Young newlyweds Guy and Rosemary (Cassavetes and Farrow) move into a New York apartment block and befriend the neighbours. When the elderly couple next door become a lttle too friendly for Rosemary, the warnings of a woman who recently committed suicide in the building come to mind.

Roman Polanski's (Chinatown, The Pianist) haunting gothick tale of devil worship is a well-crafted and surprisingly understated psychological horror. Using little more than the power of suggestion, Polanski first builds a horribly uncomfortable environment, attaching Rosemary's growing suspicions and concerns to the audience's and refusing the pieces of the puzzle necessary for its completion until the birth of the child. Farrow (married to Polanski at the time) is notable in the lead, a brittle but devoted wife who is pushed to one side when her husband's career takes off. But it's the ambiguous neighbour, Minnie Castevet (Gordon) who steals the show (and an Oscar). Gordon relished the opportunity of such a strong supporting role. Although over seventy at the time, she made more screen appearances after the film than before.

There are very few specific scary moments - instead the film follows the lead of Ira Levin's novel and devotes itself to the steady build-up of tension. But the scene it which the child is conceived, a surreal and bizarre dream sequence, is someting that will stay with the most ardent horror buff for a long time.

In Roman Polanski's first American film, adapted from Ira Levin's horror bestseller, a young wife comes to believe that her offspring is not of this world. Waifish Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her struggling actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and only elderly residents. Neighbors Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon) soon come nosing around to welcome the Woodhouses to the building; despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, Guy starts spending time with the Castevets. Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Minnie starts showing up with homemade chocolate mousse for Rosemary. When Rosemary becomes pregnant after a mousse-provoked nightmare of being raped by a beast, the Castevets take a special interest in her welfare. As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to suspect that the Castevets' circle is not what it seems. The diabolical truth is revealed only after Rosemary gives birth, and the baby is taken away from her. Polanski's camerawork and Richard Sylbert's production design transform the realistic setting (shot on-location in Manhattan's Dakota apartment building) into a sinister projection of Rosemary's fears, chillingly locating supernatural horror in the familiar by leaving the most grotesque frights to the viewer's imagination. This apocalyptic yet darkly comic paranoia about the hallowed institution of childbirth touched a nerve with late-'60s audiences feeling uneasy about traditional norms. Produced by B-horror maestro William Castle, Rosemary's Baby became a critically praised hit, winning Gordon an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Inspiring a wave of satanic horror from The Exorcist (1973) to The Omen (1976), Rosemary's Baby helped usher in the genre's modern era by combining a supernatural story with Alfred Hitchcock's propensity for finding normality horrific.