Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Directed by Roman Polanski
A young couple, Rosemary and Guy, moves into an infamous New York apartment building, known by frightening legends and mysterious events, with the purpose of starting a family.
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What critics compared Rosemary's Baby to
To be fair, Peele is clearly riffing on some films he has seen before, including “The Stepford Wives” and “ Rosemary’s Baby ,” although with a charged, racial twist.
Rose’s parents throw a party for their wealthy white neighbors, who show up looking like Satanic extras from “Rosemary’s Baby,” and who proceed to assail Chris with their country-club manners and moronic attempts at conversation.
Cinematically, Peele draws influences from The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby and anything where a secret collective hides behind their portrait of cheery perfection.
“Get Out” is a cutting-edge, fresh and sometimes bat-bleep-crazy mash-up of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives,” with dashes of John Carpenter’s “They Live,” among other films, mixed in for good measure.
Writer-director Jordan Peele is best known as a comedian (he was the Peele in Comedy Central's Key & Peele), but he is also a horror-movie fiend, and is aiming here for the escalating, vise-tightening tension of movies he’s admired (his influences include Rosemary’s Baby, and he’s named his female lead Rose).
Just as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives” transformed the genre into panicky feminist fantasias, this becomes a mind trip of interracial mistrust.
Annabelle‘s Polanski homages are particularly awful in that they don’t just derive from Rosemary’s Baby, but they also reference and ape the Manson Family murders, simultaneously trying to respect Polanski while essentially shitting on the grave of his wife and unborn child.
Indeed, the story line is largely borrowed from “Rosemary’s Baby,” with nods to “The Omen,” “Witchboard,” and even “Poltergeist.”
Rosemary's Baby was released in 1968 – could Mia have been named by the filmmakers in tribute to the movie's star, Mia Farrow, who also played a maternal figure under threat?
Directed by John R. Leonetti (cinematographer of " The Conjuring " and 2011's " Insidious ") with an accomplished zing for provoking a visceral aura of tension, "Annabelle" holds a modern relevance even as its period details and deliberate yet gripping pacing remind of Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" and William Friedkin's "The Exorcist."
There are unsubtle nods to Rosemary’s Baby, The Changeling et al, but for the most part it’s back to the de rigueur “quiet-quiet-quiet-BOO!” formula popularised to money-spinning effect by James Wan. Director John R Leonetti served as cinematographer on several of Wan’s films (including The Conjuring) so it’s no surprise that this looks much the same – although to be fair the scares are orchestrated with more flair than usual, even if the best of them are all spoiled in the trailer.
Mia is heavily pregnant (and is the character’s name a sly homage to the star of Rosemary’s Baby?), and her husband gifts her with the large-size doll she’s apparently been coveting to complete her collection.
She allows a plate of salad to rot on her bedside table, verbally abuses Rich, and brings a house party to a standstill after suffering nightmarish visions of the partygoers laughing and clawing at her—a scene that serves as a Polanski twofer, referencing both Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby.
He uses techniques familiar from horror movies like Rosemary’s Baby - eerie music, jarring close-ups, and sudden flashbacks.
Catherine unravels in ways visually recalling Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and, in a feverish party sequence, "Rosemary's Baby."
It's the one time when Perry overtly aims for more of a horror feel, perhaps riffing on "Rosemary's Baby" a little bit, and it doesn't quite work with the rest of the film.
But the dip into Rosemary’s Baby-esque horror is perhaps too precipitous to fully reclaim its sense of seriousness.
Perhaps that's why this dual character study, featuring a balls out performance from Moss and an eerie one from Waterston feels like so many other movies, everything from "3 Women" to "Your Sister's Sister" to "Rosemary's Baby" and "Repulsion," yet defies coming into its own focus.
From Soderbergh's head-scratching opening homage to Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby to a plot that, at first, seems to be a cautionary legal tale of big pharma abuses, Side Effects unexpectedly develops into a post modern Hitchcockian thriller... which is actually akin to one of Brian De Palma's chilly psychological puzzles .
He plays games with the color palette and the sound mix; Mara has a spooky, translucent vulnerability that reminded me of Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby.’’
You’ll also detect echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (questionable psychiatrists involved in Manhattan highrise hijinks) and the 1981 Body Heat (an attractive couple whose passion turns toxic).
The premise is patently yet intriguingly ridiculous—a Manhattan-set psychological thriller that satirizes Big Pharma paranoia, while harking back to such crazy-lady favorites as Rosemary’s Baby and Fatal Attraction.
It’s no coincidence he opens his film with a slow, insinuating zoom into a distant apartment window, like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Psycho.”
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(And if it's too on-the-nose for you, maybe you can impress your friends by spotting the Rosemary's Baby nod that happens elsewhere.)
In some ways this is just a creepier, slightly funnier horror-pic spoof than anything in the recently resurrected “Scary Movie” franchise; along with its references to “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist,” the film spends a considerable amount of time elucidating prophecies in the book of Revelation, often with an impressively straight face.
