The Substance

Substance Abuse: An Exercise in Horror

or

"Oh, That This Too Too Solid Flesh Would Melt, Thaw and Resolve Itself Into a Dew! Or That the Everlasting Had Not Fix'd His Canon Against Self-Slaughter. Oh God!"
 

Submitted for your approval one Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a flickering fitness guru for the "beauty-is-only-skin-deep" believing house-bound. A body-suited drill sergeant, who kills with kindness and only for your own good. Every stretch, every kick, every high-step is designed to make you as good as you can be because, after all, it works for her and she's shy a half-century. 

But Time waits for no man...or woman, for that matter, and Elizabeth Sparkle is about to learn something that will shock her down to her leg-warmers and trainers. It's a little lesson in Inevitability, in Life and the Television Industry, and it will take her the way Ponce deLeon traveled for the fabled Fountain of Youth. It's a little known path between Desperation Street and the Avenue of Self-Deception, which are all just detours that spill out...into The Twilight Zone.

Apologies to Rod Serling

The DNA of The Substance is very much that of a typical episode of TV's classic "Twilight Zone" in that it takes a mercurial person comfortable with their situation and up-ends it to which they have to act in an atypical way, even fantastic way, which then, ironically, comes back and bites them in the ass.

Elizabeth Sparkle is the host of a television work-out program that she has been doing for years and years, long after her career as an Academy Award-winning actress. On her 50th birthday, she is given a card, a present, red roses...and the pink slip. She has been sacked. Her network (run by her cartoonish producer, Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid) is (of course!) appreciative of her and her "long run" but, now, is another day and they're looking for a new host. A younger host. A sexier host. And, at 50, Elizabeth is not considered either of those things. She has lost some of her sparkle.

Most celebrities would consider product endorsements, a line of cosmetics or scents, maybe a tell-all book (how about a pod-cast?), but not Elizabeth. She stews. Then, a car accident—from which she emerges miraculously unhurt—lands her in the hospital, but bereft and in tears. A young orderly slips the sobbing Elizabeth a flash-drive with a note that says "It changed my life." The flash-drive has a presentation for "The Substance" and it's pitch is intriguing:

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can't escape from yourself.

That last bit probably serves as the warning of side-effects.

Elizabeth calls the number on the flash-drive and orders. She receives an address and a key-card and rushes to a run-down, seemingly abandoned site that discourages investigation. Inside, she comes to a pristine locker-room (it's amazing how the Substance organization runs like Amazon—except they answer the phone faster) and eagerly rushes back home to her posh condo to sample her wares.

The Substance kit has everything she'll need but it's an odd mix of syringes and tubing (lots of tubing), bizarre containers of "food" and sutures and bandages and vials, lots of vials. It's a bit intimidating, but Elizabeth takes the stuff to her "panic room" of a bathroom and injects herself with the "Activator," tripping out and falling like a dead lump to the floor.

Like most drugs, The Substance should come with warnings. Like, watch it somewhere in a chair that has something to grip onto. Because "The Activator" sequence is a horrific exercise where Elizabeth's naked body starts to roil and heave and mutate until the skin of her back starts to split like a busted seam and from it's zippered wound emerges..."Sue" (Margaret Qualley)—as she will call herself—who is literally "Born Sexy Yesterday." Sue stumbles about the bathroom, taking it all in, but once she reaches a mirror and sees herself, she calms down, stretches, and gets down to business. She has work to do.

Like clean up the mess. She sutures up Elizabeth's back (filmed in excruciating detail), hooks her up to the "food matrix" package—Elizabeth's going to be unconscious for a week—and experiences some head-spins and nose-bleeding, so she instinctively goes to the "Stabilizer" package, pulls out the hypodermics and inserts a needle into Elizabeth's spinal column and withdraws some liquid from the "matrix". Once she injects herself with it, she is good to go.

That is, go to the audition for Sparkle's old job, which she wins handily. Producer Harvey agrees that she can be allowed to work every other week (she explains that she has to take care of her elderly mother, which is true in a way), and everyone starts prepping for the new exercise show that will be flashier, sexy, and more provocative with other things on its mind than just body management. Elizabeth's happy. Sue's happy. Even Harvey is happy. What could go "worng"?

