Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [13]
She decides to raise the baby—a good, conservative girl to the very end, she can’t abandon her own, even if he is the son of Satan. By pitting the values of the family against those of religious purity, Levin hit upon an ironic finish that refused to resolve itself with the defeat of the evil force as in a typical monster movie. The Devil wins. In this final passage of the book, Levin describes the claws of the baby. Rosemary, as Stephen King would write, “has given birth to the comic book version of Satan.”
Polanski decided to eliminate it, offering only a quick glimpse of a sinister pair of eyes. Castle couldn’t believe it. The title is Rosemary’s Baby. Where was the payoff? The audience would be furious. But Polanski insisted. Castle pleaded: Let’s at least shoot another scene just so we could have an option. At this moment, Evans’s decision to hire Polanski paid off. The Old Horror, the kind where the seats buzzed when the monsters appeared, required the payoff, but this film was never about the Devil. By not showing us the cartoon devil, Polanski removed the last traces of childish comedy, the final gimmick.
IN MAY OF 1968, right before Paramount released the film, Polanski attended the first premiere at the Regency Theater in San Francisco. A team of studio executives sat in the back listening carefully to the audience. The reaction was muted. Evans waited at the door when the crowd filed out. One woman walked up to him and pointed a finger: “You should be ashamed of yourself.” Evans smiled and thought to himself: This is going to be big. The movie opened in June of 1968 to huge box office, and controversy. The Catholic League protested. On August 8, a theater manager in Vermont banned the movie from four theaters after the Burlington Roman Catholic Diocese said it distorted religious beliefs and appealed for Catholics to stay away. If they did, their absence wasn’t reflected in the box office, which brought in over $33 million.
When the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures gave the movie a condemned rating, a representative from the office told The New York Times, “the very technical excellence of the film serves to intensify its defamatory nature.” Many reviewers compared the movie’s ambition unfavorably to Polanski’s earlier work. You could sense the dismissive attitude toward the horror genre in the review by The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann, who wrote: “Only a director satisfied with ephemera could have lavished his gifts on the whole project.”
One of its harshest critics was Charles Champlin, the respected chief reviewer of the Los Angeles Times. After praising the performances and the direction of Rosemary’s Baby, singling out Farrow and Polanski, he wrote:
Having paid my critical respects, I must add that I found Rosemary’s Baby a most desperately sick and obscene motion picture whose ultimate horror—in my very private opinion—was that it was made at all. It seems a singularly appropriate symbol of an age which believing in nothing will believe anything.
Whatever you might think of his conclusions, Champlin noticed something about this film that many critics missed—that its carefully maintained ambiguity was a break from the past. “Traditional horror films turn on an agreed dichotomy of angel and devil, right and wrong,” he wrote. “Its surfaces are too accurate and Miss Farrow’s anguish too real to let us be comfortable in some never-never land of escape.” Champlin wrote a follow-up story called “Toward a Definition of Good Taste in Movies” that argued his point with a refreshing candor. Simply, for a horror movie, the movie was “too well done.”
CHAPTER TWO
THE PROBLEM WITH PSYCHO
You know what they call my films nowadays. Camp. High camp. My kind of horror