"Are you aware that the Bramford had a rather unpleasant reputation around the turn of the century? It's where the Trench sisters conducted their little dietary experiments. And Keith Kennedy held his parties. Adrian Marcato lived there too. The Trench sisters were two proper Victorian ladies - they cooked and ate several young children including a niece. Adrian Marcato practiced witchcraft. He made quite a splash in the 90's by announcing that he'd conjured up the living Devil. Apparently, people believed him so they attacked and nearly killed him in the lobby of the Bramford. Later, the Keith Kennedy business began and by the 20's, the house was half-empty. World War 11 filled the house up again. They called it Black Bramford. This house has a high incidence of unpleasant happenings. In '59, a dead infant was found wrapped in newspaper in the basement".
- Edward 'Hutch' Hutchin warns of the apartment building's notorious and sordid reputation for witchcraft and cannibalism.
In Rosemary's Baby (1968) Roman Polanski produces a supremely intelligent and convincing adaptation of Ira Levin's Satanist thriller. Levin's 1967 book describes a young, newly married woman who is impregnated by the devil (in the guise of her husband) shortly after moving into the Bramford, a strange old apartment building inhabited by witches. The story encourages Polanski to examine the psychology of a complex individual who exists within a coherent social and physical location. The film horrifies us by realistically reinvoking a sense of the powerlessness engendered by an "infantile" confusion between fantasy and reality.
By focusing in this film on a single, fully developed individual within a recognizable environment, Polanski invokes many of the expectations of filmic realism. At the same time, however, the horror genre poses an implicit challenge to realism, for it places the realist vision of plausible social interaction against an alternative worldview that understands the universe in terms of magic/supernatural forces. Tzvetan Todorov's view of "the fantastic" as an ambiguous tension between the uncanny - in which the protagonist is insane - and the marvellous - in which the supernatural is in the ascendant - is well expressed in Polanski's work. Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) feature protagonists who are "insane", while Rosemary's Baby offers a supernatural explanation for the bizarre situations it depicts. In each case, however, tension is constructed by playing on the ambiguous interactions between realism and fantasy.
The confusion between inner and outer reality engendered by "the fantastic" reflects modes of experiences that are psychologically infantile, recalling a narcissistic period of development in which the individual was unable to distinguish him/herself from the world around. Polanski's horror films achieve their effect by reproducing such infantile states both in their protagonists and in their audiences. Due to an early interest in the surrealist movement, who experimented with the artistic depiction of unconscious thought processes, Polanski commands an impressive range of techniques with which he is able to express such confusion.
The fears aroused in Rosemary's Baby primarily take the form of infantile terrors centring on bodily integrity. The film turns the conventional cinematic notions of innocent experience back on themselves to reveal a world in which the psychological and the factual are terrifyingly indistinguishable.
Though Polanski's screenplay remains close to Levin's original story, the film maximizes the ambiguity between paranoid projection and the realistic events that the novel ultimately seeks to resolve. The film's strength comes from Polanski's refusal to simplify events: ambiguity is constant, in that we are never sure whether Rosemary's (Mia Farrow) paranoia about a witches' coven is grounded in reality or a figment of her frustrated imagination. Sexual politics, urban alienation and a deeply pessimistic view of human interaction permeate the film.
Among Polanski's films it is similar to Repulsion, from which it borrows much of its iconography, most importantly its anthropomorphized depiction of the Woodhouses' apartment. However, in the place of the insane heroine of Repulsion, a diabolical universe is animated. But in both cases, the audience's growing uncertainty about the nature of the reality being presented creates suspense and involvement. Though Polanski initially carefully establishes a strong sense of verisimilitude, as the narrative proceeds this primary credible façade increasingly polarizes into two divergent choices; perverse projection or diabolical plot.
At the conclusion there is a strong sense that the narrative has validated the heroine's vision of a "plot". And at a certain level this is true. The world Polanski creates is filled with paranoid images. Though such images present the heroine as clearly, unambiguously trapped, this overlooks the question of "what" is trapping her.
On closer analysis, the film offers evidence that the trap exists within herself. Firstly Polanski makes her psychological vulnerability plausible by isolating her from her family and from any benign neighbours. The triggering mechanism of her breakdown is firstly her pregnancy. Later when her baby is born, the source of anxiety shifts from terror that part of her objectified body could be appropriated by others to an ambivalent hatred/attraction towards that part of her body that is no longer hers. She sees her baby first as endangered, then as diabolical.