Everything, if you believe the altered cliché of "Nothing exceeds like success." Although Elizabeth and Sue "are one" they are experiencing different realities and so become of two minds about the situation, which results in bent rules, missed deadlines, and adverse effects on their twin. Things turn nasty very quickly, and given "The Activator Sequence" (which will seem tame in awhile) that nastiness is going to become bloody, gooey, and, at times, painful to watch.

Yet, you giggle throughout The Substance, not because it's inherently funny—maybe ironic—but because of the sheer verve of the thing...and the nerve. The twisted nerve. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat is not playing subtle here, but her playbook is spot-on with some arresting images and a boldness that you can't help but admire. It will ultimately fall apart (heh) as the third act will descend into a frothing, spewing gore-fest that is so over-the-top, you'll feel the need to shower afterwards. But, before it goes down the drain, it revels in its satire and makes its point about society's age-adverseness and obsession with form over substance. And the lesson that even fitness gurus should know something about karma.

Fargeat settles the look of the film directly and comfortingly in the sci-fi realm with a steely one-person perspective with wide-angle lenses, emulating Kubrick, but more directly from John Frankenheimer's similarly-themed Seconds. For some reason, that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. And, thematically, she has aspects and far-away echoes from dissimilar films as All About Eve and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The reverberations of past films are all over this, but Fargeat keeps it fresh and innovative.

And the performances are quite good—Quaid's over-the-top, but I think that was deliberate, with Qualley providing just enough of that Manson-girl predatoriness that she seems to inhabit. And Demi Moore does some of the bravest image-flagellation since Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Kudos. Brava.

We should all be so brave. But, like any pharmaceutical ad, we should probably end with some warnings. The Substance is not for the squeamish. The Sunstance is not for those who are offended by extensive nudity, whether attractive or not. Or react to needles, or open wounds, or festering sores, or a vast amount of red-colored Karo syrup being sprayed like a fire-hose, use caution. Or if you don't like being taught "lessons" in movies that run the danger of changing your encrusted attitude (but don't worry, there's a lot of scary stuff at the end).

 

Always read the label and make sure you read the possible side-effects. Do not take The Substance if you're allergic to The Substance. Nor, should you take it if you don't know yourself very well. And, of course, you should always take it...with a grain of salt.

Presence (2024)

Teen Angel, Can You Hear Me?

Teen Angel, Can You See Me?
Why Do You Still Give a Damn

Why Do You Glide on Steadi-cam?

or

"Ghosts Are Ass-Holes, Man!" 

I have a friend who (so he says) became a psychic, though not of his own volition. One day, he walked into work and discovered that he could read people's thoughts and know what they were thinking (I should have asked him what number I was thinking of at the moment, but the story was too interesting to hear for some quick-thinking debunking). Anyway, he was a professional psychic for awhile and gave it up, settled down, raised a family. The toughest trick for a psychic is to STOP being a psychic...if you REALLY ARE a psychic.

 

Anyway, I went to a lecture he was giving and was driving him home and we were talking psychic stuff—its arcana and down-sides and my weird forays into TM—when I asked him "What about ghosts?" And he blurted, frustrated, "Aw, ghosts are ASS-HOLES, man!" He'd never met a ghost he'd liked, as they were always hanging around with some left-over agenda from their previous existence that they just...couldn't...let GO of! "One ghost was hanging around her daughter because she never returned a BOOK she borrowed from her! Can you believe that?" I actually could (and if he was really psychic he would have known that). But, he could never understand why ghosts just never let go and move on, especially as the way (I've heard) is perfectly well-illuminated.

 

So...Presence, director Steve Soderbergh's new film with a script by David Koepp that only cost $2 million bucks and (supposedly) has only 33 editorial cuts in it. That is as lean and mean as a movie can get, and I've always liked Soderbergh for his daring and his playing with the movie-form and his many invented ways to get movies made and/or distributed. He's the guy I'd want running DOGE over anybody else. Smart and experimental, but efficient as any director making movies—he even shoots and edits them under pseudonyms. And, in this one, he literally plays a larger part.

