Year of the Devil

Rating: 10/10 (16 October 2008)

(There are Spoilers) One of the best horror movies ever made with almost no blood or splatters scenes at all with the exception of Terry, Victoria Vetri, jumping, off camera, to her death form the seventh floor of the Bramford Building. "Rosemary' Baby" has to do with the most darkest fears one can conjure up in a movie book as well as in one's own mind; The return of Satan-the Devil-on earth and everything that goes along with him.
It's early October 1965 and the Pope, Pope Paul VI, has made a historical visit to the US and is in the process of giving a sermon, to some 60,000 people, at New York's Yankee Stadium. It's also the time designated by a coven of Devil worshiping witches for the Devil's offspring, to be named Adrian, to be conceived by the unsuspecting and Catholic observant Rosemary Woodhouse, Mia Farrow.
Since Rosemary and her actor husband Guy, John Cassavetes, moved into the creepy Bramford Building they've become very friendly with the elderly couple who lives next door to their apartment Roman and Minnie Castevet, Sidney Blackman & Ruth Roman. Even though Rosemary is not that taken in by the Castevets eccentric and somewhat wired behaviors her husband Guy is. Guy a struggling actor was desperately trying to get a part in a play that the far more talented Donald Baumgart, Tony Curtis, got. After Guy's involvement with the Castevets Baumgart suddenly lost his sight opening the door for another actor to replace him: Guy Woodhouse!
The movie starts to grow and accelerate, together with Rosemary's pregnancy, in both tension as well as curiosity as she becomes very frail and sickly as the day of the "blessed event", June 28, 1966, is soon to arrive. Feeling that something just isn't right Rosmary has been haunted since her night of conception, October 5/6 1965, it that she feels that it's wasn't Guy who fathered her now soon to be born child but the Devil or Satan,played by Clay Tanner, himself!
Despite the movie's many subplots, all centered around Rosemary's pregnancy and birth to her child, the film is never confusing in that they, the subplots, all come together in the film's final and shocking ten or so minutes! The Woodhouse's at first had no idea to what evil existed right at their front doorsteps! Soon they would become in their associations with the Castevets the very central, and rotten, core of it!
It was family friend Edward "Hutch" Hutchins, Maurice Evens, who knew not only the history of the eerie Bramford Building but that of one of its infamous tenants Steven Marcato. It was also that knowledge that lead to Hutch falling into a deep coma that he never came out of!
****SPOILER ALERT**** It was Marcato who was killed by an angry New York mob some 80 years ago for secretly practicing witchcraft! It was also Marcato who had a son who had since changed, or rearranged, his name and became a man of the world as well as, in his many travels, secretly gotten himself involved with the occult like his father did! That person is non other then the Woodhouse's kindly and harmless looking next door neighbor Roman Castevet himself!
Making a pact with the Devil has its price and the price that Guy Woodhouse paid for bringing him, in Guy allowing Satan to rape his wife Rosemary, out of the depths of Hell and into the unsuspecting world above was more that it was worth. Guy's career in both TV and the movies, as well as the theater, took off like a shot but in reality he ended up damned for all eternity. As for poor Rosemany in the end after seeing what her new born son really looked like, and what he represented, it was both her goodness, in Rosemary's Christian beliefs, and maternal instincts that eventually overrode her horror and revulsion in what she was forced, by her husband Guy and the Castevets, to unknowingly participate in. As the movie ends Rosemary is heard humming the lullaby theme of the movie as she's gently and tenderly rocking the "cute" little Devil, her son Adrian, to sleep!