Since I have never been particularly superstitious, even as a young child, I am not too fond of supernatural horror films involving the devil, demons, demonic possession, and related ungodly ingredients that are oftentimes painfully cliche, generic, and just plain downright banal when depicted cinematically by the mostly atheistic and Zionistic unbelievers of unholywood. Indeed, I find nude scenes of bloated Jewess Lena Dunham to be infinitely more horrifying than a demonically possessed Linda Blair stabbing her jailbait snatch with a crucifix in William Friedkin’s classic William Peter Blatty adaptation The Exorcist (1973). Likewise, I find it simply impossible to find little dude Damien of The Omen (1976) to be even remotely ominous, but I would not be surprised if Judaic director Richard Donner has a certain unsettling feeling when he thinks of Anglo-Saxon children, as he certainly would not be the first or the last Hebraic filmmaker to direct a film where a cute Nordic kid is supposed to be the personification of absolute evil. Undoubtedly, the most blatant and famous example of a Jewish filmmaker mocking white Christians and their beliefs is indubitably Rosemary’s Baby (1968) directed by Roman Polanski and based on the best-selling horror novel of the same name by fellow chosenite Ira Levin. Produced by Hebraic carny-like schlockmeister filmmaker William Castle (House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler) and made under the guidance of Judaic Paramount Pictures executive Robert Evans (real name Robert J. Shapera), the classic horror film is as kosher as a Jewish wedding in terms of the most important people behind it, which makes perfect sense when one considers that it is about an overly sweet and sensitive yet oftentimes awfully annoying Catholic girl that literally gets fucked by the devil and inseminated with his sinister seed. Starring insufferable archetypical white liberal moron Mia Farrow—a woman that should probably go down in history as the originator of the grotesque virtue-signaling-based Hollywood trend of adopting child of different races from around the world as if they are accessories—with the sort of vomit-worthy hipster chic dyke haircut that is quite typical among bourgeois leftist feminist bitches nowadays, the film is almost like a parable about the nefarious (post)counterculture influence of Jews on the seemingly hopelessly naive and impressionable white middleclass, especially young and dumb WASP debutantes, but that does not mean it is not a virtually immaculate horror classic that it is probably the best that the (sub)genre has to offer.
Until yesterday, the last time I saw Rosemary's Baby was nearly a decade ago with an ex-girlfriend, who is incidentally currently pregnant (quite unlike Farrow’s character, there is no way she could give birth to anything resembling a demon child), so naturally my thoughts on and appreciation of the film has changed somewhat over the past ten years or so. Notable for being Polanski’s first adaptation of a novel and not an original story made in collaboration with his longtime co-writer Gérard Brach, the film might be looked at as the director’s first piece of for-hire hack work were it not so readily apparent that he put himself completely into the film’s screenplay and seemingly immaculate direction (notably, male lead John Cassavetes, who butted heads with Polanski throughout the production, would later state regarding the director, “You can't dispute the fact that he's an artist, but yet you have to say ROSEMARY'S BABY is not art.”). Although it might be fucked up to say on retrospect, the film feels so innately and even smugly ‘evil’ that it almost seems like an act of twisted fate that his wife Sharon Tate and unborn child were brutally murdered by members of the so-called Manson Family not long after its release (at the very least, this fact only adds to the film's potency).
While people have accused Polanski of being a crypto-Satanist of sorts despite his glaring nihilistic sympathies, Rosemary's Baby is certainly a rare film where the viewer finds it hard to root for the all-too-sweet Catholic girl protagonist when the Satanic antagonists are so much more charming, worldly, elegant, and mild-mannered. In fact, Ethan Mordden would go so far to argue in his classic text Medium Cool: The Movies of the 1960s (1990), “Even worse, because she is powerless, is the heroine of Roman Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY (19680), who drives the public into crazes with her dithering and wondering. All praise to Mia Farrow for fulfilling the director's intentions—for he obviously does not want us to identify, even sympathize with, Rosemary, one of the film's very few characters who is not a full-fledged ghoul. Farrow winces, whines, and withers, but she can't stand up and say no [...] Polanski is rooting for the devil. A year before the infamous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont and the climax of rock-as-demonism, the director says, this is what the times favor; this is where we have landed. We like the darkness. We sing the monster.”
