June 12

“What's Wrong With Its Eyes?”—Rosemary's Baby and a Question of Consent

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Mia Farrow’s voice—thin, childlike, slightly off-key—singing wordless syllables over Krzysztof Komeda’s spare, minimalist score as the opening credits roll over slow shots of Central Park West…

It’s one of the most iconic, unsettling film opening of its era, and possibly of its genre: nothing supernatural in sight, and yet the unease is immediate and total. Rosemary knows something before the audience does.

On this day in 1968, Paramount Pictures released Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel that had skyrocketed to bestseller status only the year before. Like the book upon which it was based, the film opened to overwhelming critical and commercial success, grossing $33 million against a modest $3.2 million budget. It received two Academy Award nominations, winning Best Supporting Actress for Ruth Gordon (in a particularly terrifying performance), and was later selected for the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It is, by the consensus of film historians and moviegoers alike, one of the greatest horror films ever made.

But Rosemary’s Baby is also a film whose relationship to actual occult tradition is considerably more complex, and considerably more interesting, than its lazy reputation as a “Satanic horror film” would suggest.

Legends & Myths

Ira Levin, whose subsequent bestselling novels would include The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, was known not only a born storyteller, but a meticulous researcher. Always with an eye on Hollywood adaptations of his work, he insisted on as much accuracy as a horror story could muster, and had studied both historical witchcraft and Satanism before writing the novel (although Hollywood never seemed to learn the difference), and the details he built into his narrative were drawn from genuine sources. The “tannis root pendant”—although an entirely fictional herb created out of Levin’s imagination—provides a major clue within the story’s unraveling mystery, and was accurately depicted as an object of magical protection, as was the coven’s need for a personal possession of their intended victim to direct their spells. Likewise, Levin’s use of a “good witch” doctor to monitor Rosemary’s pregnancy, and the ritual impregnation itself (although, perhaps, the most terrifying of all scenes) were drawn from historical accounts. Each of these elements has direct correspondence in the grimoire tradition and in the actual practice of folk and left-hand path ceremonial magic.

The film’s central conceit—that a Satanic coven can harness a woman’s reproductive body as the vessel for birthing the Dark One’s son—draws on a theological tradition running from the Malleus Maleficarum through the Witches’ Sabbath panic literature, all the way through to the twentieth century’s anxieties about bodily autonomy and the uses to which women’s bodies are viewed without their consent. Coming along at the apex of Women’s Lib, the horror of Rosemary’s Baby hit many of those real-world themes; the story isn’t primarily supernatural: it’s horror of a woman whose husband has sold her body to his employers, and the paranoia of not knowing who to trust. While traditional horror tropes are the vehicle, Rosemary’s Baby spoke to audience who recognized that, truly, the violation of consent was the tale’s driving force.

Of course, even at the time of the film’s release, rumors about the production only worked to add an additional mystique. One of the most persistent legends surrounding the film, and that still persists to this day, is that is that the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, served as a technical advisor on the production and played the uncredited role of Satan in the impregnation sequence. But there’s never been any evidence that LaVey ever even visited the set. The rumor seems to have originated with LaVey, looking to boost his own esoteric “street cred” and taking credit for work he had nothing to do with. (He was a former carnival barker, after all.) however, there was a more substantial connection between LaVey and the film that only worked to further propagate the urban legend: Susan Atkins, a Manson Family member who would participate in the 1969 murder of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, had previously performed as a topless vampire dancer in LaVey’s “Witches’ Sabbath” theatrical shows—making the Church founder only a few half-steps reviewed from the Rosemary’s Baby director … a little to close for comfort.

But, like the later releases of such horror blockbusters such as The Exorcist and Poltergeist, there were other real-life omens and tragedies that further fanned whispers of a “haunted” film. Krzysztof Komeda, one of Poland’s most renowned jazz composers, was thirty-seven when he scored Rosemary’s Baby, and had already created brilliant soundtracks for Polanski’s previous films Knife in the Water, Cul-de-Sac, and The Fearless Vampire Killers. In December of 1968—only six months following Rosemary’s release—attended a party in Beverly Hills when he stumbled from a small cliff on the property, sustaining a fatal brain hematoma. Following a lengthy coma, he passed away on April 23, 1969. Over the decades, film buffs and conspiracy theorists alike have been quick to point out the parallel with the film: Rosemary’s friend Hutch is afflicted by the Satanic coven with a mysterious coma of unknown cause from which he never awakens.

Additionally, during the production, producer William Castle suffered severe kidney stones, causing hallucinations and a lengthy hospital stint that included surgery. He claimed that as he went under anesthesia he screamed, “Rosemary, for God’s sake, drop that knife!” and admitted afterward that he had become “very frightened” of the film he had produced.

An Occult Perspective

Rosemary’s Baby is, at its core, a devastating depiction of what happens when magical power is exercised without consent (something carried over into such modern horror films as Hereditary and Obsession). Every element of the “Castevet coven”’s operation involves the circumvention of Rosemary’s will: the drugged mousse and health drinks, a doctor who reports to the coven rather than to his patient, and, perhaps worst of all, the husband who has sold her body as the vessel for a pact in which she had no say. Guy’s deal with the coven is structurally identical to the diabolical pact of the grimoire tradition—he trades his wife’s body and soul for career advancement—but the film inverts the usual moral of the Faust legend. Here, the man who made the deal survives and prospers, offering a direct commentary on the Patriarchal practice of making a woman’s place as second to her husband.

The Western magical tradition, at its most serious (the tradition of Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” which is universally misread as permission for anything, but which is actually a statement about the obligation to discover and perform one’s genuine True Will rather than the will of others) has always maintained that magical operation against the will of another is the fundamental violation. The grimoire tradition’s prohibition against harming the innocent; the Wiccan Rede’s “harm ye none”; the Thelemic distinction between True Will and false will imposed upon another person—all of these are versions of the same principle. What the Castevet coven does to Rosemary is, from the perspective of the tradition, the most complete possible violation of that principle. The film’s final image of Rosemary bending over the black-draped cradle, beginning to rock her child, with her face moving from horror toward something that is not quite acceptance and not quite love, but is achingly recognizable as the beginning of both, is the most theologically precise moment in the film. She has not consented to any of it. She did not choose this.

“What’s wrong with its eyes?” Rosemary asks.

“He has his father’s eyes,” her husband answers.

The question could never get a better answer than that.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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