We open on a house. More actually, we open IN a house, looking through the window down at some pavement below and then the camera looks up and we see the window, turn around and we're looking at the empty bedroom of a vacant house. The camera glides through rooms, up and down stairs, down to the main floor into the kitchen, around the living room and out the window. Nothing to see here. Fade to black.

When we come back we're looking out the upstairs front window and a woman getting out of a car. "We" run down to the first floor as she enters and it's a real estate agent (Julia Fox) who's going to show the house to a family who soon arrive. They are, as we soon learn, the Payne's: Rebekah (Lucy Liu), Chris (Chris Sullivan) and the kids Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang), both teens. Rebekah loves the place, but Chris has questions—are the schools okay? it's by a fire-station and are the sirens going to be annoying—and the kids are... preoccupied. Tyler's a jock and submersed in his phone—it's not even sure if he notices the house ("whatever...") and Chloe wanders around, not saying a word...except...at a couple points she looks directly at the camera, which then swiftly retreats away from her gaze. Nobody else notices or looks our way, only Chloe and only a couple times. In fact, the camera will move very close to people in intense discussions and there is no reaction. It's like we're invisible.

It's like we're a GHOST. Which is exactly what's going on here. There is a spirit in the house (something the real estate agent doesn't mention and probably doesn't know as she's focused on making a sale). Everybody is busy with other issues and so they don't notice, they're not attuned to it. Only Chloe who is sunk deep in depression over the death of a friend—accidental overdose it was ruled—is aware that there's an unseen house-mate, who's useful at putting her books away or causing a fortuitous distraction. One night, on the edge of sleep, she senses something in the closet (the spirit's go-to refuge), gets up, wanders to the center of the room and tentatively asks "Nadia?" It was the name of her passed friend.

There have been plenty of "point-of-view" movies. They were quite prevalent in the day of slasher horror (but only sparingly—but enough that it became a trope—and usually to disguise the perpetrator or increase suspense ala The Silence of the Lambs), and Orson Welles was going to use it for his aborted first RKO film Heart of Darkness, and director Robert Montgomery employed it (partially successfully) in his adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake—quite naturally as Chandler wrote his mysteries in the first person. But, it's a gimmick, like those movies employing found media (I'm thinking The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield) where the point-of-view technique is meant to be claustrophobic and limit what is shown. It's a distraction, as well.

Interesting that there are a couple of extra chairs at the dinner table.

Expecting guests, are we?

But, not here. "Our" role—as we, the audience, don't have a choice in the matter—is not as a stand-in for the narrator or the director's presence (although director Steve Soderbergh DID shoot the whole thing himself, so one could say that he is portraying the ghost). We are the observer (as per usual), like the presence, unseen and unheard—but, even if we don't, it is still quite capable of making an impact.

The film is of our time, and what is going on in the lives of the Paynes is distrust, an uneven power dynamic between the four, and involves teens and bullying and social media, plus an unsolved murder or two, all seen through the eyes of a spirit who knows a few more things than we do and acts accordingly when it feels the urge to. One may have a qualm or two with its selective abilities ("Well, if it can do that, why can't it do this?") and it all may come down to cherry-picking for the sake of dramatic effect and suspense. Given the amount of detail that Koepp and Soderbergh put into the scenario, one suspects that they were just interested in telling an engaging story and didn't want resolutions to be too easy. Poltergeists can't do everything. If they could, they'd be guardian angels...which is another pay-grade.

Are ghosts ass-holes? I don't know. Presence would make the argument against—that they serve some purpose other than flickering lights and poltergeisting to their sacred hearts' content. And "Ass-holes" is a little judgy. Plus, it's never a good idea to look down on things that can look down on you (especially things known for knocking things off ledges). Maybe ghosts are just like those career-people who absolutely refuse to retire and can't imagine themselves relaxing with a harp. That's a little relatable. It certainly would be to Steve Soderbergh who's said at several junctures of his career that he's going to retire and he...just keeps...making...movies.

 

I certainly hope he does...if the spirit is willing.

