Editorials
50 Years Later, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Still Terrifies and Inspires Modern Horror Hits
“This is no dream! This is really happening!”
First released in theaters 50 years ago, on June 12, 1968, Rosemary’s Baby changed horror as we know it today, effectively inspiring a new wave of horror that forever altered the genre and paving the way for major hits like The Exorcist. Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Ira Levin, released just the year before, Rosemary’s Baby won over audiences and critics, earning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Ruth Gordon, and was eventually selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for being historically and culturally significant. Rosemary’s Baby remains an all-time great horror film, but like most trailblazers, the path to forge new territory came with blood, sweat, and tears behind the scenes.
Rosemary’s Baby nearly became an entirely different film before production even began. Hoping to segue into a more prestigious career with Oscar-winning potential, B-movie gimmick horror director William Castle immediately knew Ira Levin’s novel had major potential to give him what he was looking for and mortgaged his home to purchase movie rights. Having a contract with Paramount, he went to them with the pitch to direct. They, however, wanted young up and comer Roman Polanski and offered Castle a producer’s role instead. Backed into a corner, and not wanting to tie up the project financially for years to come, Castle begrudgingly accepted. Castle’s inputs on the film were minor, at least from an artistic standpoint, and his dreams of mainstream respectability were never realized as he suffered from kidney failure soon after the film’s release. Even still, without Castle’s recognition of Levin’s novel about a housewife pregnant with the Antichrist, Rosemary’s Baby wouldn’t exist as we know it.
For his part, Polanski immediately keyed in on the story element that would make Rosemary’s Baby so effective and chilling; deception. Polanski wanted to focus on the story from Rosemary’s perspective only, relying on ambiguity of the supernatural and using it to create an anxiety in the audience. Rosemary, played effectively by Mia Farrow, is the epitome of a ‘50s housewife. Eager to please her husband and eager to have a baby, Rosemary puts the needs of everyone else before hers, especially when her health is at stake. Even when she wakes after that fateful night thinking her husband has raped her, she’s quick to forgive. All the while, ominous signs are around her that things may or may not be all in her head. That Rosemary’s fate is almost never in her own control lends to the overall feeling of anxious helplessness that pervades the narrative; the only two decisions in the film that are entirely her own is her choice to move into the Bramford apartment and to give in to her maternal instincts in the closing moments. Any time Rosemary dares to stand up for herself she’s consistently manipulated by those around her. Those she’s meant to trust. Anyone who does genuinely seek to help Rosemary is quickly eliminated.
Polanski further played with deception in terms of what Satanists look like. These weren’t the Gothic characters, ominous and robed, seen before. These were welcoming neighbors in New York City. Roman and Minnie Castavet were nosy, elderly neighbors who dress their age and bring home-baked goods (albeit drugged). Dr. Sapirstein, her appointed doctor by the Castavets, is renounced in his field; no one would ever suspect that he too is a member of the coven planning to usher in the Antichrist. The opening credits are conveyed via pink cursive over a panning cityscape, a style choice that gives the opposite impression of a horror film. Polanski’s final decision would solidify the film’s greatness; he never showed us the Devil. By refusing to show the audience the Devil, it forever remains etched in the nightmares of imagination.
Despite the ambiguity that would deeply root Rosemary’s journey in psychological terror, it’s no surprise that the film stirred up controversy after release. The Catholic League protested, The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures gave it a condemned rating, and some theaters even banned it from playing. It didn’t stop the film from becoming a money maker at the box office. Rosemary’s Baby-inspired a slew of Satanic horror soon after, but its effects on the genre are much more profound than that. It took the ultimate battle between good versus evil and put it in the seemingly mundane home of a vulnerable housewife. Sweet, eager-to-please Rosemary whose internal struggle with her faith is only barely hinted at became the mother to the Antichrist without her consent. Even 50 years later, that’s still terrifying.
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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