Fears of sexuality and pregnancy articulate generalized social attitudes. Once Rosemary becomes pregnant, everyone begins to treat her strangely. The exaggerated fussing of the friends at the party she gives is complemented by her husband's attitude of fear and avoidance. All convince her that her baby has become an object of "special" consideration, for she is treated more as a pregnancy than a person. These attitudes form the background of her paranoia, and the audience responds to them as unremarkable because we share this culture.
Yet social attitudes are not at issue here so much as the more global worldview implied by religious conviction. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby amplifies the erroneous nature of religious beliefs.
The most notable difference between the film and the novel is the way in which the supernatural motif is handled. Levin's story ultimately takes the question of the existence of God and the devil seriously, but in contrast Polanski relentlessly satirizes it throughout by equating good with evil.
The film's final scene, with Rosemay in madonna-like attire after receiving a foreigner bringing gifts, explicitly parodies the birth of Christ. Earlier during the dinner that Rosemary and Guy (Rosemary's actor husband played by John Cassavetes) share with their friend Hutch, Polanski adds a ghoulish sequence of dialogue about the Agnus Dei of Christian mythology: "They cooked and ate several young children, including a niece", observes Hutch, describing the activities of the infamous Trench sisters, who formerly occupied the Bramford. Meanwhile he serves lamb he has just taken from the oven while his guests sip wine. The witches' cannibalism is thereby equated with Christian ritual. The conversation then continues with Hutch's comment, "In 1959 a dead infant was found wrapped in newspaper in the basement". To which Guy responds, "Mmm - you really rouse my appetite". "Drink your wine" Hutch replies. Such equations of orthodox religion with profane sects suggest that all religious beliefs are characterized by the projection of dark impulses that exists within their followers.
Such dark impulses may motivate Rosemary's growing "faith" in a cult; they may also lead the audience towards a similar point of certainty within the slippery world of the film. For Polanski calls all belief into question by continually manipulating the film's illusion of reality. He repeatedly flaunts its verisimilitude. The meaning of the most naturalistic images is constantly called into question. Half-open doorways suggest a hidden reality by the partial views they offer of what is occurring behind them, for people and actions are only half seen. Guy clearly shows Rosemary both of his shoulders to prove the witches have not marked him. But she looks dissatisfied at this revelation and does not respond. Such ambiguities leave the viewer with no conclusive sense of the nature of the reality the film is depicting.
Sound gradually becomes ambiguous as well. An unexpected crashing interrupts Rosemary's conversation with her neighbour in the buildings laundry room. Subsequently she ascribes sinister overtones to this event. Earlier, during Guy and Rosemary's first evening together in their apartment, the background sound of traffic and a plane are interrupted by other more inexplicable sounds of chanting. Guy's joke remark, "Shhh. I think I hear the Trench sisters chewing", relegates the strange noises in the old building to supernatural causes, lightly invoking a level of explanation that Rosemary will take seriously as she becomes increasingly paranoid. Polanski's camera lingers over such ambiguities in order to emphasise their inherently irresolvable nature.
What can be accepted as plausible may, in fact, be only what serves the interests of the psyche. Accordingly changes in the environment echo the stages of Rosemary's regression. As her sense of security diminishes, the filmic effects increasingly emphasize a threatened and polarized vision of the world. The intimacy of Hutch's apartment is replaced by an "Alice in Wonderland" vastness when Rosemary and Guy are in their own apartment, the result of wide-angled perspectives viewed from camera positions near the floor. The distorting and intimidating effect of wide-angle photography is even more pronounced near the end of the film when a hand-held camera precedes the fleeing Rosemary down the cavernous passages to the "safety" of her apartment. In a similar manner unharmonic dissonances that dramatize both Rosemary's pain and the diabolical machinations she perceives around her eventually supersede the delicate harmonies of the film's opening lullaby. Its colour at first contrasts the foreboding darkness of the elderly apartments with bright primary hues surrounding Rosemary and Guy. Soon, however, these transformations lead to garish jarring.
The film's conclusion, in which the coven is revealed as an actuality allows the audience to escape directly confronting the disturbing implications of fractured psychological states. On a deeper level, however, Polanski decisively implicates us in such states through his naturalized portrayal of a fantastic world. It is finally this dimension of the film that frightens us. By involving us with an apparently rational character in a seemingly contemporary world, Rosemary's Baby gradually takes not only its heroine but also its audience to a state of powerlessness and traumatic confusion between fantasy and reality. Though we never see Rosemary's baby, the last image of Rosemary herself superimposes its unnatural eyes over her own; for the "alien" forces that terrorize her ultimately arise from within herself.