Nosferatu (2024)

Come To Me, My Melancholic Baby

or

"He's Italian!?"

Robert Eggers' new remake of F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, is respectful of the original—it's on the director's list of favorite films—but allows for Eggers' darker interpretations of myths, his sexualization of those myths, as well as his emphasis (as with David Lynch) on texture. 

 

Murnau's original (if we can use the phrase ironically) was a knock-off of Bram Stoker's "Dracula", the names changed to protect the filmmakers from copyright considerations—although they were sued by the Stoker estate—and is genuinely creepy, owing to the German Expressionist manner of lighting and filming. Plus, Murnau was an extraordinarily clever filmmaker who could use rudimentary special and camera effects to create arresting images. But, then, so is Eggers, and his version of Nosferatu* is respectful, but also tries to achieve Murnau's evocation of dread through its own means, given the advantages of modern cinematography and (something Murnau didn't have access to) sound. More on that in a bit.

Eggers also has an advantage in that he's had over a hundred years of cinema to be inspired by in the years between Murnau's version and his. Watching his Nosferatu one can see the debt he owes to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (with its shadow-play and use of miniatures), but also in the addition of making the attraction between Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) a predestined certainty—Ellen has been diagnosed as "melancholic" for her sleep-walking and agitation in her youth and it only intensifies once her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) falls into the orbit of the Count. This "love for the ages" concept wasn't originally part of the "Nosferatu" heritage.

The other major influence is from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Eggers shares Kubrick's love of framing his shots with the one-point-perspective, but here he employs it the way it was done in the Stephen King adaptation—that one-point-perspective leads the eye to a negative space, which is why the effect is so creepy and audience-disorienting. Here, all those tangential lines may lead only to an empty spot on the horizon...or a castle in the distance. There are whole sequences that give you a vertiginous feeling, as if one could fall into that screen, pulled by gravity and it's not a pleasant experience. For a horror movie, it's ideal. Unnerving, but ideal.

And he does something else: his camera may be fluid, but it's also austere. He'll frequently do a 360° turn of the camera and do it slowly, determinedly, placing the audience in the perspective of the character watching his environment, dreading whatever might be at the edge of the frame. It's been awhile since I've seen either movie, so I can't remember if it was Murnau or Carl Theodore Dryer's Vampyr where the camera makes similarly slow circular movements that, rather than make you wonder why you're making the trip, fill you with dread. They're nice touches and are nice little updates to the story-telling.

And it's a familiar story—anyone familiar with Stoker's "Dracula" knows it. A solicitor is sent to the castle of a count to finalize the selling of an estate. The man is sent through the machinations of his boss who is under the throes of the Count's influence, as the man is, in fact, a vampire. He makes his way to the new estate and begins to set upon the citizens there, most prominently, the woman closest to that poor solicitor.

This leads to visits by doctors, who, being scientists, cannot explain the malady and so a specialist in the "unconventional" is called upon, and it is he who deduces that the plague in their midst is a vampire and must be dispatched. This being Nosferatu, the names are changed, but the situations are basically similar. "Dracula" takes place in England; Nosferatu takes place in Germany. All the arcana we associate with vampires is stripped to the bone—no silver bullets or crucifixes (much in display but ineffectual), not even a clove of garlic is to be seen. Those killed by vampires die and stay dead, and although a stake through the heart is effective to kill them (if one comes prepared), the surest way is to distract him with a nice virginal meal until the sun comes up and...that vampire's toast.

The acting is quite good, with particular nods to the three leads, Hoult, Depp and Skarsgård. Hoult has the unenviable task of having to act like he has no idea what the audience is fully expecting to happen, but manages to make his Thomas Hutter still sympathetic when he makes the effort to complete his job even after all the signs tell him him should just turn around and go home. And Depp's performance is just plain scary. Her fits look truly traumatic with her eyes rolling back in her head and her body contorting and spasming into Exorcist-like exercises.

And Skarsgård's Count Orlok has been carefully distanced from Max Schreck's rat-like vampire. Described as "very old and very eccentric...he has one foot in the grave already" Orlok is a hulking figure, stooped and wrapped in a dark bear-like coat with a coarse, brushy mustache. He is barely visible in his first scenes, just a overpowering presence, but the more you see, the more he resembles a rotting corpse, his skin flayed off in places and as far afield from any semblance to a romantic figure (ala 1979's Dracula) as you could get.