Not surprisingly, in 2003 Judaic source writer Ira Levin would complain in regard to his belief that the film and his source novel inspired religious fanaticism, “Lately, I’ve had a new worry. The success of ROSEMARY’S BABY inspired EXORCISTS and OMENS and lots of et ceteras. Two generations of youngsters have grown to adulthood watching depictions of Satan as a living reality. Here’s what I worry about now: if I hadn’t pursued an idea for a suspense novel almost forty years ago, would there be quite as many religious fundamentalists around today?” Of course, Levin's remark reeks of the short of repugnantly smug Jewish leftist anti-Christian arrogance that has turned academia, various art movements, and ‘Western’ culture in general into what might be best described as a putrid rotting dead horse that needs to be, at the very least, buried deep in mountains of manure. While the film makes brief reference to Nietzsche in a scene where titular female protagonist looks at a magazine with a cover that reads, “Is God Dead?,” the German philosopher did not delight in the prospect as he was afraid that it would lead to collective nihilism and ultimately the death of the Occident.
While people have accused Polanski of being a crypto-Satanist of sorts despite his glaring nihilistic sympathies, Rosemary's Baby is certainly a rare film where the viewer finds it hard to root for the all-too-sweet Catholic girl protagonist when the Satanic antagonists are so much more charming, worldly, elegant, and mild-mannered. In fact, Ethan Mordden would go so far to argue in his classic text Medium Cool: The Movies of the 1960s (1990), “Even worse, because she is powerless, is the heroine of Roman Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY (19680), who drives the public into crazes with her dithering and wondering. All praise to Mia Farrow for fulfilling the director's intentions—for he obviously does not want us to identify, even sympathize with, Rosemary, one of the film's very few characters who is not a full-fledged ghoul. Farrow winces, whines, and withers, but she can't stand up and say no [...] Polanski is rooting for the devil. A year before the infamous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont and the climax of rock-as-demonism, the director says, this is what the times favor; this is where we have landed. We like the darkness. We sing the monster.”
Not surprisingly, in 2003 Judaic source writer Ira Levin would complain in regard to his belief that the film and his source novel inspired religious fanaticism, “Lately, I’ve had a new worry. The success of ROSEMARY’S BABY inspired EXORCISTS and OMENS and lots of et ceteras. Two generations of youngsters have grown to adulthood watching depictions of Satan as a living reality. Here’s what I worry about now: if I hadn’t pursued an idea for a suspense novel almost forty years ago, would there be quite as many religious fundamentalists around today?” Of course, Levin's remark reeks of the short of repugnantly smug Jewish leftist anti-Christian arrogance that has turned academia, various art movements, and ‘Western’ culture in general into what might be best described as a putrid rotting dead horse that needs to be, at the very least, buried deep in mountains of manure. While the film makes brief reference to Nietzsche in a scene where titular female protagonist looks at a magazine with a cover that reads, “Is God Dead?,” the German philosopher did not delight in the prospect as he was afraid that it would lead to collective nihilism and ultimately the death of the Occident.
