In one of the opening paragraphs of the article, Pinedo defines contemporary horror films as those produced after 1968, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rosemary’s Baby was released June 12 of that very year. I watched the film last semester with a friend who’s an avid horror fan, and as I was reading the article, I was struck by how many qualities of postmodern horror the film embodies.
Pinedo claims that postmodern horror often supplants the male expert protagonist with “an ordinary victim who is subjected to high levels of explicit, sexualized violence, especially if the victim is female” (20). Rosemary is that victim. She is an ordinary, sweet housewife who is drugged and restrained by her neighbors and husband and raped and impregnated by the devil. The scene is not necessarily explicit – it occurs in a half-drugged dream sequence – but the violence is blatantly sexual.
Embodying another aspect of postmodern female horror protagonists, Rosemary relies on intuition as opposed to facts and expert opinions. While her husband, neighbors, and doctor assure her nothing is wrong, she instinctually knows that her pregnancy is not a normal one. At a dinner party, female friends hear about the symptoms she is experiencing and immediately agree that something is amiss. As Pinedo explains, the Cartesian philosophy suggests that rationality is male and intuition is female. It is her intuitive female friends rather than male doctors who see through the facade.
Ultimately, I believe Rosemary’s Baby most strongly embodies Pinedo’s category of “Lack of Narrative Closure” (24). Below is the final scene of Rosemary’s Baby. Rosemary finally lays eyes upon her child, realizes he is the antichrist, and is left with the decision either to reject or accept him. Initially she rejects the child, claiming that it isn’t her baby. However, the final sequence of the film involves her soothing the crying baby, staring contemplatively into the distance while eerie music begins to play. It is unclear whether Rosemary accepts her child or not at the end of the film. The conclusion is left ambiguous and the antichrist remains in the world.
(The clip was accessed from the Youtube channel Movieclips and depicts the final scene of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby).
While Rosemary’s Baby lacks certain aspects of the genre, such as graphic violence, it departs so significantly from classical horror that I argue it may be one of the first instances of postmodern horror.