Don’t believe your eyes
A quartet of current films recall the feminine dread of early horror masterpieces
“Pray for Rosemary’s Baby,” read the newspaper ads for Roman Polanski’s 1968 film adaptation of Ira Levin’s controversial bestseller about an unsuspecting young woman impregnated by the devil.
Viewers should have been praying for the kid’s mother, of course: as memorably embodied by Mia Farrow in a pixie cut, Rosemary is compelling both as a damsel in distress and an amateur sleuth unravelling the spooky conspiracy snaking its way through her social circle.
Historically, the best horror movies are the ones that manage to surf the cultural zeitgeist and say something about what we’re really afraid of. Underneath its Gothic surfaces, “Rosemary’s Baby” was about nothing less than the world-shaking collision between tradition and modernity, threading ancient, primal fears about capital-E evil through contemporary anxieties about class, gender roles and, especially, bodily autonomy: while the word “abortion” goes unsaid in the story, Levin’s fable was easily read as an allegory about shifting attitudes toward a woman’s right to choose.
Taken strictly as a piece of filmmaking, “Rosemary’s Baby” is a virtuoso exercise in dread, leveraging empathetic melodrama against black comedy and going for the satirical jugular (it turns out not only that Satan is real, but he’s working with the annoying elderly couple next door).
It’s a movie with a long shadow: without its critical and commercial success, it’s unlikely that a similarly sacrilegious A-list shocker like “The Exorcist” would have been produced, or at least not on such a luxurious blockbuster budget. Myriad parodies and rip-offs followed: in the past month alone, two separate new releases have paid tribute to Polanski’s classic. The first is Michael Mohan’s “Immaculate,” which stars the much-hyped It Girl Sydney Sweeney as an American nun who suffers frightening visions after being stationed in an abbey in Italy; the second is Arkasha Stevenson’s “The First Omen,” which unfolds a near-identical plot (with Nell Tiger Free as the embattled novitiate) while rewriting its own underlying franchise mythology, which riffs freely (and goofily) on the Book of Revelation.
Released in 1976, “The Omen” was a brazen cash-in on “Rosemary’s Baby” that tried to traffic in the same sense of sociological terror: here, the Antichrist was no longer in utero but incarnated in a cherubic little boy, insulated against danger by a combination of black magic and economic privilege.
In interviews, the film’s director, Richard Donner, explained that he had trouble with the story’s supernatural elements, and tried to hedge his staging so that the various spectacular deaths and decapitations occurring onscreen could potentially be chalked up to coincidence. The shared twist in both “Immaculate” and “The First Omen” is that instead of trying to prevent the birth of the Antichrist, the Church (or at least a breakaway faction within it) is trying to hasten his arrival as a way of (literally) putting the fear of God back into the flock.
Like “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Immaculate” and “The First Omen” play purposefully with point of view, restricting our perspective on events to that of the female protagonists, who have reason to doubt their own eyes. In both films, there are scenes where the camera seems to be straining to peek around dark corners (a stylistic flourish indebted to Polanski’s off-centre framing).
Pakistani-Canadian director Zarrar Kahn employs a similar trick in his new thriller “In Flames,” in which a young female medical student, Mariam (Ramesha Nawal), begins to feel the presence of something uncanny manifesting in her family’s apartment in Karachi — the ghost, perhaps, of a not-sodearly-departed father figure exercising his grip on Miriam and her mother (Bakhtawar Mazhar) from beyond the grave.
On the scale of production values, “In Flames” exists in an entirely different sphere from “Immaculate” and “The First Omen.” It was funded partially through Telefilm’s cost-conscious Talent to Watch Program. But in a broad sense, it deals in similar themes about the power and malevolence of a religious patriarchy that would deny women agency, a topic it tackles less floridly than its Hollywood brethren.
Crucially, what all three films have in common — and what distances them a bit in time and attitude from “Rosemary’s Baby” — is a belief in the potential of resistance. While the plot line of “The First Omen” is constrained by its status as a prequel, Stevenson manages to carve out space for sequences that boomerang the essentially exploitative and misogynist nature of the material back at the audience (leaving us to wallow in our visceral own discomfort) while the already infamous final sequence of “Immaculate” — shot in a single long take that uses Sweeney’s bloodstained face as a widescreen canvas — inverts the helpless dynamics of Polanski’s climax to crowd-pleasing effect.
There is one other 2024 horror movie worth unpacking in terms of its contemporary resonance: Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ late-’70s pastiche “Late Night With the Devil,” which unfolds as an alleged “lost” episode of a syndicated talk show, including period-authentic cinematography and editing strategies. It’s a clever premise, elevated by a superb performance by the raven-eyed character actor David Dastmalchian, and yet “Late Night With the Devil” has become a lightning rod for online criticism owing to its apparent use of AI-generated imagery: a series of deliberately cheesy interstitials used to demarcate commercial breaks.
In the wake of a series of industry strikes that pivoted partially on the desire for protection against AI, the Cairnes’ decision to cut corners was read as a betrayal, both of their movie’s otherwise handmade esthetics and a tightly knit online horror-movie community that tends to root for the underdog.
The offending images only appear onscreen for a few seconds, too quickly for the average viewer to notice and yet long enough to open the door for debate about a very different sort of Faustian bargain, and the impending invasion of ephemeral, insidious forces into the world of cinema and beyond.
In light of the controversy around “Late Night With the Devil” — and its implications going forward — a great, cynical line from “Rosemary’s Baby” (delivered in the film with wry amusement by indie-film saint John Cassavetes) comes to mind: “That’s showbiz.”