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Rosemary's
baby
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Movie
| Book
| Author
| Director
& cast
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Book: Rosemary's Baby (1967)
Movie: Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Premise
movie:
"Rosemary's Baby (1968) is Polish director Roman Polanski's first American feature film and his second, scary horror film - following his first disturbing film in English titled Repulsion (1965) - about a mentally-unstable, sexually-terrified woman (Catherine Deneuve) left alone in her apartment. Polanski served as the scriptwriter and based the darkly atmospheric film upon Ira Levin's best-selling novel of the same name. [Levin also wrote another horror tale about voyeurism in a Manhattan apartment building that inspired the film Sliver (1993), starring Sharon Stone.] The film was produced by Paramount Studios and veteran, low-budget horror film maker William Castle, best known for gimmicky, cheesy films such as Mr. Sardonicus (1961), Homicidal (1961), House on Haunted Hill (1958), Macabre (1958), and The Tingler (1959).
The creepy, eerie gothic film is about a young newlywed couple who move into a large, rambling old apartment building in Central Park West, and begin a loving, post-honeymoon period. They become friendly with the eccentric next-door neighbors, an overly-solicitous and intrusive elderly couple (members of a coven), and soon the husband's acting career turns promising. But after a nightmarish dream of making love to a Beast, the paranoid, haunted, and hysterical woman believes herself impregnated so that her baby can be used in the New Yorkers' evil cult rituals. [Polanski deliberately presented the film with enough ambiguity so that the viewer is never quite certain whether Rosemary's experiences are truly supernatural or just fabricated, imaginative hallucinations.] The creepy film ends with the devil's flesh-and-blood baby being cared for by the mother! The incredible irony of the film was that the plot would be similarly played out a year later - Polanski's pregnant actress/wife Sharon Tate would be terrorized and murdered by the strange cult of Charles Manson followers in her Benedict Canyon home.
The big-budget horror film received two Academy Award nominations: one for Polanski's Best Adapted Screenplay, and Ruth Gordon won the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as one of the well-meaning, 'normal' NYC neighbors."
from:
http://www.filmsite.org/rosemhtml
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Premise
book:
"When published in 1967, Rosemary's Baby was one of the first contemporary horror novels to become a national bestseller. Ira Levin's second novel (he went on to write such fine thrillers as A Kiss Before Dying, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil), Rosemary's Baby, remains perhaps his best work. The author's mainstream "this is how it really happened" style undeniably also made the novel his most widely imitated. The plot line is deceptively simple: What if you were a happily married young woman, living in New York, and one day you awoke to find yourself pregnant? And what if your loving husband had--apparently--sold your soul to Satan? And now you were beginning to believe that your unborn child was, in reality, the son of Satan? Levin subtly makes it all totally plausible, unless of course, dear Rosemary--or the reader--can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality! A wonderfully chilling novel, it was later faithfully transformed into an equally unnerving motion picture. In 1997, a sequel was spawned, Son of Rosemary."
from:
http://www.scifan.com/titles/title.asp?TI_titleid=27074
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Author:
"Ira Levin decided on the career of a writer at the age of 15. Educated at the elite Horace Mann school, he went on to two years at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, before transferring to New York University where he majored in philosophy and English. He earned his degree in 1950. In 1953, he was drafted into the Army. Based in Queens, New York, he wrote and produced training films for Uncle Sam, before moving into television, penning scripts for "Lights Out" and "The United States Steel Hour". He made his bright theatre debut at the age of 25 with a stage adaptation of Mac Hyman's "No Time for Sergeants" (1955). He went on to write several plays, including the longest running Broadway mystery to date, "Deathtrap" (1978), and several popular novels."
from:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0505615/bio
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Director:
Roman Polanski
Cast:
Mia Farrow (Rosemary Woodhouse), John Cassavetes (Guy Woodhouse), Ruth Gordon (Minnie Castevet), Sidney Blackmer (Roman Castevet), Maurice Evans (Edward Hutchins), Ralph Bellamy (Dr. Abraham Sapirstein) and others.
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