You may have noticed (or will notice soon) some of the more well known horror movies popping up on efihr.com. After a fairly lacklustre halloween crop this year I decided it was time to revisit some classics, or at least what we are told are the classics. Rosemarys Baby is one of the few ‘horror’ films rolled out on ‘must see’ lists that I had not actually seen. I put ‘must see’ in inverted commas because the concept of a must see list fundementally goes against all this blog stands for, and I put ‘horror’ in them because it is patently not scary. I would never argue that an age rating is a signifier of … well anything really, but how this is an 18 is beyond me, I am not saying that it could have passed at 12A with “contains scenes of devil rape”, because thats not going to fly, but honestly, the hand of the ‘devil’ looked like a pokemon (graveler to be specific) and his body looked like it was straight out of childrens bedtime favorite “rainbow fish”. “Contains scenes of Rainbow Graveler rape” doesnt sound as bad, but I concur, brightly coloured geology doesnt make rape any better. Just in case you were interested (you are right?) the devil suit from the movie recently sold for $4000, a small price to pay considering it was listed as “condition – very fine, as worn in film”, I think you may find that is because it only appears in the film for about thirty seconds. So, in any conventional sense this is one of the least scary films to be marketed as horror I have seen in a while. There is some other stuff going on here, its surely saying something about the social elite, of ‘old money’, for which ‘the coven’ is a synedouche. By remaining together their money stays in their group, to join it success can be bought, but at a price, a particularly devilish one. It could be a clever critique of the 1%, except here they want to breed the spawn of satan, rather than just be rich and have swimming pools and mansions and things. There are lots of stories about this film, mostly sparked by the horrific Manson murders which occured soon after the film was released. This and other misfortunes (if the Manson murders could be called that) have been attributed to a curse upon the film. Ultimately though I cant help but think that it was just a series of awful events, which perchance happened to follow the making of a film, and the real reason people wanted to talk about them is because they are, by any measure, the most scary thing about this film.