After recently re-watching the film, it was apparent to me that Rosemary’s Baby is almost a satire of irrational Christian fears as written and directed by someone that seems like they would smile at the prospect of a devil defiling a pedomorphic Catholic girl, but I guess one should not expect anything less from a filmmaker that has a self-confessed affection for much younger women and thus can personally relate to such displays of ungodly carnality. Indeed, ultimately in the end, the cutesy yet unintentionally kooky female protagonist learns to ‘love the devil’ (or at least his half-human bastard son) and the Satanists prevail and proudly declare, “God is dead! Satan lives!” in great megalomaniacal triumph. Of course, such a scenario is probably quite satisfying to Jews who believe that Christians think of them as ‘Christ-killers.’ In fact, the only thing that could make the film more immaculate in terms of its elegantly executed contempt for Christendom is if it was produced by a studio named the Synagogue of Satan. Whilst one could argue that the film is poking fun at old school ‘antisemitic’ tropes about Jews using Christian babies for satanic rituals, it is quite obvious that Polanski takes great glee in depicting these stylishly sinister scenarios. In that sense, Levin is not too far off when speculating that the film influenced Christians to get more militant, as Rosemary’s Baby is, in many ways, more incriminating regarding the sinister influence on Hebraic Hollywood than even the most sophisticated of white nationalist oriented propaganda pieces. Of course, the fact that Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey—a Jewish carny that plagiarized a good portion of his atheistic philosophy of self-worship from the writings of Russian Jewess Ayn Rand—made up an enduring myth that he worked as both a technical consultant for the satanic rituals and acted in an uncredited cameo role as Satan only adds to the film's satanic Jewish cred.
The virtual stereotype for the helpless white bourgeois princess, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) made her first big mistake when she married a scheming swarthy hack actor named Guy (John Cassavetes) that absurdly believes that acting in television is where “the artistic thrill” is at, thus underscoring his insincerity and lack of values and moral principles. Of course, Guy is more of a con-artist than an artist but his young wifey is too much of an airheaded sweetheart to realize that. Quite unbeknownst to the tragically naïve protagonist, her sleazy hubby is willing to play cuckold to the devil himself just so that he can get his acting career started. Notably, at the beginning of the film, Rosemary and Guy are depicted making love in the most soulless and mechanical fashion imaginable as if it were a chore in a scene that really highlights the sorry sham that is their marriage, but I guess one should not expect anything less in a glaringly mismatched relationship where the wife resembles a sort of androgynous Virgin Mary and the husband seems like a terribly desperate and morally bankrupt Jewish used car salesmen with a tendency towards banging intoxicated guidettes. Against the sound advice of her ambiguously gay ex-landlord Hutch (Maurice Evans)—a queen-ish fellow that curiously writes “stories for boys” yet seems to lack any interest in any traditionally masculine subjects—Rosemary and her husband move into an apartment complex with the unflattering nickname ‘Black Bramford’ with a dubious history that includes Victorian cannibal sisters, devil worshipers, and mysterious dead infants wrapped in newspapers, among other things that people do not typically associate with a perfect bourgeois apartment building.
Not long after moving in, Rosemary is excited to befriend a gorgeous goombah babe named Terry Gionoffrio (Victoria Vetri under the pseudonym ‘Angela Dorian’ in a small role where she humorously complains that people think she looks like Victoria Vetri), only to find her new gal pal not long after with her blood and brains splattered across concrete as a result of a dubious suicide that involved her falling seven floors from a Bramford apartment window. Terry was an ex-junky that was taken in by Rosemary’s exceedingly eccentric elderly neighbors Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevets (Sidney Blackmer) who supposedly treated her as the “child they never had.” Of course, as the viewer eventually speculates, Terry was originally the Castevet’s choice for the carrier of Satan’s half-human spawn, but now that Rosemary has moved in they have a much better choice for Satan's female cattle. After all, Terry’s drug and STD ridden body was surely not fit to produce the ungodly spawn of the Prince of Darkness. Somewhat strangely, Rosemary is not too disturbed when Minnie—a perniciously pushy little pipsqueak bitch that openly admits that she never takes no for an answer—gives her a supposed good luck charm containing a dubious herb named ‘tannis root’ that Terry was wearing when she died horrifically under questionable circumstances. Despite being repulsed by the putrid smell of tannis root, Rosemary is a good little follower and agrees to wear the antique necklace, at least until she realizes that it is really a satanic good luck charm of sorts that really contains a evil fungus called ‘Devil's Pepper.’
