Pain, begone, I will have no more of thee!

Rating: 8/10 (14 April 2016)

Rosemary's Baby is effective horror because it shows so little and suggests so much. Many have mistaken the brief, subliminal flash of the demon eyes near the end as the actual baby's eyes starting back at Rosemary. In reality it is the flashback of Satan himself from her nightmarish memories of the rape. We do not ever actually see the hell-spawn, but are left to imagine its horrific appearance from that classic, spine-chilling line from Farrow: "What have you done to his eyes, you maniacs?!" In the vivid, dreamlike sequence where we first are thrust into the demonic world, the nervous, titillating camera perspective, the sound design and the way the edits jump back and forth do a fantastically eerie job of blurring the boundaries between the vision and reality. In fact the whole experience is handled so deftly by Polanski that we have a half-mind to agree with the worries of Dr Hill and call in support for this poor, deluded woman babbling about witchcraft and cultish conspiracies out to get her.
Beneath the horror we also have the subtext of feminist issues which would seem a lot more apparent in the 60s. Horror has taken many elements of Gothicism but here we have Polanski (diligently sticking to Levin) channelling what Ellen Moers referred to as female Gothic, a little known literary movement depicting female heroines trapped and confined within suffocating spaces. Of course in the nineteenth century this was a reaction to an increasingly challenging and diverse literary sphere - whereas within the context of this film we have the female liberation's movement, and an issue very close to the heart of Rosemary, reproduction. So we have an overly dominant patriarchal force babying and forcing Rosemary into domesticity. She's given strange ailments that render her unable to leave the house, and it is only the strong feminine encouragement of her friends that enables her to stop the treatment. Guy's reaction is of course immediately volatile - Cassavetes' character is above all characterised by a tinge of misogyny. Who else would hand over their wife like property in exchange for fame, fortune and prestige?
Another element that makes Rosemary's Baby so effective is Ruth Gordon's Minnie Castevet. She and her husband's constant flirting in and out of the frame tread a fine line between caring and bothersome until it becomes almost to much to bear for Rosemary. In fact they are almost too nice - we see how Polanski has engineered each social situation to wring every last drop of second hand embarrassment that we too want Minnie to stop bothering them because no one could be so selfless and serving. But wisely it is not taken to absurd extremes - partly because it would be overkill and partly because they want their cult to remain hidden. So she lets herself be waved off after pushing Rosemary to consume the drink soon, and doesn't barge into the party because it would be rude (and suspicious). Gordon never once breaks her doting grandmother routine, and this is key - even in the final, haunting reveal, they are all having a jovial little tea party complete with one jolly member taking pictures, and the normalcy with which they proceed draws Rosemary in. Well, it does have its father's eyes, but surely there's a bit of Rosemary in there too.