But, it's his vocal performance more than anything that's fascinating. Speaking in a low, rattly and sepulchral growl (augmented electronically so it fills every speaker in the theater) every syllable is e-nun-ci-ated slowly only to be broken off by the driest asthmatic breath-intake you can imagine this side of an iron lung. If the theater allows such things, I would take a big bag of cough-drops or lozenges. Super-size the soft-drinks.

Face it, it's those new approaches to things are what you're looking to see the movie for, because the story has been done to death...and after...and has more lives than Christopher Lee's Dracula. Just when you think you can't squeeze any more blood out of the thing,** it comes back to haunt you. So, just remember: you're the one who invites him back.

 

In the meantime, Eggers' version will do...and do quite well...until the next vampire movie rises from the grave.

* His version? There have been other versions of Nosferatu—aside from the official remakes of the Dracula novel—including one that was released just a year ago. There's also Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre and also 2000's Shadow of the Vampire, which told a tale of the making of the original with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe (who's also in Eggers' film) as Nosferatu player Max Schreck. Plus, little nods to the original can be found in vampire designs of the 1979 TV-version of "Salem's Lot" and in Taika Waititi's original What We Do in the Shadows.

 

** Geez, I didn't even mention the ghastly sucking sounds he makes when he's feeding on his victims.... 

Heretic (2024)

The One True Religion (Stop Me If You've Heard This One)

or

A Reading from the Book of Iterations...(And Voltaire Never Said It)

Two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) are doing door-to-door evangelizing for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) on a not-too-weather-friendly day in Colorado, in Heretic, the new film from the team that gave you 65 (and wrote A Quiet Place). A storm's a-comin'. But, despite that, they take their bicycles for a requested "knock-knock" from an inquiry made by a Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) at his out-of-the-way house in the woods. After some wait as he comes to the door, he welcomes them eagerly, assuring them that his wife (who is very shy) is in the back, baking. Reassured that there will be a female present during their visitation, the two young women enter the house and accept the hospitality...even after he casually informs them that the walls and ceilings have metal in them (that's no problem, is it? Oh, good, good). He then takes their coats like a good host and goes behind a door to fetch the Mrs. It is then that the two women remember that they have the key to their bicycle lock in one of those coats. They're going to have to get it back if they intend to leave. With their suspicions heightened due to a couple of other things, they try to make a cellphone call...they can't (metal, you know) and they find that the front door cannot be opened...know matter how hard they try (and one has to admit, they don't try very hard as they never consider destruction of property...lawsuits, I guess). But, the long and the short of it is...they're trapped. And they can't leave except through the largess of Mr. Reed, who has disappeared deeper into the house. Interestingly, one thing they don't do...is pray.

Maybe they should have.

I don't like horror movies as a rule (despite the seeming obsession with them during Hallowe'en month). I do think they're valuable in instances, certainly in film. It's where a lot of young directors learn their craft in how to levitate people out of their seats in popcorn explosions (think Carnival of Souls or Night of the Living Dead). Even great directors will dabble in instances of horror. I just stay away from them as a rule because so many of them of late, especially during my formative movie-watching years, are (literally) hack-jobs. The slasher-movie craze left me cold after the first John Carpenter Halloween, and those series devolved into repetitive gore-fests with indestructible purveyors that kept coming back sequel after sequel after sequel (nothing new in the horror genre—how many Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolfman movies did Universal crank out?).But, the main reason I don't watch them of late is that so many are based on the element of cruelty...and casual cruelty where the moral compass has gone astray. Frankly, if I wanted to watch that, I could watch the news.

