question others motives. I know every twist and turn, and of course, the doomed outcome, but it still feels fresh with each viewing, and never am I not trying to warn Rosemary to get away from those meddling neighbors and that shifty-eyed husband of hers. I'm also never not chilled over the fact that a woman's pregnancy --- something that is supposed to be intimate and innocent --- is turned into something so perverse and terrorizing.
Still, without Levin's wonderful text, his attention to every detail from the start, there wouldn't have been this brilliant film affair. Polanski studied Levin's text to the letter to where character ticks, whole dialogues, and even the food that is consumed is replicated on film. It's about as faithful as an adaptation as you'll get, a film that complements the book, extending the terror it has laid bare. The genius Levin flexes in text, (and I repeat) shows that that everything is not what it appears to be, but then sentence by sentence, detail by detail, everything is exactly what it appears to be --- and then the rug is yanked beneath our once stable conscious.
