Rosemary's Maybes: Losing My Connection with Classic Horror Films
Ever since I became an official Netflix couch potato, I've been spending my evenings popping one Hollywood back-catalog movie after another into my nifty new Blu-ray/DVD player. The mail-me-a-movie service is a godsend for ADDers like me. I almost never see first-run films -- the idea of sitting quiet and still in a room full of strangers for an hour and forty-five minutes is too much for my restless psyche to bear. The joy of my new-found ability to plop on my futon in the comfort of my own apartment and progressively watch my way through a list of movies any human being should have seen by now tells me Netflix has an untapped market in anyone on drugs starting in Adder- or Rita-.
So I've been getting caught up with movies you've likely seen before, many times, and/or a long time ago. I particularly enjoy suspense and horror "classics". Flip on the original Halloween, the original The Fog, Poltergeist, anything Hitchcock, and I'll be there with popcorn before you have time to put down the remote. So when I got the Netflix email telling me Roman Polanski's 1968 mega-hit Rosemary's Baby was on its way, I was particularly excited. At the time, Roger Ebert gave the film adaptation of Ira Levin's 1965 devil-worship novel four stars. Movie fans on Rotten Tomatoes rate the film 98% fresh even today. Even one of Marina City's couch ladies told me how scary a film it was.
So it took a while for me to figure out why I was bored out of my mind watching it last night. All two hours and 16 ponderous minutes of it. This morning I awoke to two reasons wobbling around my noggin. For starters: maybe the shock value of first-of-their-kind movies pales over time?
In his period review, Ebert applauds the way the movie's persistent telegraphing of a "horrific" and "inevitable" conclusion brings the audience along for a frightening ride. I doubt he'd write the same review today. In 1968, the mere idea of a woman being raped by a creature from hell so that a coven of witches could steal her baby and raise it as the anti-Christ would be inducive of shudders. But forty-one years of graphically violent splatter movies since then have reduced the power of such images to shock much of anyone anymore.
Having seen it all time and again, Polanksi's persistent early plot giveaways just made Rosemary's Baby seem predictable to me. A groggy woman tied to a bed and pounced on by a figure covered in red scales in the second reel? Yeah, I'm pretty sure she's giving birth to Satan's son somewhere before the credits roll -- as Rosemary, or course, did, while I waited around another hour for something unexpected to happen. (The same thing happened to me watching 1973's The Exorcist for the first time in the 1990s -- head spinning, green vomit, and subliminal shots of demonic shapes weren't going to make a Clinton-era cable-watcher rush from his living room in fright the same way they made Nixon-era moviegoers rush from theaters.)
My second noggin-wobbling reason was the real clincher for me, though: maybe you just have to be Christian to really be scared by movies like Rosemary's Baby (or The Exorcist, for that matter)? And in particular, Roman Catholic?
Whether in 1968 or today, ominous religious ideas like hell, Satan, and demonic possession have the power to give pause to individuals whose personal beliefs give credence to them. The adult Buddhist in me watched these themes flit through Rosemary's Baby and yawned. Having been raised Catholic, I could clearly understand how as a child I would have been terrified by a move that played upon the religious beliefs that my family believed in. Believing in a wholly different view of the universe today, however, reduced the move to an overly long exercise in camera angles for me, rather than an engaging evening.
While I'm on the subject, why do religious thrillers always seem to revolve around Catholic cosmologies? You can count Jewish, Lutheran, Mulsim, and Buddhist thrillers on one hand, but you can swing a cat and hit a theater showing a movie that features something coming up from hell and dragging off someone holding on to a cross, saying a "Hail Mary", and praying to a saint for dear life. In a country with a Protestant majority, for that matter. Why is that?
For fullest disclosure, I have a healthy spirituality, have a close relationship with my concept of God, and respect the multitude of religious traditions that guide the people closest to me and those with whom I share the planet. But I'd pay money to see Hollywood make a horror film that acknowledged a wider religious cosmology than the one blessed in Rome. It can't just end with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Vesak Terror Train, anyone?
