“Rosemary’s Baby” (1968)
From the moment Rosemary enters her seemingly perfect new apartment, something seems not quite right. Not long after she moves in, Mia Farrow’s wide-eyed waif begins to suffer from nerve-rattling nightmares: of drug-fueled orgies, of cults that appear to be Satanic and of rape and various undefined tortures. The second (and arguably best) in Polanski’s great “Apartment Trilogy,” “Rosemary’s Baby” remains perhaps the quintessential is-she-mad-or-is-she-sane flick, and also an eerily prophetic end-of-the-’60’s horror picture. The film’s depiction of paranoia —where any gathering of people could potentially be a pack of murderous vipers in disguise— often serves as a disconcerting reminder of the tragic fate of Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate who would become a victim of the notorious Charles Manson gang while pregnant a year after this film’s release. Yet in spite of these sordid circumstances, “Rosemary’s Baby” stands as one of the director’s finest achievements: a portrait of mental unrest that is all the more destabilizing for not resorting to hackneyed boogieman clichés in order to get under the audience’s skin. The monsters in Polanski’s film are not vampires, ghouls or goblins. They are friends, neighbors, passerby on the street. Even Rosemary’s doctor —and who are you going to trust if you can’t trust a doctor?— turns out to be conspiring against her. Polanski asks a lot of his leading lady, and Farrow is more than up to the task via her frighteningly, achingly human performance. From the morbid, sea-sick lullaby and God’s-eye zooms of its opening title sequence all the way to its stomach-churning finale (“Hail Satan!”), “Rosemary’s Baby” is one of the greatest achievements in horror cinema.
“Suspiria” (1977)
Probably the artistic apex of the giallo movement director Dario Argento pioneered along with fellow Italians Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, touchpoint ballet horror film “Suspiria” is a spectacular evocation of a kind of heavily sexualized dementia that again happens in a cloistered, rarefied, and largely female environment. For giallo neophytes, its trademark lush, hyperstylized, color-saturated visuals, lashings of gore and undercurrent of lurid female eroticism can be a heady attack on the senses —there is nothing tasteful about “Suspiria,” which is part of its eternal attraction. Drenched in an extraordinary score (provided by prog rockers Goblin, who made it onto our list of Best Horror Scores of all time for this and Argento’s “Tenebre“), the film concerns an American ballerina (Jessica Harper) who transfers to a sinister German dance academy covertly run by a satanic coven of witches, including “Dark Shadows” star Joan Bennett. But it’s far more of an exercise in splashy, sensationalist style and evocatively nasty imagery than a page-turner narrative, with all the ways it departs from the polish of a classically Hollywood-style film (cronky post-dubbing of the Babel tower of accents from the international cast; unconvincing acting; hyper-unreal special effects and herky-jerk editing) become the very elements that make it such and arresting and eternally rewatchable mish-mash now. But for all the garish unsubtlety and occasionally amateurish feel of Argento’s work, “Suspiria” is undeniably creepy and evocative, tuning in to burgeoning female sexuailty as a metaphor for a quasi-mystical transformation process that is unknowable but also oddly beautiful without ever trying to transcend its exploitation / b-movie basis. Taking on these cues and polishing and refining them would be a job for the film’s many subsequent admirers (Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” owes “Suspiria” a heavy debt), but this is the film that is their ground zero, and it retains an intense, unsettling and uncanny power today despite its undeniable camp value.
There are of course many other films in this storied genre —”Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” springs to mind immediately as the grand guignol archetype of this sort of fervid exploration of female envy and bitterness, while “Mommie Dearest” and other films about diseased mother-daughter relationships often have that same histrionic edge. On the vastly more realist end of the scale, there’s John Cassavetes‘ peerless “A Woman Under the Influence” which feels too real and sincere to easily rub shoulders with some of the campier extremes outlined above, while the entire early output of Pedro Almodovar, especially the absurdist “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” takes its self-aware archness in a more overtly comedic direction than “Queen of Earth.”
If you want more of this sort of thing, you can check out tangentially related features like Lunatic Asylum films, 5 Of The Worst Movie Mothers (and here are 5 More), or a similar piece we ran on 5 Films To Watch If You Love ‘The Wicker Man.” Meantime, stay away from bodies of water, sharp objects, isolated cottages and reflective surfaces and let us know your own favorite cinematic hysteria victims in the comments below.
— co-written with Nicholas Laskin