Stockholm Film Festival

''This is not a nightmare! This is reality!'' How many times have horror films used a panic stricken scream of helplessness with a surrounding which refuses to listen and come to aid? But never in the sophisticated, technically advanced, horrifyingly gripping way as here. After Hitchcock had said ''no'' to the film rights for Ira Levin's thriller, even before the book had been published, the directorial offer eventually ended up with Polanski, in what was to become his first American film. He had just finished his nearly clinical study of schizophrenia and sexual fear, Repulsion and suspected that Levin also had seen and been inspired by his film - even if the writer later, hurt, denied it. With a thorough reduction of the literary original, a brilliant feel for casting, personal direction and precision even down to a sinister sounding floorboard, and a twisted - but silent nightmare angle, Rosemary's Baby became Polanski's own, and one of the best horror films ever made. The moral exasperation rose amongst the right wing Christian guardians of decency, over this violent and psychosexually charged story about Satanism, rape, belief, pregnancy and psychosis. But above all the film touched every human's fear over losing their ''self'', to be invaded by someone else, someone unknown, even if this other is the one that is closest to you. Polanski didn't mince his words when the British censors wanted to cut the film: ''The censors' attitude belongs in the Inquisition. But how are they ever going to protect people against everything imaginably perverse?'' 

Medverkande

Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer

Producent

William Castle

Manus

Roman Polanski, after the novel by Ira Levin

Foto

William Fraker

Musik

Krzysztof Komeda

Talat språk

English

 

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