Not long after moving in, Rosemary is excited to befriend a gorgeous goombah babe named Terry Gionoffrio (Victoria Vetri under the pseudonym ‘Angela Dorian’ in a small role where she humorously complains that people think she looks like Victoria Vetri), only to find her new gal pal not long after with her blood and brains splattered across concrete as a result of a dubious suicide that involved her falling seven floors from a Bramford apartment window. Terry was an ex-junky that was taken in by Rosemary’s exceedingly eccentric elderly neighbors Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castevets (Sidney Blackmer) who supposedly treated her as the “child they never had.” Of course, as the viewer eventually speculates, Terry was originally the Castevet’s choice for the carrier of Satan’s half-human spawn, but now that Rosemary has moved in they have a much better choice for Satan's female cattle. After all, Terry’s drug and STD ridden body was surely not fit to produce the ungodly spawn of the Prince of Darkness. Somewhat strangely, Rosemary is not too disturbed when Minnie—a perniciously pushy little pipsqueak bitch that openly admits that she never takes no for an answer—gives her a supposed good luck charm containing a dubious herb named ‘tannis root’ that Terry was wearing when she died horrifically under questionable circumstances. Despite being repulsed by the putrid smell of tannis root, Rosemary is a good little follower and agrees to wear the antique necklace, at least until she realizes that it is really a satanic good luck charm of sorts that really contains a evil fungus called ‘Devil's Pepper.’
While his wife Minnie is the worst extreme of the nagging and perennially scheming Jewish mother (even though she is technically not a mother), Roman is an elegant quasi-Svengali-like old fart that knows how to play the game when it comes to manipulating people, especially to the benefit of his infernal god, though he is not afraid to express his anti-Christian sentiments. Indeed, Roman somewhat disturbs Rosemary not long after they meet by stating things like, “No Pope ever visits a city where the newspaper are on strike” and “You don’t need to have respect for him [The Pope] because he pretends that he is holy.” Still, as a confused lapsed Catholic that has bad memories regarding frigid old nuns, Rosemary seems like easy prey for Roman's heretical influence. When Rosemary’s rather wise pal Hutch randomly meets Roman, he immediately becomes suspicious of him, especially due to his, “pierced ears and piercing eyes.” Rather sadly, Hutch is the only person that seems to truly have Rosemary’s best interests in mind, but he is no match for the manipulative majesty of Roman, aggressive scheming of Minnie, or overbearing bullshitting of Guy.
Like Rosemary, Guy wants to have children, albeit for the totally wrong reasons. Of course, as the film reveals, Rosemary could not have picked a worst time to have her first child. While Rosemary believes that her first pregnancy has been planned by her and Guy, Roman and Minnie have already hatched a pernicious well thought out plan to have her procreate with Beelzebub. When Guy lands a respectable acting role as a result of the original actor going blind under mysterious circumstances, he becomes inordinately overjoyed and absolutely delights Rosemary by telling her that he wants to have a baby. Unbeknownst to Rosemary, Guy has made a pact with Castevets to allow Satan to fuck and impregnate her in return for a successful acting career. Indeed, Guy is such a pathetic narcissist that he made a deal to become Satan’s cuckold in return for the shallowest of careers. There is no doubt that Guy does not truly love Rosemary, who seems to be completely blind to this lack of love, at least at first. As his tasteless choice of trade and phony charismatic personality hint, Guy loves himself and only himself and he certainly has no qualms about making a quasi-Faustian pact that involves sacrificing his wife's fresh womb to be a demonic baby incubator the Devil himself to advance his acting career. In fact, the morning after he has Rosemary drugged and raped by Satan, he lies to her and states that he fucked her in her sleep, even jokingly describing it as, “Kinda fun in a necrophile sort of way.”
To make sure that Rosemary was properly knocked out so that Satan could penetrate her Catholic cunt without even the slightest bit of resistance, Guy forced her to eat chocolate mousse that was drugged by Minnie even though she complained it had a “chalky under taste.” While Rosemary remembers being defiled by something inhuman, she ultimately rights off the satanic rape as merely a bad dream even though her body is covered in claw marks as if someone roughly violated her during sex. Needless to say, Rosemary's incessant refusal to ever say “no” to the satanic conspirators becomes increasingly aggravating to the point where the viewer eventually finds it nearly impossible to sympathize with her plight. Indeed, not unlike the stupid rich WASP college student that buys into all the propaganda of largely Jewish cultural Marxists, feminists, LGBT agitators, and other scum, Rosemary hardly deserves pity as she is a feeble-minded individual that is a mindless traitor to both herself and her ancestral faith.
