Shocktober 2025 - Rosemary's Baby (1968)

“What have you done to his eyes, you maniacs?”

– Rosemary Woodhouse

It’s traditional during Shocktober that I do a few deep dives into my collection, and that’s been the case this year with movies like Count Yorga and Blacula. This one is my REAL deep cut. Even for me, this one’s deep. It’s certainly the oldest movie I’ve got on this year’s lineup, but that’s not the reason. I bought the movie on disc several years ago – and by several years, I mean around seventeen years ago. And then, it lay gathering dust until a couple of days ago because until the time I was making my movie selection for this year’s 13 Screams, I’d largely forgotten it was here. (Hey, before you judge, it’s easily done – there are over 4000 discs in the collection. Some get overlooked from time to time.)

As I watched the movie, it struck me that I had only seen the film once before. And that time was in my very early teens, on television. We got our first colour TV in mid to late 1974, and it was before that because I have a clear memory of seeing it on a black and white set. I remembered some details, the basic plot and the line I’ve quoted above, which I consider to be one of the finest, most unnerving lines ever uttered in a horror movie. Largely then, over a half century later, this was a pretty new experience.

The Woodhouses, Guy (John Cassavetes) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are a couple of newly married New Yorkers who movie into their new home, an apartment in the Dakota Building – the same place where John Lennon was shot in 1980. They are the very image of late sixties normality, their whole lives ahead of them. Guy is an actor; Rosemary is what used to be called a homemaker. They want to start a family very soon.

One evening while doing the laundry, Rosemary meets another tenant, a young girl who was previously a homeless drug addict named Teri Gionoffrio (Angela Dorian) who has been taken in by Rosemary’s elderly neighbours the Castevets and is being rehabilitated. Shortly afterwards however, Teri takes a suicidal dive through the apartment window and plunges to her death on the sidewalk below. This is when the Castevets enter the picture, tutting at the corpse as they return from a walk.

I think we’ve all been there, moving to a new home and who meet the neighbours who seem kindly and well meaning, but are also nosy and intrusive with a side order of just…wrong. That pretty much sums up the elderly couple, Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer) and his wife Minnie (Ruth Gordon). They seem ever present, particularly Ruth who seems to become a daily multi-time visitor after Guy and Rosemary accept an invitation to dinner. Guy enjoys himself so much that he returns to them the following evening to hear more of Roman’s stories.

One evening, having decided to try for a baby, Guy and Rosemary are having a romantic meal before, well… anyhow, Minnie calls over with her special chocolate mousse dessert, which they eat. Rosemary says hers tastes chalky before she begins to feel ill and practically passes out. During her sleep, she experiences what appears to be a kind of fever dream, where Guy removes her clothing, she sees alternatively Guy and some kind of demonic presence have sex with her, with the unclothed elderly residents of the apartment building look on. The demon scratches her back, leaving its mark.

The following morning, she wakes up and sees there are actual scratches on her back. In a scene that I imagine plays differently today compared with 1968, Guy tells her that he carried on anyway and had sex with her while she was passed out. (It may well as I said play differently today to back then, but surely at its worst it’s rape, and its best it’s creepy beyond belief – and that’s all I’m going to say about it.)

It soon becomes evident that Rosemary’s now pregnant. The helpful Minnie insists that her doctor be the one Rosemary goes to, and provides Rosemary with a daily kind of protein drink, made with herbs she grows herself.

It seems that Rosemary is losing control of her own life, and is succumbing to paranoia. Even her close friend and father figure Hutch (Maurice Evans) who is well read on occult matters and gives Rosemary a book on the subject dies mysteriously after becoming suspicious that Rosemary’s not looking at all well.

The tension mounts, and Mia Farrow turns in an Oscar worthy performance as the increasingly frail and sickly-looking Rosemary as her pregnancy continues and her apartment seems more and more claustrophobic. She even tries, and fails, to change her doctor, but the kindly though overbearing Doctor Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy) will not be denied.

Eventually, she gives birth – but she is told that her baby was stillborn. However – she notices that her pumped breast milk is being stored rather than thrown. She has enough presence of mind to stop taking her pills, prescribed by Sapirstein and now becoming gradually more alert and finds her way to the Castevet apartment, where they, Guy, Sapirstein and the rest of the elderly neighbours are tending the baby. Her suspicions were correct – they are a coven, and Guy has joined. She was indeed raped by Satan himself and bore his child.

Looking in to the crib, she utters the line; “What have you done to his eyes, you maniacs?” and is told; “Nothing, he has his father’s eyes”. The film closes as she succumbs to a mother’s love for her child and approaches tenderly.

Rosemary’s Baby is a film that has over the past several decades regularly appeared on various top 10 horror movie lists, and I think deservedly so. The direction by Roman Polanski is flawless, and producer William Castle is far out of his comfort zone being known more for gimmick films of the fifties and sixties, like The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler and Mr Sardonicus. I’m not convinced it’s merely a horror movie as such though, it’s more of an exercise in paranoia and isolation (albeit justified) and a commentary on women’s rights, as Rosemary gradually loses hers. Though on reflection, that’s horrifying enough.

There was a sequel made for TV in 1976 called Whatever Happened to Rosemary’s Baby which recast Rosemary and other characters, but I haven’t seen it. The reviews are dire and I’ve no idea if it’s available on disc or streaming. But to be honest, I’m happy with the ambiguous open ending we have, with the baby never being seen, only an almost subliminal flashback of the Devil, as Rosemary remembered his eyes looking down on her. The imagination gives a far more horrifying image of what the baby looked like than Hollywood ever could.