And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
"It's genuinely funny, yet it's also scary, especially for young women: it plays on their paranoid vulnerabilities... Mia Farrow is enchanting in her fragility: she's just about perfect for her role."
Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” is a brooding, macabre film, filled with the sense of unthinkable danger. Strangely enough it also has an eerie sense of humor almost until the end. It is a creepy film and a crawly film, and a film filled with things that go bump in the night. It is very good.
As everyone must have heard by now, the movie is based on Ira Levin’s novel about modern-day witches and demons. But it is much more than just a suspense story; the brilliance of the film comes more from Polanski’s direction, and from a series of genuinely inspired performances, than from the original story.
Although I haven’t read Levin’s novel, I’m informed that he works in the conventional suspense mode. We meet Rosemary and her husband and the couple next door. We identify with Rosemary during her pregnancy, sharing her doubts and fears, But when the ending comes, I’m told, it is an altogether unexpected surprise.
Polanski doesn’t work this way. He gives the audience a great deal of information early in the story, and by the time the movie’s halfway over we’re pretty sure what’s going on in that apartment next door. When the conclusion comes, it works not because it is a surprise but because it is horrifyingly inevitable. Rosemary makes her dreadful discovery, and we are wrenched because we knew what was going to happen–and couldn’t help her.
This is why the movie is so good. The characters and the story transcend the plot. In most horror films, and indeed in most suspense films of the Alfred Hitchcock tradition, the characters are at the mercy of the plot. In this one, they emerge as human beings actually doing these things.
The best thing that can be said about the film, I think, is that it works. Polanski has taken a most difficult situation and made it believable, right up to the end. In this sense, he even outdoes Hitchcock. Both “Rosemary’s Baby” and Hitchcock’s classic “Suspicion” are about wives, deeply in love, who are gradually forced to suspect the most sinister and improbable things about their husbands.
Roman Polanski was notoriously meticulous on set, often insisting on specific lenses to create a sense of claustrophobia. He famously used wide-angle lenses in tight spaces, which distorted the rooms just enough to make the walls of the Bramford feel like they were closing in on Rosemary.
This film is also a masterclass in off-screen sound. Much of the horror is conveyed through muffled chanting heard through apartment walls or the scraping of furniture in the unit next door. By denying the audience a visual of the "conspiracy" until the very final moments, Polanski builds a level of tension that a more graphic film might lose.
Contextual Connections
If the psychological dread of Rosemary's Baby resonates with you, it is considered the first installment in Polanski's unofficial "Apartment Trilogy," which explores themes of isolation and mental collapse within a single residence:
Repulsion (1965): A more surreal, black-and-white look at a woman’s descent into schizophrenia while alone in a London flat.
The Tenant (1976): A Kafkaesque story where a man becomes obsessed with the previous occupant of his new apartment, eventually losing his own identity.
Behind the Scenes: Fact vs. Legend
The production was famously troubled, adding to the film’s "cursed" reputation:
The Divorce: During filming, Mia Farrow was served divorce papers by Frank Sinatra, who reportedly wanted her to quit the production to join him on his own film set. Her fragile, gaunt appearance in the latter half of the movie was partly due to the genuine stress she was under.
The Raw Liver Scene: In an era before strict craft services or safety protocols, the vegetarian Farrow actually ate raw calf's liver for a scene to ensure her reaction of revulsion and hunger was authentic.
The Bramford: The exterior of the building is actually The Dakota in New York City. Its gothic architecture became so synonymous with the film that it added a layer of dark celebrity to the building long before other tragic events occurred there.
The Recent Prequel: Apartment 7A (2024)
This is the most recent attempt to bridge the lore.
The Focus: It tells the story of Terry Gionoffrio, the young woman Rosemary briefly meets in the laundry room at the beginning of the 1968 film (who supposedly died by suicide).
The Plot: It explores how Terry ended up at the Bramford and her own dealings with the Castevets before Rosemary arrived. It acts as a direct narrative lead-in to the start of the original movie.
The Composer: Krzysztof Komeda
The score for the original film was composed by Krzysztof Komeda, a renowned Polish jazz pianist and composer. He was a frequent collaborator of the director during the 1960s, known for his ability to blend avant-garde jazz with traditional cinematic tension.
Key Musical Elements
The Main Theme: The most famous piece from the soundtrack is the opening lullaby, titled "Sleep Safe and Warm." * The Vocals: In a haunting creative choice, the lullaby is actually sung by the lead actress, Mia Farrow. Her soft, slightly off-key humming creates an immediate sense of domestic vulnerability that contrasts with the dark subject matter.
The Tone: Komeda utilized a mix of nursery-rhyme simplicity and jarring, dissonant jazz arrangements. This duality mirrors the film’s central theme: the terrifying invasion of the supernatural into the ordinary, everyday world of a Manhattan apartment.
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