Rosemary's Baby is a 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin which deals with Rosemary, a housewife in New York City who is a native of Omaha, Nebraska. She was originally Rosemary O'Reilly, and came from a staunchly Catholic, Irish-American family with which she has had little contact since her civil marriage to Guy, a non-practising Protestant and aspiring actor. The film dealt very little with the issue of Rosemary's religion and her family back home, although the subject was given generous treatment in the book.

The novel was a best-seller, and was adapted as a 1968 feature film directed by Roman Polański which starred Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes as the newlywed couple, and Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer as their shifty neighbors Minnie and Roman Castevet. Gordon won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the film. There is a popular rumor that Anton LaVey appears in the film as Satan, but he had no involvement with the production. The uncredited role of the devil was played by Clay Tanner (see [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0849623/). Aside from Farrow and Charles Grodin, who appeared in a bit role, the cast is deceased.

This film was Robert Evans' first big hit running Paramount Pictures. He was closely involved in the production, and numerous times had to deal with Mia Farrow's precarious relationship with then-husband Frank Sinatra. Farrow and Sinatra divorced soon after the film was completed.

A sequel titled Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby aired as a made-for-TV movie in 1976. Another sequel, called Son Of Rosemary written also by Ira Levin was published in 1997. There were rumours that they would shoot this novel too, but it never came to happen, though the book did appear to have been specifically written with the possibility of turning it into a film, in that Cassavetes, Gordon and Blackmer's characters did not appear. (All three actors were deceased at the time of the book's publication.) Levin dedicated this book to Mia Farrow.

Plot summary

The story follows Rosemary Woodhouse, a somewhat naïve young woman, and her husband Guy, an aspiring actor, after moving into a New York City apartment next door to enthusiastic, oversolicitous neighbors. The couple want to have a baby; on the night they plan to try to conceive, she has dizzy spells and passes out, experiencing a dream or vision that she is being raped by a demonic presence. A few weeks later, she finds out that she is pregnant. Guy lands a small but noticeable part in a play when the man who was originally cast goes suddenly and inexplicably blind. For the first three months of her pregnancy, Rosemary suffers agonizing abdominal pains and loses weight instead of gaining it. Guy is cast in a sitcom that gets him even more attention, so that a number of film studios are eager to sign him up. Following clues left to her by an older friend, who goes into a coma and dies before revealing the whole story, Rosemary comes to suspect that her neighbors are part of a Satanic cult with designs on her as-yet-unborn child, and that her husband is working with them in exchange for his career advances.

An increasingly disturbed and unstable Rosemary becomes convinced that her neighbors plan to use her child as a sacrifice to Satan. The efforts of her husband and neighbors to dissuade her from this idea are in vain; until the end, where she's revealed to have been almost exactly right.

Motifs

• The use of the color red to indicate the devil weaves itself throughout the story--with the various red clothes of the Castevets; the red pen Rosemary uses to mark the calendar; the red wine offered to the couple by the Castevets; Hutch takes out a red handkerchief after discussing the tannis root--minutes later, Guy enters wearing a red scarf (just after Rosemary mentions his closeness with the Castevets); and many more examples

ISBN numbers

• ISBN 1568490658 (library binding, 1991)
• ISBN 1568654707 (hardcover, 1997)
• ISBN 0451194004 (mass market paperback, 1997)
• ISBN 0451210514 (paperback, 2003)
• ISBN 3926048301 (hardcover)

External links

1967 novels | 1968 films | Films featuring a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award winning performance | Films based on horror books | Films directed by Roman Polański | Satanism

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