American Horror 2: Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

Chocolate Mouse, anyone? Rosemary’s Baby was a smash hit on release - the best selling horror novel of the 1960s, eventually selling over 4 million copies. The year after publication it was adapted into one of the greatest films of the decade - directed by Roman Polanski with Mia Farrow as the eponymous heroine.

At first glance, it seems that Ira Levin’s story was at odds with the prevailing spirit of free love - read the room, baby! But as we’re going to find out - the secret of Rosemary’s Baby is that it perfectly captured the spirit and anxieties of the age. Ira Levin would repeat the trick with the Stepford Wives in 1972 and The Boys From Brazil in 1976, but Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece. A book which is simultaneously an outlandish fantasy and one of the greatest novels about coercive gaslighting relationships.

Sophie and Jonty ask a tough question: is Levin's depiction of a coercive relationship just too real? Do we come away feeling that Rosemary has real power and agency that speaks to us now, or is the book's depiction of domestic violence and misogyny and trapped in its own cultural moment just as much as the stuffed mushrooms and Gibsons the couple consume on the fateful night that the horror takes hold?

Content Warning: the book and film — and this conversation — contain descriptions of sexual violence, rape and abusive relationships.

Books and Film Referred to:

Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby

Roman Polanski, Rosemary's Baby

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Jane Austen, Emma

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Adrienne Rich, "In the Evening"

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

Andrea Dworkin, Women Hating

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

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