RoseMary's Baby

The story focuses on Rosemary Woodhouse, a bright but somewhat naïve young housewife, and her struggling actor husband Guy, as they move into the Bramford, a New York City apartment building with a history of unsavory tenants and mysterious events. Their neighbors are an elderly and slightly absurd couple, Minnie and Roman Castevet, who tend to be meddlesome but seem harmless. Guy becomes unusually close to the pair while Rosemary tries to maintain a distance from them. Guy lands a role in a play when the actor originally cast suddenly and inexplicably goes blind. Soon afterwards he suggests that he and Rosemary have the child they had planned. On the night they plan to try to conceive, Minnie brings them individual ramekins of chocolate mousse, but Rosemary finds hers has a chalky undertaste and surreptitiously throws it away after a few tastes. Shortly afterward, she has a dizzy spell and passes out. She experiences what she perceives to be a strange dream in which she is raped by a demonic presence. A few weeks later, Rosemary learns she is pregnant. She plans to be treated by Dr. Hill, recommended by her friend Elise, but the Castevets insist she see their good friend, famed obstetrician Dr. Sapirstein. For the first three months of her pregnancy, Rosemary suffers severe abdominal pains, loses weight, and craves raw meat and chicken liver. The doctor insists the pain will subside soon and assures her she has nothing to worry about. When her old friend Hutch sees Rosemary's wan appearance, he is disturbed enough to do some research, and he plans to share his findings with her but falls into a coma before they can meet. He subsequently dies but before he does instructs his friend Grace Cardiff to deliver the book about witchcraft on his desk to Rosemary. Photographs, passages in the text he marked, and the cryptic message "the name is an anagram" lead the young mother-to-be to realize Roman Castevet is really Steven Marcato, the son of a former resident of the Bramford who was accused of worshiping Satan. She suspects her neighbors are part of a cult with sinister designs for her baby, and Guy is cooperating with them in exchange for their help in advancing his career. She then learns that Dr. Sapirstein is part of the conspiracy when the front desk clerk at his office alludes to a smell that Rosemary has when she wears the necklace Minnie gave her as a gift and the doctor often smells just like that. An increasingly disturbed Rosemary shares her fears and suspicions with Dr. Hill, who, assuming she is suffering from a hormonal imbalance, calls Dr. Sapirstein and Guy. The two men bring her home, where she goes into labor. When she awakens following the delivery of her baby she is told he died shortly after birth. However, when she hears an infant's cries somewhere in the building, she suspects he still is alive. In the hall closet, she discovers a secret door leading into the Castevet apartment, where the coven meets, and finds the congregation gathered, worshiping her newborn son, the spawn of Satan. Contrary to an urban legend, Anton LaVey did not play the role of Satan in the rape scene of Rosemary's Baby. THE CURSE OF THE FILM Predictably, two of the most famous cursed films are also two of the scariest and most controversial: The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary's Baby (1968). "With those films, " she says, "the correlation between events inside the film and events outside it are just so uncanny, " says Mikita Brottman. "A genuine hex is when you simply can't watch a film without being aware of those extra circumstances." The Exorcist stories turn on the subsequent travails of Linda Blair, the child actor who played the 12-year-old girl who is possessed by a demon. In 1977, aged 18, she was arrested on drugs charges. Since then she has variously gone into hiding and claimed that her experience on the film has made her resolve never to have children. Beyond that, cases of psychological disturbance among viewers are legion: the most infamous "fan" of the Exorcist movies being gay American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. He was obsessed with Exorcist III, watching the film over and over again before killing his victims. It was playing on his video when police finally arrested him. Even more disturbing are the stories surrounding Rosemary's Baby. Roman Polanski's 1968 film told the story of a young Manhattan woman whose husband trades their unborn child in a Faustian pact with a group of devil worshippers. A year after its release, Polanski's own wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson Family. Tate was pregnant with the couple's first child when she died. Chillingly one film critic, reviewing the film before her murder, described the satanists as resembling "a small, far-out Californian religious sect." But even before Sharon Tate's death, producer William Castle has begun using the c-word. In April 1969, days after receiving death threats and hate mail relating to the film, Castle is rushed into hospital with kidney failure. At one point he cries out "Rosemary, for God's sake drop that knife." As he convalesces, he discovers that in the same hospital is Krzysztof Komeda, the Polish composer who wrote the score for the film and an old friend of Polanski's and Tate's. Komeda will die of a brain clot before the month is out, a death which echoes that of Rosemary's friend Hutch in the film. Two years later, Polanski would undergo his own form of exorcism by tackling a film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, most memorable for a scene in which Lady Macduff and her children are murdered on Macbeth's orders. It was a brave attempt at catharsis, but the stain of the Manson tragedy and the Rosemary's Baby curse has remained with him. Although fictitious where Polanski is real, Superman is another who has been scratched at by the Fates. Actor George Reeves, who played the Kryptonite-fearing superhero on television in the Fifties, died of a single gunshot wound in mysterious circumstances in 1959. Most said suicide; some said murder. Two decades later Christopher Reeve took on the role and was himself paralysed after a riding accident. His co-star, Margot Kidder, later suffered psychosis. It's worth noting that the director of the first Superman film was Richard Donner, fresh from The Omen.

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Rituals satanic

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