But, getting back to Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, clearly they are in a dangerous situation. They are stuck in a house with Mr. Reed—there's no sign of this "Mrs. Reed"—and even though he's curious and quite amiable (in that Hugh Grant "twitchy" way), it becomes quite clear that he doesn't need much evangelizing. He claims to be a theology student, and even has a well-annotated Book of Mormon on his shelf. And he explains that he's always wanted "a" religion in his life, but he couldn't settle for second-best (equating it with favorite fast-food franchises in a discussion with the Sisters), that he was on a life-long quest to find The One True Religion to devote to. He peppers them with questions about LDS and their beliefs and how their life-experiences fit into a belief system that's a bit late "in the game" and had its share of waffling on tenets.

But, the discussion becomes deeper the deeper they get into the house. By this time, the ruse that there's a "Mrs. Reed" is way-past accepting, just as Reed is way-past accepting that Sisters B and P (as he calls them) are not above being dishonest in their words as well. There's no cellphone call they feign accepting—cell service doesn't work—and they can't call out (even though an elder (Topher Grace) knows that they're out on a call and to whom) and the front door is on a timer and it won't unlock until the morning. He tells them they can leave at any time...but they have to go through the back door. And there are two doors in the room: which of them goes to the back door he's not saying.

But, first he has a little speech (of course he does). And it's all about "iterations" and how the Big Three Religions can be compared to the game of Monopoly or (more towards the Sister's younger spheres of culture) the case of a song that might be "inspired" by earlier songs. The Big Three Religions have as their basis previous theologies, and Protestantism, Calvinism, LDS, Scientology (what have you) are all further iterations of The Big Three. It's as if the latest prophet should start his religion with "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before." But, they don't...because they have "the one true religion." And Reed isn't interested in copies.

But, there's the matter of those two doors—both lead to dark stairs leading downwards—neither of them seeming too appealing, and Mr. Reed has already demonstrated that he's not the most honest of people, and the Sisters, if they want to leave the house (he says), must choose between them if they do want to leave (and they truly do). And he ups the ante by marking them "Belief" or "Disbelief". Which of the doors will they choose?

But, before you think this will be an examination of Faith and its repercussions, one should recall that it's a horror film. A rather icky, grisly one, and one that takes a step or two back from the post-feminism horrors like Silence of the Lambs or even, say, Ready Or Not, and for all the intriguing aspects of the theological arguments, the film slides relentlessly downhill once those doors are opened. And however much some of the talking brings up some salient points (and a couple of attribution gaffs) it never builds on them or resonates through them, but turns into a simple gore-fest.

 

Slate Magazine calls Heretic "mansplaining as horror," which is a good line (and to be expected as the film is about religion where, outside of the world of Dune, women are tolerated, not elevated), but, unfortunately, that mansplaining is the best part of the movie (a lot of it due to Hugh Grant's performance, building on past roles as "man-monsters"). Once we start entering the house's sub-floor the movie never rises to the same level as those opening 45 minutes. The writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods make movies that have wonderful first acts—great concepts that can "sell" a movie to studios—but they fall apart and start regurgitating on cruise-control for the remainder of the film. There're no epiphanies or revelations at the end.* Nothing's earned. They just stop. 

But, movies should be more than their elevator pitches. I have faith that someday Beck and Woods will get that. But, for now, they're stuck in the basement.

* The film has two good lines of dialogue at the end, but to show you what a big blood-soaked nothing burger the movie becomes, it could have been said an hour earlier and it would have made as much of an impact then as in its current place.

Olde Review: Rosemary's Baby

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This Saturday's ASUW films in 130 Kane are Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, and Robert Wise's The Haunting.

Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) Rosemary's Baby opens with this theme:* it's a lullaby, sung charmingly off-key by Mia Farrow, its star, but underscored with even more off-key, sometimes baleful accompaniment. And as this lullaby oozes out on the soundtrack, the image we see is of a line of New York apartments--not an unusual opening shot for the beginning of a movie, in fact, it's pretty much of a cliche. 

 

And so is the opening situation--two young newly-weds-in-love house-shopping. We've seen it hundreds of times. It's an everyday occurrence. The apartment is lovely, the couple buys it, and everything is quite normal. 

 

Until a new-found friend of Rosemary's commits suicide, and Rosemary's relationship with her eccentric neighbors turns rather familial, and a bizarre fate befalls the fellow who got her husband's job. Now, that it looks like success for them, they decide it's time to have a kid...and see, there's this chocolate mousse...