Like Rosemary, Guy wants to have children, albeit for the totally wrong reasons. Of course, as the film reveals, Rosemary could not have picked a worst time to have her first child. While Rosemary believes that her first pregnancy has been planned by her and Guy, Roman and Minnie have already hatched a pernicious well thought out plan to have her procreate with Beelzebub. When Guy lands a respectable acting role as a result of the original actor going blind under mysterious circumstances, he becomes inordinately overjoyed and absolutely delights Rosemary by telling her that he wants to have a baby. Unbeknownst to Rosemary, Guy has made a pact with Castevets to allow Satan to fuck and impregnate her in return for a successful acting career. Indeed, Guy is such a pathetic narcissist that he made a deal to become Satan’s cuckold in return for the shallowest of careers. There is no doubt that Guy does not truly love Rosemary, who seems to be completely blind to this lack of love, at least at first. As his tasteless choice of trade and phony charismatic personality hint, Guy loves himself and only himself and he certainly has no qualms about making a quasi-Faustian pact that involves sacrificing his wife's fresh womb to be a demonic baby incubator the Devil himself to advance his acting career. In fact, the morning after he has Rosemary drugged and raped by Satan, he lies to her and states that he fucked her in her sleep, even jokingly describing it as, “Kinda fun in a necrophile sort of way.”
To make sure that Rosemary was properly knocked out so that Satan could penetrate her Catholic cunt without even the slightest bit of resistance, Guy forced her to eat chocolate mousse that was drugged by Minnie even though she complained it had a “chalky under taste.” While Rosemary remembers being defiled by something inhuman, she ultimately rights off the satanic rape as merely a bad dream even though her body is covered in claw marks as if someone roughly violated her during sex. Needless to say, Rosemary's incessant refusal to ever say “no” to the satanic conspirators becomes increasingly aggravating to the point where the viewer eventually finds it nearly impossible to sympathize with her plight. Indeed, not unlike the stupid rich WASP college student that buys into all the propaganda of largely Jewish cultural Marxists, feminists, LGBT agitators, and other scum, Rosemary hardly deserves pity as she is a feeble-minded individual that is a mindless traitor to both herself and her ancestral faith.
Undoubtedly, one of the most overtly Jewish aspects of the film is that Rosemary is coerced by the Castevets into going to see an arrogant satanic obstetrician named Dr. Abraham Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy) after she gets pregnant. Aside from developing a compulsion to eat raw meat, Rosemary suffers great stomach pain after getting pregnant and suspects something is extremely wrong, but super smug semite Dr. Sapirstein arrogantly discounts her complaints and endorses her drinking a strange cocktail that is prepared by Minnie of all people instead of taking normal pregnancy vitamins. Like with virtually every evil character she encounters, Rosemary seems to have next to nil intuition into the true insidious nature of Dr. Sapirstein until it is much too late, which is rather depressing since she is a genuinely nice and trusting little lady that, to her ultimately rather tragic detriment, seems to be willing to give virtually anyone the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, Rosemary does not realizes that the Castevets are members of a witch coven until she has unwittingly caused her homey Hutch to fall into a coma and eventually croak as a result of having a spell put on him by the elderly Satanists. Clearly realizing that he might be a threat to their satanic agenda, Roman put a spell on Hutch not long after first meeting him. Before croaking, Hutch managed to procure an antique book entitled All Of Them Witches that reveals that Roman is from a satanic family and that his name is really an anagram for his real Satanic name ‘Steven Marcato.’ To add insult to injury, Roman names Rosemary’s half-breed demonic child ‘Adrian’ in tribute to his infamous bigwig Satanist father Adrian Marcato, who has an entire chapter dedicated to him in All Of Them Witches.
