Rosemary's
Baby (1968) 136 min.
screenplay by Roman Polanski, based
on the novel byIra Levin
directed by Roman Polanski
 Some
evil walks in the front door and announces itself boldly and unambiguously.
It is easy to identify--an external force, a villanous outsider--the stuff
of classic horror. But there is another type of evil. The kind
that sneaks in the back door, less conspicuous, less precise. It
is not a misshapen monster lurking in the shadows, leaping at us from dark
corners. It is an evil that resides in our homes--in spic and span
kitchens, in our neighbors’ living rooms, in our own bed. It is the
exploration of this everyday evil that makes Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror
classic Rosemary’s Baby (based on Ira Levin’s novel) more chilling
and enduring than many of its genre cousins.
Through the use of visual compositions and images that often blur the lines of fantasy and reality, Polanski creates a paranoid universe in which Satan’s evil is diffused in everyday existence. With his veteran cinematographer William Fraker, Polanski presents a chilling portrait of motherhood, domesticity, marital relations and modern urban life. It is not what the camera reveals, but what it taunts us with that creates the film’s throbbing tension. Polanski’s camera constantly teases us with its claustrophobic spaces and unsettling compositions -- characters are often framed in the confinement of doorways or obscured by partitions. Neighbor Minnie Castevet’s telephone conversation, for example, becomes more menacing because we do not fully see her; the baby’s monstrousness is more horrific because the restrained camera keeps him hidden in the black-draped cradle. And in true Polanski style, the film’s darkness is injected wtih small doses of humor and everyday concerns--Minnie, for example, stooping to retrieve the knife from her hardwood floor and fussing over the nick it left, in the midst of the climactic showdown between Rosemary and the coven of Satanic in-laws. Polanski once said, “I like shadows in the movies. I don’t like them in life.” Rosemary’s Baby acknowledges the shadows, but it is one of cinema’s most effective expressions of the evil that lurks in the light. Film essay by Francine J. Sanders, a
professor of film at Columbia College in Chicago, IL. She has an
M.A. in Cinema from Northwestern University.
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