Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) is a film that carries a great deal of influence which can be seen in films such as The Exorcist, The Omen, the Shinning and The Sentinel. On release Rosemary's Baby, which is essentially a film about Satanism, was a big commercial hit and was met with a good critical response. It contains many elements that Hitchcock would be proud of and it delves into the psyche in similar ways to his movies Repulsion and The Tenant. The excellent Ruth Gordon won an Academy Award for best supporting actress: no mean feat when you look at the quality of the cast.
Mia Farrow is great as the disintegrating Rosemary and John Cassavettes plays the two faced husband with his usual excellence. The other characters are bizarre and creep up on Rosemary like poison Ivy. Of course the terrible tragedy that befell Polanski the year after the film's release, in which his wife Sharon Tate and his unborn child were brutally murdered, is often referenced as some sort of curse connected with the movie. This talk of movie curses carried on with such films as The Omen, Poltergeist and the Exorcist.
Rosemary's Baby is not just a great horror movie, its a great movie about conformity and the dark underbelly of polite society, it's a film that resonates now in such movies as Kill List and the general trend toward the Gothic. Polanski more or less unleashed a genre and a cinematic trend upon a largely unsuspecting movie going public.
And also one of the closest adaptations of a book I've ever seen. A real classic!
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