While Rosemary makes a desperate attempt to convince another Jewish obstetrician named Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin) into helping her give birth lest her child be stolen by satanic conspirators, the good doctor naturally does not believe her rather wild and fantastic story and thus betrays her by informing Guy and Sapirstein about her whereabouts. Surely one of the most sinister Judaic characters in cinema history, Sapirstein even dares to blackmail Rosemary by threatening to have her committed to a mental institution if she continues to complain about a satanic conspiracy against her. In short, Rosemary—a genuinely sweet and sensitive girl that could make for a truly devout Christian were she not married to a scumbag and mixed up with such malevolent characters—is no match for any of the Satanists in terms of sheer will power, intellect, and moral bankruptcy. In the end, Rosemary is horrified to discover that her baby, which she was told was dead, has the eyes of Satan, yet Roman manages to coerce her into being the demonic being’s mother in what ultimately proves to be a wickedly warped twist ending where Satan is glorious and a sweet and sensitive young Catholic girl learns to love her satanic bastard progeny that was sired via ritualistic phantasmagoric rape. Of course, this scenario ultimately not much different from the one depicted in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up (2007) where singularly obnoxious Judaic lard ass Seth Rogen portrays a Hebraic slacker that proudly engages in Rassenschande with a blonde Shiksa portrayed by Katherine Heigl.
While Rosemary makes a desperate attempt to convince another Jewish obstetrician named Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin) into helping her give birth lest her child be stolen by satanic conspirators, the good doctor naturally does not believe her rather wild and fantastic story and thus betrays her by informing Guy and Sapirstein about her whereabouts. Surely one of the most sinister Judaic characters in cinema history, Sapirstein even dares to blackmail Rosemary by threatening to have her committed to a mental institution if she continues to complain about a satanic conspiracy against her. In short, Rosemary—a genuinely sweet and sensitive girl that could make for a truly devout Christian were she not married to a scumbag and mixed up with such malevolent characters—is no match for any of the Satanists in terms of sheer will power, intellect, and moral bankruptcy. In the end, Rosemary is horrified to discover that her baby, which she was told was dead, has the eyes of Satan, yet Roman manages to coerce her into being the demonic being’s mother in what ultimately proves to be a wickedly warped twist ending where Satan is glorious and a sweet and sensitive young Catholic girl learns to love her satanic bastard progeny that was sired via ritualistic phantasmagoric rape. Of course, this scenario ultimately not much different from the one depicted in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up (2007) where singularly obnoxious Judaic lard ass Seth Rogen portrays a Hebraic slacker that proudly engages in Rassenschande with a blonde Shiksa portrayed by Katherine Heigl.
Not surprisingly, Rosemary’s Baby is a favorite film among many real-life ‘Satanists,’ including the Church of Satan, which officially endorses the film in the eponymous book The Church of Satan by Magistra Blanche Barton as approved by the pseudo-church's founder Magus Anton Szandor LaVey. Additionally, LaVey’s estranged son-in-law Nikolas Schreck—a one-eared Satanist turned Tantric Buddhist that is probably best known as the frontman of the goofy pseudo-deathrock group Radio Werewolf—highly praised the film in his book The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema (2001) where rightly noted, “The film is remarkably free of the clichés that marred previous films of Satanism. To cite only one of the most obvious examples, Castavet’s coven are not bloodthirsty fiends slavering to commit blood sacrifices.” In his book, ex-Satanist Schreck also makes it quite clear that, despite the claims of both various Christian and Satanic groups to the contrary, the film was not the product of genuine devout Satanists, or as he states himself, “ROSEMARY’S BABY became a kind of blueprint for the occult renaissance of the late 1960s, quite unintentionally placing the Hollywood seal of approval on the Black Arts. Putting the cart before the horse, both occultists and Christians of different stripes have looked in the film for hidden magical messages and authentic Satanic lore. Rumors have spread that the film-makers must have sought technical advice for ‘real’ Satanists to imbue the film with such seeming authenticity.” While I have made fun of Schreck in the past, I certainly cannot deny that he probably said it best when he noted regarding the importance of the film in the context of satanic cinema a whole, “The impact of ROSEMARY’S BABY on the Satanic cinema can hardly be overestimated. Its popular success moved the Devil from the margins of the film world to the centre, directly inspiring a tidal wave of diabolical movies that surged around the world for a full decade after its release. One of those rare films that transcends it original beginnings as simple escapist entertainment, it was elevated by its mysterious inner force into its own dark myth. ROSEMARY’S BABY was fortuitously released at exactly the right time, capitalizing on and helping to create the sixties occult revival that it will always be associated with.” While Kenneth Anger is the undoubtedly the greatest occult filmmaker to have ever lived, Polanski certainly deserves the credit for bringing overt left-hand path themes to the mainstream (though Val Lewton surely made a valiant attempt with The Seventh Victim (1943), which was clearly a major influence on Rosemary's Baby).