And just when things start to drag a little, This Is the End pays vulgar homage to Rosemary’s Baby and the monsters arrive, leading to situations such as a gross-out soccer game with a severed head.
If Rogen and Goldberg want a hit as big as “Ghostbusters” (another film, along with “The Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” that this one borrows from), they should remember that the Bill Murray comedy didn’t keep putting the plot on hold for long stretches of improv.
I will note, however, that the film's ripoff of the demonic impregnation scene in Rosemary's Baby is considerably more horrifying than the original.
The obvious nods to " The Exorcist " and "Rosemary's Baby" co-exist with a hilarious examination of the familiar dynamics of a group of friends.
Writer-director Darren Aronofsky wants to have his commercial cake and chomp down on some vexing personal issues, too, in mother!, a very Rosemary’s Baby-like intimate horror tale that definitely grabs your attention and eventually soars well over the top to make the bold concluding statement that, for some creators, art is more important than life.
You could say that Aronofsky is drawing on “The Shining” (the isolated setting and Bardem’s stony resentment) and also on “Rosemary’s Baby,” the greatest of all paranoid horror films.
In his first film since the 2014 Noah, Aronofsky sifts through Roman Polanski’s wastebasket and weeds out a little Repulsion here, a lot of Rosemary’s Baby there.
To compare Mother! to other mama-minded thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, Antichrist and The Babadook is almost selling it short.
Unlike The Yellow Wallpaper—or Rosemary’s Baby, for that matter, another work exploring the gaslighting of a pregnant woman—Aronofsky’s film is ultimately concerned with the parasitic nature of the male artist; how he drains the lifeblood from all those around him in the name of creativity and ego fuel.
The Polanski Rosemary’s Baby influence is in there, too, obviously, with its diabolical menagerie focused on a woman’s swelling uterus.
In the subgenre of mother horror, The Babadook deserves mention among the likes of Rosemary’s Baby, Dark Water and The Conjuring .
As is all of "The Babadook," a haunting masterpiece of psychological horror, claustrophobia and paranoia in the vein of Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Tenant," Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and William Friedkin's "The Exorcist."
Combining fright and psychological analysis, Kent delivers a metaphor of horror and parenthood as powerful as “The Shining,” “The Exorcist” or “Rosemary’s Baby,” where moms and dads learned they were no match for demons.
Kent has given us a grown-up horror tale in the tradition of "Rosemary's Baby, "Psycho" and "The Exorcist."
“Psycho,” “The Exorcist,” “The Shining,” “Rosemary’s Baby”?
In Roman Polanski’s sinister Rosemary’s Baby (1968) Mia Farrow plays an expectant mother who has just moved into a new apartment block.
The sustained aura of unease is reminiscent of “Rosemary's Baby,” but it's also unsettling in the way that recalls his 1965 psychological thriller “Repulsion.”
But overall Suspiria looks fantastic, mostly eschewing Argento’s trademark color-saturated palette for something grittier and looser, more in the vein of paranoid ’60s and ’70s psychodramas like Rosemary’s Baby and Brian De Palma’s Sisters.
In Rosemary's Baby, another movie about a young woman coping with evil forces around her, the title character lays out her case simply, in a mostly calm and collected manner.
Like the precursor of Rosemary in “Rosemary’s Baby,” American dancer Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz) backs out of some evil arrangement with the dance troupe and explains her reasons to Dr. Josef Klemperer (Swinton) in opening scenes.
Dakota Johnson’s protagonist Susie seems far less innocent than Jessica Harper’s wide-eyed original, despite the fact she comes from a family of Ohio Mennonites who presumably don’t spend their time watching Rosemary’s Baby or reading the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft.
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It joins the league of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen as one of the most diabolical entries in the modern horror library .
Imagine John Carpenter hired to make a drive-in knock-off of Rosemary’s Baby.
West matures considerably with what is basically a slow boil homage to the seventies that is obviously inspired by the classic “Rosemary’s Baby.”
Better than the film’s nuanced references to its forebears (the opening nods to Rosemary’s Baby with a track into Mary’s back positioned only partly inside a door frame), is its capricious script.
As the tale unfolds, a debt to not only '80s horror films, but also Rosemary's Baby, The Amityville Horror , and Hammer's gothic '70s classics also emerges: food (specifically, pizza) is a source of fetid disgust; murderous mysteries are discovered in the remote mansion's nooks and crannies; and Satanism is revealed as a malevolent force with which Samantha must ultimately reckon.
Thematically, The Gift is reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which is also about a young, emotionally fragile, but fundamentally decent young woman who discovers that she is married to a man whose egocentrism and desire for personal success drives him to commit heinous deeds.
Recovering from a miscarriage, she’s beset by strange dreams and bad vibes, with which Edgerton infuses a “Rosemary’s Baby” sort of dread.
She’d make a mean Rosemary of Rosemary’s Baby.
It winds up having more in common with “Rosemary’s Baby” than, say, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” being a deeply empathetic look at a woman being slowly dehumanized and used by unseemly forces, in this case by men who aren’t always aware of the evil forces lurking inside them.