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could just be me, but i've always thought of rosemary's baby as a dark comedy (ruth gordon is incredibly funny in it) and a very good one at that.
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That is one of the things it is. PSYCHO is also a very dark comedy, as Hitchcock himself told Truffaut.
Two exceptional classic horror films no one should miss, and both with the same title, are "The Huaunting". One is with Deborah Kerr and it's based on Henry James' "The Turning of the Screw" and the other with Julie Harrris, based on a novel by Shirley Jackson. Both are errie psychological horror storiesAs far as I remember, there's no blood and no knives coming at you from the screen but these films have you on edge with intense horror.
Of course, there's always "The House of Wax" with Vincent Price that scraed me senseless when I saw when really young. All those other of Price's Edgar Allen Poe adated horror fillms are more less kitch and camp as was Price in those films.
I think the Deborah Kerr film you are talking about is "The Innocents". However, both were fabulous and very scary films. In fact, "The Haunting" with Julie Harris is my pick for the scariest film of all time. I absolutely refuse to watch it at night if I'm going to have to sleep alone. And there wasn't a drop of blood in either film. No demons in red scales, no dismembered limbs laying around or flying about. Just pure genius in mood and in composition.
One scene in "The Haunting" that I find the most chilling is a shot of the house at night, after everyone has gone to bed. The music, the lighting, the set up was so perfect that it almost makes me afraid to walk around my own house after everyone else has gone to bed.
Another fabulously scary film is "The Changeling" from 1980 with George C. Scott. That one, somehow, hardly ever gets mentioned but I notice that JDM73 and Tallulah, below, both share my opinion of it.
It was "The Innocents", My goof. "The Haunting" with Julie Harris was remade as "The Haunting of Hill House" and it doesn't compare to the original. I've never seen "The Changeling". Now I'll have to find it on DVD and watch it. Thanks.
Well, I just ordered "The Changeling" and also "Don't Look Now" with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland from Amazon. Hope I get the willies from both of them.
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The wretched remake of THE HAUNTING was also just titled THE HAUNTING.
I agree about the greatness of these two films. Around 1970, I saw THE INNOCENTS and THE HAUNTING as a double feature at a theater in Hollywood (Ray Bradbury was seated directly in front of me. Down in front, Ray!) Both work, but the audience was more frightened by, and screamed more at THE INNOCENTS. Also, the screenplay of THE INNOCENTS is co-written by Truman Capote.
HOUSE OF WAX, which was in 3-D, and Price's Poe films are great fun, but then I'll lap up Vincent Price in ANYTHING! I adore Vinnie!!!
My favorite Price films are THEATER OF BLOOD and THE ABOMINABLE DOCTOR PHIBES.
Excellent posts, folks! "The Haunting" was a masterpiece, based on Shirley Jackson's horror classic. "The Innocents" was based on "the Turn of the Screw". "The Changeling" was truly creepy; so was "Let's Scare Jessica to Death". None of these has buckets of fake blood, but they still make my blood run cold!
Doyle, you're wrong about "Rosemary's Baby". The film was terrific when it first appeared on screen and holds up very well today. You're coming at this from an almost poltical perspective and not an artistic one. The performances by the entire cast were first rate and especially Mia Farrow and Ruth Gordon, and the film certainly holds up better than Hitchcock's "Pyscho" which gets pretty cheesy half way through and especially with that phoney skeleton of Norman's mother sitting in that rocking chair near the end and it's psych 1 explanation. I've passed that building where the film took place on Central Park West countless times and every time I do, I still get a chill. Today, all we get are cut-and- slash and computer enhanced special effects. "Rosemary's Baby" was psychological horror more than blood and guts spilled all over the screen. It was a film for adults, not for today's teen crowd who thrill at seeing other teens getting slashed left and right.
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I agree with you completely about ROSEMARY'S BABY, and utterly disagree about PSYCHO, which is a masterpiece.
