Rosemary's Baby (1968)
The story is simple: Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is coerced by satanists to bear the antichrist, satan’s child. Though the film is light on grotesque images the mood is stifled and terrifying—this is minimalist horror in which the monster we are afraid of is never shown directly. On the other hand (from the latent view) what is most terrifying is shown: Rosemary, not wishing to become pregnant, is coerced by society—husband, parental figures, friends and doctor—to produce a baby and is soon forcefully impregnated. Her psychotic break happens once the baby is born and she falls under the baby’s lurid spell. It is the turn of the screw in Rosemary’s mind between manifest fantasy (satan’s baby) and latent content (unwanted baby) that makes the film so powerful.
And yet apart from the movie’s technical prowess, it has come to dominate the culture in a much further-reaching sprawl of paranoid zeitgeist and celebrity death. The film is often said to be cursed. It has become a weird nexus of hexed serendipities and spiraling bad-vibes that spans outward in a strange pattern depicting in negative nothing less than when the psychedelic promise of the ‘60’s turns into the bad trip of the high weird ‘70s.
Consider these strange facts:
The setting of Rosemary’s Baby is The Dakota, a large renaissance revivalist apartment building on the west side of Central Park in NYC
Just after finishing up the Rosemary’s Baby shoot Mia Farrow would practice transcendental meditation with The Beatles at an ashram in Rishikesh in spring of ‘68 while they wrote the songs for The White Album. This record is considered by some (the Vatican) to be their "satanic" album because of certain lyrics that, when played backwards, reveal satanic slogans; in particular Revolution Number 9. But the song that would really take on its part of the Rosemary curse was Helter Skelter
Meanwhile, evil shaman Charles Manson believed that The White Album prophesied a race war in which racist whites and non-racist whites would kill each other in an apocalypse that Manson would initiate. With a lethal combination of white supremacy, occult mysticism and lots of acid, Charles Manson brainwashed his “family”—a ragtag cult of disillusioned teenagers and paranoid Hollywood outcasts—into believing that murdering celebrities was the catalyst of the end times. Helter Skelter was the anthem for when the Manson Family, hiding in an underground labyrinth of Death Valley caves, would emerge triumphant after the war to rule the nation.
Rosemary’s director Roman Polanski originally wanted his wife Sharon Tate to play Rosemary, but could not get studio approval. She appears in the movie uncredited in a party scene. The movie was still in theaters when she was murdered in her home (along with four others) by the Manson Family on the night of the 8th of August 1969. This is the moment when the psychotic potential of psychedelics (acid in particular) would be made real and terrifying. The psychedelic dream of the ‘60s would die with Sharon Tate; she was eight and a half months pregnant. On the refrigerator scrawled in the victim’s blood were the words: “Healter Skelter.”
But even as these murders broke the continuity between eras and established a new terrible mood, the Rosemary curse was still active. John Lennon (who had declared for all time that The Beatles were bigger than Jesus) was shot four times in the back by Beatles super-fan Mark David Chapman on December 8th 1980 in the street outside of where he lived with Yoko Ono: The Dakota building.