Aside from being noted by some, including ex-Satanist Schreck, as a sort of allegory for the birth of the Age of Satan (or what Thelemites like Anger describe as the Aeon of Horus), Rosemary’s Baby is also (in)famous for supposedly being a cursed movie, namely due to the Manson Family brutally murdering auteur Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate and unborn child. Aside from that, the film’s Polish musical composer Krzysztof Komeda died in 1969 of more or less the same illness (haematoma of the brain) that the film's character Hutch died after having a spell put on him by the Satanists. Of course, Mia Farrow’s entire post-Rosemary’s Baby life seems to be at least somewhat cursed in various ways. Indeed, aside from the fact that she was married to a purported pedo and had a sick brother that was a convicted gay child molester, Farrow, whose then-hubby Frank Sinatra notably divorced her because she refused to quit Polanski’s film, would later star in a number of rip-off films ranging from Richard Loncraine’s virtually totally unknown UK-Canadian production The Haunting of Julia (1977) aka Full Circle to the dreadful The Omen (2006) remake where she demonstrates a nasty knack for unintentional self-parody. While in Rosemary’s Baby Farrow seems like a genuinely pure and virgin-like beauty that is no match for a coven of evil conniving witches, Farrow would go on to seem like the archetypical psychologically decrepitude white liberal pseudo-intellectual whack-job, hence her dubious marriage to a patently pathetic physical specimen like neurotic Hebraic dork Woody Allen.
Undoubtedly, if I were to pick a song that I believe best sums up the spirit of seemingly accursed auteur Roman Polanski and his films, especially Rosemary’s Baby, The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and The Ninth Gate (1999)—all cinematic works where evil prevails in the end—it would be “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones, even if it is not exactly the sort of song that he would use in one of his films. Indeed, while Polanski’s films reveal that he has extremely pessimistic existentialist tendencies, they also demonstrate that, at least allegorically speaking, he has no problem sympathizing with the plight of Satan, but I guess one would not expect anything less from a Polish Jew that personally witnessed the worst of the Kraków Ghetto as a child and whose mother died in Auschwitz concentration camp, not to mention the fact that he was forced against his will to pose as a Roman Catholic lest her be found out as a Jew and sent to a concentration camp like both of his parents. Of course, not unlike Satan in Rosemary’s Baby, Jewish outsider Polanski impregnated a blonde Aryan beauty, thus making the murder of said blonde Aryan beauty and the dead half-Jewish fetus seem all the more bizarre on retrospect, as if the auteur had been punished by god for his bold cinematic sins. As someone that is not particularly religious, I somehow find the bizarre metaphysical implications of Rosemary’s Baby to be surprisingly intriguing, especially considering that even a carny huckster like William Castle—a man that thrived like no other in terms of being a shameless cinematic smut-peddler—felt severe guilt in regard to producing the film, even writing when his hit satanic flick was receiving Academy Awards, “All my life I had yearned for the applause, approval and recognition of my peers and when the awards were being passed out, I no longer cared. I was at home, very frightened of ROSEMARY’S BABY.” On top of feeling guilty about the spiritual influence of the film, Castle also suffered kidney failure shortly after it was released. To Castle's credit, the horror films that he personally directed like The Tingler (1959) and even his swansong Shanks (1974) are fun and hokey with cartoonish depicts of good and evil and surely not works that celebrate Satan, so it almost seems sickly absurd that he was involved with producing a film that is nothing short of Satanic cinema par excellence.