The "Skeleton" is not a skeleton, but Norman's mother's body stuffed via taxidermy. There's nothing cheesy about it. And the psychiatrist's "explanation" is SUPPOSED to be fatuous, as we then see Norman sitting alone, grinning his death's head grin, and realize that the truth is darker and deeper than the psychiatrist grasps. (Ever notice that the guard on Norman's cell is Ted Knight from The Mary Tyler Moore Show?)
I don't have any compelling desire to see Rosemary's Baby, but the knock on Psycho is wrong. The psychologist is indeed fatuous, and if you watch closely, in the absolutely final moment of the film, Alan Bates quite literally becomes his mother. If you are paying attention (having been lulled into boredom by the shrink), it is one of the four most horrifying moments of the film -- only one of which, the death of the private investigator -- depends on special effects. Maybe Doyle is mixing up Hitch's original with the remake....
You must not be referring to the classic Hitchcock directed Psycho as you said you have passed the building where the film took place in Central Park. The original and only classic Psycho was filmed on the Universal Studios Lot in Southern California. I think a fire took the Bates Motel and the scary house on the hill some years ago.
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He's referrring to The Dakota, the building where Rosemary's Baby was filmed, not PSYCHO.
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PS. The fire at Universal did no harm to the Bates Motel nor to the Psycho house, both of which are still there. It did destroy the King Kong exhibit.
Both PSYCHOs were filmed on the same location. The different house was a shell built around the roiginal, and was removed again afterwards, so the original Psycho house is still there, still on the tour.
But you're taking it out of context. It is the way it is because of when is was filmed. And frankly, it never scared me, you must have scared easy as a kid.
I still love it though, it's a great vintage 60s thriller. I don't look for scares from this film, I enjoy the well written story and the fantastic performances...oh and the 1960s vintage cloths etc. Gotta love the 60s!!
Th eonly reason the film didn't exactly terrify me was because I had read the book prior to seeing the film so I knew what was coming.and the book was frightening. Still, this is one good scary film.
Having seen all three movies based on Ira Levin novels ("Rosemary's Baby", "The Stepford Wives" and "The Boys from Brazil"), I notice a common theme in his stories. Everything is going along normally, until there's some point at which you realize that there's something terrible going on.
"Psycho" and "The Shining" are the only movies that I would classify as scary: they could really happen.
PS: "Rosemary's Baby" was filmed in the Dakota, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived.
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Ira Levin also wrote SLIVER, which was made into a terrible movie with Sharon Stone & William Baldwin (The book was butchered. They even changed whodunit.), and A KISS BEFORE DYING, which has been filmed twice. THE STEPFORD WIVES was also filmed twice, the first time faithfully, and the second time as a terrible "satirical" botch.
All of those books conform to the pattern you describe. Stephen King, in his nonfiction book DANSE MACABRE, called Levin "the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel. In terms of plot, he makes what the rest of us do look like those five dollar watches you can buy in the discount drugstores."
Levin also wrote the play DEATHTRAP, which was filmed pretty much as Levin wrote it, with Michael Caine & Christopher Reeve.
THE SHINING is a supernatural ghost story. It could NOT "really happen."
Even in the novel, the "Bramford" was always supposed to be the Dakota.
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"Four decades of similar storylines and far more frightful--and graphic--imagery have made me and much of the movie-going public jaded to films like Rosemary's Baby."
But that's a criticism of today's films and filmgoers, not the of great classics of the past, where imagination and implication was used with the skill of a surgeon.
"I had the same experience with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I got why it was a classic in its day. Then I turned it off after an hour utterly not into it."
Again, your attention-deficit-disorder is not a flaw in the movie. You get credit for trying at least. When I hear someone tell me, for instance, they won't watch a black & white movie, that's it. I won't even bother speaking further to such philistines.
I wrote a book (THE Q GUIDE TO CLASSIC MONSTER MOVIES. Available now) about the classic thrillers of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, which face the same obstacles when seen today by people who are bored by shots over 10 seconds long, and can't be scared by their imaginations, but need hacked-off limbs in their faces in 3-D to raise a hackle. The magnificence of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (my personal all-time favorite movie) is lost on them. I'm sad for them and for you. The movies themselves remain masterpieces. (Not all of them, obviously. Some always were stinkers.)
