Clusterhucktober Spooktacular: Rosemary's Baby

In 'Rosemary's Baby,' the devil gets back to the real best trick he ever pulled: gaslighting Eve.

I didn’t grow up watching a lot of scary movies. This had to do with a mix between a conservative Christian upbringing that was skeptical of Halloween and the simple fact that I was a big scaredy cat. My parents didn’t really want me watching scary movies and that was fine by me.

I don’t really remember when things changed, but I’m very into good horror movies now. I say “good horror movies,” because many of them re bad and I think that holds a lot of people back from getting into the genre. If you grew up like I did and didn’t try to get into horror until later, you could be forgiven for thinking all horror movies are disposable, exploitive slop. A lot of them are, but some of them are the best movies you could ever watch. I wish I’d had somebody there to point me through all the forgettable schlock and towards the good stuff. I didn’t. But now you do.

Through the month of October, I’ll be writing about eight different horror movies that I love. These aren’t necessarily my all-time favorites, but I think they’re all good horror movies for people who don’t necessarily like horror movies or, at least, aren’t super experienced with horror movies. And hopefully, they’re movies made by filmmakers who understand and utilize fear towards substantive, meaningful ends.

The Orphanage (2007)

The Shining (1980)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Signs (2002)

It Follows (2014)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Alien (1979)

The VVitch (2015)

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The term “gaslighting” comes from the 1944 movie Gas Light, about a man who dims and brightens his indoor lights and then tries to convince his wife that it’s all in her head. The term became popular because it describes such a common but hard-to-explain form of abuse, something men in particular do to women all the time. Like many of our best words to describe nuanced phenomena, “gaslight” lost all its value when it flooded the market, and you can now hear people use the term “gaslighting” to basically accuse someone of just disagreeing with them. But the thing “gaslight” describes is still very real. A paranoid person might accuse some men of deliberately cheapening the word just to strip women of the simple agency to name something they experience. 

Paranoia is the name of the game in Rosemary’s Baby, a movie in which a woman clings to her ability to objectively interpret reality like a life raft. Rosemary is under siege, being lied to by everyone near her and systemically cut off from those who might tell her the truth. The beautiful life she’s built for herself is being transmogrified into a house of mirrors, and her friends and family are mutating into agents of the devil. Those mysterious scratches she finds on her back after sex with her husband? “Time to trim my nails!” he says. The ugly smell of the good luck charm her neighbors give her? “You’ll get used to it!” They assure her. The excruciating pain in her belly. “Normal part of pregnancy,” her doctor assures her. The looming sense of evil slowly enveloping her life is all in her head. Everyone around her knows it. She nods, but she’s never convinced. “This isn’t a dream,” she finally says. “This is really happening.” 

Gas Light¹ may have birthed the term but, for my money, Rosemary’s Baby is cinema’s finest articulation of the lies we use to keep women in line. It’s one of the best movies ever made, a total masterpiece that pulls you directly into Rosemary’s world and lets you feel her confusion, frustration, fury, helplessness and terror as she sees the walls of her prison go up. It is a generational performance from Mia Farrow, whose transformation from sunny bride to haunted husk is all fraying nerves and collapsing dreams. Until the very end, when Rosemary undergoes a final, unexpected metamorphosis. 

When we first meet Rosemary, she is doing very well. Sure, her husband Guy’s acting career could be going a little better, but she’s a supportive partner and when they decide to sign a lease on their dream apartment, she handwaves the expensive rent away, trusting that Dick’s luck is about to change. She’s more right than she knows.