Well, I don't have to go any further for I'm sure the legend of Rosemary's Baby has preceded it. 

 

But what separates Rosemary... from other gothics is the perverse outlook of its director, Roman Polanski. Yes, everything's normal, and it is that very normalcy that makes the intrusion of Demonic Forces so doubly terrifying. One can accept odd happenings on a dark and stormy night on a cliff-top castle, but on a sunny day in a New York apartment complex?** 

It makes the horror so much more palpable to be surrounded by normalcy for it increases the possibility of something happening to you. And thus, Polanski places threats in such "normally" innocent and reassuring things as a chocolate mousse, or Ralph Bellamy (who had hawked aspirins for years on the tube) playing a "witch" doctor, if you'll excuse the pun. 

It's an unorthodox approach to the Gothic Horror Story...at least it was in 1968, when it was released, and to paraphrase an ad for Polanski's latest film, The Tenant, "No one does it to you like Roman Polanski."***--not William Friedkin in The Exorcist, or Richard Donner in The Omen. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is head and shoulders...and horns, above them.

 

Broadcast on KCMU-FM on October 22 and 23, 1976 

 

Still true, but, my God, after Polanski's conviction of child-rape, that's one hell of a movie tag-line on The Tenant! Polanski's arrest, trial and conviction would come later, two years after The Tenant was released, but it sure is the ultimate sick joke.

As for Rosemary's Baby, it still tops the lists of "Movies No Pregnant Woman Should Watch" and it still takes the prize as the best "Devil Walks Amongst Us" movie (sorry, Damien and Regan), and it's no small part due to Polanski's sick sense of humor—Orson Welles, in one of his conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, referred to him as "one of those morbid boys"—and his way of mixing the mundane and the sacrilegious. 

The most entertaining parts of Rosemary are the elderly and uncomfortable neighbors—the "legacies" of the Bramford Hotel, and the best of them is sprightly Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her role. It resurrected Gordon's career, and she went on to star in a long list of films in her twilight years. But, there are others, like Patsy Kelly, Ralph Bellamy (the joke in his early roles was that he was always the dullest of leading men and Polanski makes full use of that reputation here), Elisha Cook, Jr. (a favorite of producer William Castle), Hope Summers, and Phil Leeds (he would end up a fixture on "Seinfeld"), all semi-familiar faces that, in other circumstances, might provide comfort, all part of a conspiracy to make an anti-domestic situation to welcome the Anti-Christ.

Add to it the presence of Mia Farrow, the urchin break-out star of TV's "Peyton Place" who'd just married...Frank Sinatra!...and had a quality that could charitably be called "odd." You're not sure if she's going crazy, has a pre-postpartum depression, or if something weird is actually going on, and it keeps audiences on a tightrope tension of sympathy for/suspicion of Rosemary, the yin and yang of our sympathies and cynicism. And, of course, Polanski (out of Ira Levin, who cloned Hitler and roboticized housewives in other thrillers) turns that into your worst nightmare.

Producer William Castle had a carnival-barker-showmanship to him, gimmicking customers into screenings of his goofy-creepy thrillers and horrors and after Hitchcock (inspired by Castle's box-office receipts and asking "what if someone good did it?") managed to best his efforts with Psycho, he wanted to do the Master of Suspense one better. With the solid story-ideas of Rosemary's Baby, head and tails above what he could conceive, he was able to get that much better and gain some industry clout, although he ultimately had to cede most of the creativity to Polanski, and his Paramount studio-bosses. He would always be a B-movie-maker, but Rosemary's Baby made him see the promised land of the A-list.

 

* Yeah, there's nothing wrong with your computer--there is no song. I usually backed my radio-reviews with an appropriate piece of music, and for this one, I used the actual theme on the soundtrack (that I recorded on cassette from a TV broadcast...I used to do that).

Here it is:

 

** Ironically enough it's the high-end and rather exclusive Dakota building, standing in for the "Bramford." John Lennon would be shot in front of the Dakota a decade later.

*** EEE-Yikes!

 

Legendary producer-showman William Castle appears outside the telephone booth for a cameo.