I was not prepared for this movie. Rosemary's Baby is the first movie that I've watched for Horror Month that actually gave me nightmares, which is something it should be applauded for I suppose. It's atmospheric, creepy, semi-realistic, and extremely suspenseful. I really liked it. Rosemary's Baby is about a couple who move into a new apartment, next to an older couple. From the start of the movie the neighbors appear to be slightly "off" and take a somewhat intrusive interest into their lives. Rosemary and her husband Guy are planning to have a child, and when she finally gets pregnant things take a turn for the demonic. The night her baby is conceived, Rosemary has a very vivid dream where she is surrounded by chanting people while a monster (later revealed to be Satan himself) rapes her. Everyone around her tells her that this vision wasn't real, so she puts it out of her mind. Later on, she is assailed by unending pain for months. Her doctor, who the old couple next door insisted she see, tells her that it's normal, and to keep taking the strange medicine the woman next door is making for her. Rosemary eventually figures out that something is wrong and she tries to escape and consult a different doctor, but she is only kidnapped by her husband, the crazy old couple and her doctor, and confined in her apartment until she gives birth. After waking up, she is told that the child died after being born, but she hears the sound of a baby crying through the wall. Rosemary finds a secret passage to the next apartment hidden in a closet, and then confronts a large group of people including the old people next door and her own husband. It is revealed that they are a satanic witch coven and they used her to birth a spawn of Satan, a child that will wreak havoc on the Earth.
Rosemary's Baby isn't a very conventional horror film. It is very slow and deliberately paced, but masterful in its execution and exposition of the plot. I found it to be riveting because for the majority of the movie, you are kept in the dark and constantly trying to figure out what's happening. It's not until the very end that you really find out who these old people truly are, and for much of the movie it is a definite possibility that Rosemary is quite simply insane. I found Rosemary to be very believable and easy to like as well, Mia Farrow's performance is remarkable and consistent. The hallucinatory sequence where Rosemary is raped by Satan is very well shot and quite disturbing, even if at first you don't believe that it's really happening. Another thing I really liked about this movie is how little gore it had. Watching a movie like this, you kind of expect to see a lot of blood and guts, and Rosemary's Baby has very little of that. It's horrifying in concept, and doesn't need to be explicit to get its scares across. It's scary because the fact of the matter is, people have been practicing witchcraft for centuries and some still do to this day. You know this in the back of your mind when watching the film, and although summoning Satan to spawn a child in a woman may be unrealistic, it's still scary and believable because it's the type of thing that witches might do if they could. The ending is scary in itself because at the end of the film, Rosemary and Satan's child is still alive. The bad guys win in this movie, and that demonic baby is allowed to live. It's even scarier 40 years later because that baby would be grown up by now, and who knows where he is or what he's capable of. It's this kind of lingering thought that makes Rosemary's Baby a successful horror film, and one I definitely plan to watch again.
No comments:
Post a Comment