Rosemary’s Baby

Somewhere during my ninth grade year, I watched a ton of horror movies. Unfortunately, I watched Kubrick’s The Shining first, so it was pretty much downhill from there. But the problem with watching a lot of horror movies all in a row is that they start to lose their effect. This “effect” is really 90% of what most horror movies shoot for anyway, so if they stop scaring you, you mind as well not be watching. For this reason, I’m glad I waited to watch Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, a movie that absolutely terrified me. I wasn’t even expecting to be scared — in fact, I haven’t really been scared by any movie since The Shining. Rosemary’s Baby is quite frankly a masterpiece as far as horror films are concerned. While it’s only the second Polanski film I’ve ever seen, I can’t wait to hit Repulsion, just a little ways down the Netflix queue.

Rosemary’s Baby does not seem to have a particular interesting premise, especially if all you do is read a sentence or two about it. Guy and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) Woodhouse are an adorable young couple, scouting out new apartments in New York City as the story opens. They’re led around a pleasant but somewhat austere apartment by the building’s landlord (a coincidentally familiar Elisha Vanslyck Cook, Jr. of The Maltese Falcon) in a beginning that appeals to all of horror’s classic “haunted house” motifs.

Right off the bat though, Polanski begins to add his own touches to the classic model. He seems to get style across most impressively just by where he puts the camera. As the young couple tour the apartment, the camera focuses almost entirely on them, tracking their giddy movement as they explore. Polanski knows that we’re wary of this new apartment; he’s certainly not hiding that it’s a creepy place, but he reveals its more disturbing features through the characters’ perspectives. We don’t notice, for instance, that an armoire has been moved from a hallway to directly in front of a closet at the end of the hall until Rosemary points it out for us. We see Rosemary look down, and then the camera quite conspicuously moves to allow us a view of the spot where the armoire should be. This camera work produces two effects. First, it gives us a sense that we’re really there with the characters, looking down at the ground with Rosemary, exploring the apartment along with her. But second, this kind of cinematography takes control away from us. We want to explore, we even already want to warn Rosemary that the armoire should not be out of place, but we’re forced to look down with just the same naivete. It’s as if Polanski is giving his audience an immersive experience but allowing us no way to escape, and the terrifying claustrophobia of the film sets in before anything has even really happened.

The camera work for the bulk of the first half of the film is largely static, punctuated with rare but significant camera movement. Polanski seems to know when to simply set up a shot and let his actors do their thing. But the cinematography is far from transparent. I kept noticing sequences where the camera was unnaturally low, sometimes only catching the bottom 2/3 of the characters as they moved around the apartment. Often, too much floor was shown in shots, which kept making me want to look up, to see what was happening and look out for the clueless Rosemary. But at the same time, Polanski occasionally throws in a shot that is perfectly framed, almost as if in a portrait. Every once and a while, the camera feels like it’s been pulled too far back, as if it’s trying to get a group picture of a collection of people sitting. Framing like this is unrealistically ideal, putting the audience even more on edge.

Occasionally dialogue scenes would be slightly out of line where they should have been symmetrical. I can remember that in one scene, in which Rosemary and another young women are pleasantly talking, the shot is framed in such a way that their heads take up most of the screen. The two women are on opposite sides of the screen, and the shot should be symmetrical, but instead Polanski puts the camera just a few inches off-centered, with Rosemary (on the left) pushed right enough that we can see three or four inches of blank behind her, while her companion’s head is actually slightly off screen. The effect was subtle, but wholly unsettling.

The young couple meet their neighbors, Rosemary gets pregnant, and the story gets progressively more disturbing. After watching quite a few horror films, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the most difficult things for a horror director to do is shift the tone of the film from calmness to fear. A lot of cheaper horror films do this abruptly; the characters will suddenly realize that they’ve been kidnapped, or one of them will be killed unexpectedly. Some of the better horror films handle this transition gradually. Kubrick, for instance, builds the underlying fear behind The Shining from beginning to end so that the effect the effect is again more claustrophobic and engaging.

Polanski, once again, does not disappoint with his method. As I’ve already mentioned, he uses the now archetypal “haunted house” concept to let us know that something is definitely wrong with Guy and Rosemary’s apartment, only to shift the focus of the film to innocence as if nothing was even wrong with the situation. It’s almost as if Polanski is telling us, “That’s silly, audience. You believe in haunted houses?” only to throw in another hint that something is terribly wrong. Rather than being either abrupt or gradual, Polanski’s moments of terror come in waves of unexpected amplitudes. When our couple first gets the apartment, the film takes a nearly twenty minute break without any overt horror motifs. Just as she would any evening, Rosemary falls asleep, and the film shifts to a nightmare that makes me shiver just to recall it. After I watched this particular semi-dream sequence, I was so stunned and disturbed that I had to rewind the film and watch it over again immediately.

To describe the scene in its entirety would never do it justice, but it would suffice to say that Polanski begins to play with the fine line between perception and reality. Polanski pans up from a sleeping Rosemary, using film techniques we’ve all come to recognize as signifying a transition from reality to dream, even using conspicuous effects to accent the transition. All of the sudden, though, halfway through the dream, the camera pans down to Rosemary’s bed again, and Rosemary begins to talk to her dream from her bed. Polanski makes us feel like nothing is safe in his world, that the horrors of nightmares aren’t even independent. I’m afraid there is little more I can say about this scene, as I am shivering just recounting it.

The difference between perception and reality is Polanski’s main focus in this film. At its core, the film’s main conflict comes from our own attempt to determine whether we, like Rosemary, are crazy to think that spooky events are occurring or are justified in our fears. Until the end of the movie, we can’t ever know whether it’s all nonsense or foul play. Part of the fun of the film comes from trying to approach it like a puzzle.

As far as techniques go, Rosemary’s Baby certainly doesn’t stop with excellent camera work, though. Sound design plays a critical role in the way suspense and fear are built. In dream sequences like the one above, Polanski accentuates smaller sounds, sounds like the squishing noises of lips while people are talking. He often mutes other audio tracks at the same time. In such a way, he uses audio to effectively point at what he wants us to pay attention to, even more subtly using it to point at what isn’t relevant in a scene (a sort of auditory ellipsis).

Occasionally, Polanski seems to be just having fun with the audience’s expectations. During the aforementioned conversation between Rosemary and her friend, for instance, a glass bottle smashes loudly off-screen, and the characters’ responses are little more than a passing, “This is kind of a creepy basement.” Once again, we feel distracted by what the film chooses to show us and what it doesn’t. We want to look around the corner and see where the bottle fell, but the camera doesn’t let us; we’re trapped. During dream sequences, little effects like non-diegetic squishing noises or clock-ticks with no apparent source pierce background static. Some scenes seem to capture that sound you hear when you’re in an airplane and your ears haven’t popped yet. Unsettling, to say the least.

Looking down at my notes, I’m realizing there’s at least half a dozen things I’ve forgotten to mention in this entry. Little touches like how the camera is always centered exactly the same way when the apartment door is opened or the perpetual fluidity of the camera work during dream sequences. I didn’t even get a chance to talk about Mia Farrow’s performance, what should be a model for horror movie heroines. I feel like I need to watch Rosemary’s Baby again as soon as possible, just to catch all the little intricacies that Polanski clearly loved to add to his film. Rosemary’s Baby quickly rocketed to my top 10 favorite movies with this first viewing, possibly even surpassing The Shining (I know, crazy) as my favorite horror movie.