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(Oops. Sorry. Posting that comment there was a batch-paste goof by me. Here is what I was trying to post)
I should clarify regarding THE SHINING, that I am criticizing only the idea that it could actually take place. Although I personally do not care for the Kubrick film (I prefer the TV remake, quite frankly), the novel THE SHINING is one of the greatest ghost story novels ever written, right up there with Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and Henry James's THE TURN OF THE SCREW.
As for PSYCHO, one of the greatest horror movies ever made, it is certainly plausible. (It was based on the true story of Ed Gein, who also inspired THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE), but that is true of most any psychological thriller, such as Polanski's great REPULSION (as good a movie as PSYCHO).
But a movie doesn't have to be plausible to be scary, if you can just suspend your disbelief.
OK as someone admittedly uninterested in movies you feel you have a lot to share as a critic of..... movies. You are off to a brilliant start.
You then feel that a movie released in 1968 seems a bit dated........................
No flies on you (word of warning, don't bother with 1984, so last millennium).
Let me know when when you get around to watching Psycho, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the strange colour of the blood in the shower scene. Must have been a reference to the cold war or something, or maybe the industrial revolution, I hear that happened in the past too.
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"Psycho, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the strange colour of the blood in the shower scene"
What are you talking about? PSYCHO is in black & white. (And Hitchcock used chocolate sauce for the blood, as it photographed better in black & white.)
A sarcastic reference to movies being dated, i.e. black & white
RB is one of my favorite movies. A horror story filmed on location in NYC. Ruth Gordon. Mia Farrow. the "Bram". Perfection.
Absolutely agree. RB is a near perfect film.
Can't say that I disagree. "Rosemary's Baby" didn't do a thing for me...neither did "The Exorcist". I didn't think they were bad films; I just didn't find them scary. On the other hand, "Carnival of Souls", "Night of the Living Dead", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Changeling" frightened me profoundly, and they're still jarring when I watch them today. It's a matter of individual taste, I guess. For me, the big problem with "Rosemary's Baby" was that the novel struck me as pure satire, so it was impossible to take the film seriously. Just my two cents.
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I thnk all of the films you've sited are very good films. The Changeling was, I think, too little seen.
I agree, "The Changeling" was a great movie. Even after having watched it several times, it's one of those films that I won't watch after dark if I'm going to be alone in the house. I've never understood why it got so little attention.
Yes, it's still relatively little known. It does have a fan base, but for every person I know who has seen and enjoyed "The Changeling", there are five who are unaware of it. I'm constantly recommending this film to people, especially if they're fans of some of Peter Straub's early novels like "Julia" and "Ghost Story". The vibe is very similar.
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(Continued from below)
The novel ROSEMARY'S BABY (which the film adheres to almost page-by-page. The book almost IS the screenplay) was written by Ira Levin, who was Jewish, and knew all the Catholic hoo-haw in his story was bunk. All you had to do was empathize with Rosemary's paranoia to find the film scary. It's about paranoia. The Satanists are just the metaphor. (Catholicism is often used because it's wacky, over-the-top superstitious mythology is so soaked in horror already that's a natural. How would you make a Buddhist-mythology-based horror movie?)
Empathy and metaphor, that's what your period film-viewing is lacking.
Try Polanski's REPULSION. No Catholic myths, just one very crazy lady inside whose head you spend the film. It scared the crap out of me in the theaters, and Criterion just released a fine DVD of it.
The lack is in you, not in these great movies. It's not that you're Buddhist; it's that you're jaded.
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Indeed my point. Four decades of similar storylines and far more frightful--and graphic--imagery have made me and much of the movie-going public jaded to films like Rosemary's Baby. And, no, it didn't work for me as a psychological thriller, either. The paranoia was amusing at best, boring at times, but never very off-putting for me.
