Rosemary's Baby is the best horror movie of all time. It is the rare perfect movie. Mia Farrow is captivating. The pacing is brilliant. The aesthetic is compelling. The camerawork is striking. The movie itself is thrilling, and the ending is satisfying. But most of all, the story stays with you, because it taps into deeply felt horrors, which are emotional and cerebral and visceral - no cheap thrills here.
This film perfectly epitomizes (and was seminal in developing) two central horror tropes --
1) A person leading a normal life is exposed by chance to the dark, seedy underbelly of the world. Experiencing this new truth radically transforms the hero's view of society and of their place within it. As the hero probes deeper into this new, ugly truth of the world, they are inexorably dragged deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. If they conquer the dark forces and emerge successfully, they are forever altered.
~ This trope is profitably explored in Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), for example.
2) Others refuse to validate the new truth the hero is experiencing, and the hero is forced to choose between denying the truth of their own experiences (and thus accepting that they have gone mad), or believing that everyone around them is out to get them, and is involved in some great conspiracy at the hero's expense. This tension fills the hero (and vicariously, the viewer) with terror and uncanny revulsion, at the loathsome prospects of insanity, or betrayal. The need to resolve this tension is what drives the hero deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
~ In this blog, I have used the tag "I know yall think I'm crazy but..." to identify films with this theme.
~ Hitchcock of course inspired the term "gaslighting" with his eponymous 1944 film.
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