While there is ample evidence to argue that Rosemary's Baby is a sort of dark crypto-comedy at the expense of Christian true believers, there is denying that it has a singular dark and ominous essence that has yet to be rivaled by any other film. Undoubtedly, it is one of those oh-so rare films that, although I come back to it every couple years, I cannot exactly say that I am a true fan even though I believe that is one of the most subversive, immaculate, and artistically merited that has ever come out of Hollywood. While Polanski once stated, “I no more believed in Satan as evil incarnate than I believed in a personal god; the whole idea conflicted with my rational view of the world,” his sins, life of artistic and monetary success yet strange misfortune, and films certainly seem to contradict this. Indeed, one could also argue that working in Hollywood caused Polanski to lose his soul, or as David Thomson noted in his trusty film reference book The New Biographical Dictionary of Film regarding the auteur's inexplicable decline as a cinematic artist with an unmistakable style, “Once upon a time, it would have seemed impossible for Polanski to stagnate. Yet it has happened. DEATH AND THE MAIDEN and THE NINTH GATE did not seem to belong to him, whereas, once, he had put his stamp on anything and everything. This liberty has not enriched him. There has been no talk of a return to America; and no hint of that music not having to be faced. In Paris, Polanski seems disconsolate, a thumb-twiddler. And while time passes, the mood for his best films is nearly forgotten.” Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Macbeth (1971) and to even some extent The Pianist (2002), but the somewhat flawed The Tenant (1976) aka Le Locataire seems to be the director's last display of unadulterated artistic integrity. As for Rosemary's Baby, it might be adapted from the novel of an obscenely overrated mainstream horror novelist, but it is pure Polanski in a darkly comedic misanthropic sort of fashion that, for better or worse, reminds viewers why people used to oftentimes oftentimes associated Jews and Judaism with Satanism. In other words, I am not surprised that the film was directed by an inordinately artistically gift holocaust survivor.
While there is ample evidence to argue that Rosemary's Baby is a sort of dark crypto-comedy at the expense of Christian true believers, there is denying that it has a singular dark and ominous essence that has yet to be rivaled by any other film. Undoubtedly, it is one of those oh-so rare films that, although I come back to it every couple years, I cannot exactly say that I am a true fan even though I believe that is one of the most subversive, immaculate, and artistically merited that has ever come out of Hollywood. While Polanski once stated, “I no more believed in Satan as evil incarnate than I believed in a personal god; the whole idea conflicted with my rational view of the world,” his sins, life of artistic and monetary success yet strange misfortune, and films certainly seem to contradict this. Indeed, one could also argue that working in Hollywood caused Polanski to lose his soul, or as David Thomson noted in his trusty film reference book The New Biographical Dictionary of Film regarding the auteur's inexplicable decline as a cinematic artist with an unmistakable style, “Once upon a time, it would have seemed impossible for Polanski to stagnate. Yet it has happened. DEATH AND THE MAIDEN and THE NINTH GATE did not seem to belong to him, whereas, once, he had put his stamp on anything and everything. This liberty has not enriched him. There has been no talk of a return to America; and no hint of that music not having to be faced. In Paris, Polanski seems disconsolate, a thumb-twiddler. And while time passes, the mood for his best films is nearly forgotten.” Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Macbeth (1971) and to even some extent The Pianist (2002), but the somewhat flawed The Tenant (1976) aka Le Locataire seems to be the director's last display of unadulterated artistic integrity. As for Rosemary's Baby, it might be adapted from the novel of an obscenely overrated mainstream horror novelist, but it is pure Polanski in a darkly comedic misanthropic sort of fashion that, for better or worse, reminds viewers why people used to oftentimes oftentimes associated Jews and Judaism with Satanism. In other words, I am not surprised that the film was directed by an inordinately artistically gift holocaust survivor.
-Ty E
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