It's funny though, how Rosemary's Baby seems to generate utter fandom or total boredom. I had the same experience with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I got why it was a classic in its day. Then I turned it off after an hour utterly not into it. I'll say this for Rosemary's Baby, at least I watched it all the way through.
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"Four decades of similar storylines and far more frightful--and graphic--imagery have made me and much of the movie-going public jaded to films like Rosemary's Baby."
But that's a criticism of today's films and filmgoers, not the of great classics of the past, where imagination and implication was used with the skill of a surgeon.
"I had the same experience with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I got why it was a classic in its day. Then I turned it off after an hour utterly not into it."
Again, your attention-deficit-disorder is not a flaw in the movie. You get credit for trying at least. When I hear someone tell me, for instance, they won't watch a black & white movie, that's it. I won't even bother speaking further to such philistines.
I wrote a book (THE Q GUIDE TO CLASSIC MONSTER MOVIES. Available now) about the classic thrillers of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, which face the same obstacles when seen today by people who are bored by shots over 10 seconds long, and can't be scared by their imaginations, but need hacked-off limbs in their faces in 3-D to raise a hackle. The magnificence of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (my personal all-time favorite movie) is lost on them. I'm sad for them and for you. The movies themselves remain masterpieces. (Not all of them, obviously. Some always were stinkers.)
Horror is not about "frightful imagery." It's true, that our perceptions are moulded by our culture, and thus what is shocking visually or even culturally in a film may change, but the "art" itself remains. When I was a kid, I ogled Rubens and Titians because they had naked women in them. Now, with gynecological detail available in streetcorner magazines, I still love classic nudes. Courbet's l'Origine du monde is a great case in point. For its time, it was too shockingly graphic to be "seen" as a painting. Today, we are "jaded" enough to be able to see the actual picture.
Give me the orginal "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane" any time.
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While I love BABY JANE, and occasionally drive by the house used for the Hudson Sisters' home, I never found it scary. Rather, I find it a laugh-out-loud campfest.
"Blanche, you didn't eat your din-din."
"Repulsion" had a lasting affect on me. It took me hours to shake the feeling and just thinking about the film brings it back. That was a great film and seriously scary.
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After I saw REPULSION the first time, I think the theater had to reupholster the chair I was sitting in. Really scary movie!
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Yes, back in the days of subtlety and implication, movies scared through imagination, rather than through sledgehammer gore that any boob can aim a camera at, as in today's unwatchable excuses for horror(ible) movies.
But your point "maybe you just have to be Christian to really be scared by movies like Rosemary's Baby (or The Exorcist, for that matter)?" is wrong.
I'm a stubborn old atheist, and I saw both of those films multiple times in their original releases, having read the books before as well) and found both very frightening, without for a moment taking their premises seriously. Hammer's HORROR OF DRACULA scared me back in the day too, but it didn't require belief in vampires to do it.
What it requires is empathizing with the characters. You don't have to be Catholic to find the thought of your child turning into a monster scary. You only had to relate to not understanding the real-life changes your real-life kids were going through. It's called metaphor. Try it. (Exorcist book author Willliam Peter Blatty was a True Believer, and was trying to prove the existence of God through fiction, an idiotic quest.)
(Reply continues below)
Not that it was a good film, but "Van Helsing" did have a somewhat amusing scene with representatives of various religious groups gathered together.
And of course there is the wonderful scene from Polanski's previous movie, "The Fearless Vampire Killers", with the Jewish vampire.
True, but then again, as the director Stephen Sommers stated, Van Helsing was a parody of the horror genre. He was just having fun with it, not trying to make it scary.
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VAN HELSING is a TERRIBLE movie. Silly, over-the-top action. Utterly unbelievable on any level. You'd need to be a gold medal champion weightlifter to suspend you disbelief during it. And Hugh Jackman doesn't take his shirt off until the very end, if anyone stayed to the end. Ghastly film. I wanted my money, and my 2 hours back. And I had enjoyed his first MUMMY movie.
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