Film Classic

Everybody knows the story of Ira Levin's 1967 thriller about a woman who believes herself impregnated by the Devil. Made into a terrifying yet, by today's standards, remarkably restrained film the following year by director Roman Polanski, it achieved and still enjoys widespead cult status, the legendary performance of Mia Farrow in the title role, making it difficult to separate the film from the novel. As the happily married, innocent and childishly vulnerable Rosemary Woodhouse who gradually becomes a horrific travesty of her former self, Farrow's haunting face beams up not just from the book's cover but every page. The economy of Ira Levin's deliberately understated prose, which has stood him in good stead for popular classics such as The Boys from Brazil and The Stepford Wives, is at its most insidious as he carries us along Rosemary's inexorable descent into hell. Without indulging in gore, violence or gothic melodrama, the author creates the ultimate nightmare: a woman carrying the offspring of Satan. This is no humdrum tale of witches and warlocks, however. Levin brilliantly constructs a tantalizing psychological dimension whereby the reader can never be sure whether Rosemary's fears about the malign paternity of her unborn child are grounded in reality or merely a figment of her own imagination resulting from prepartum hysteria. The outcome may be the same - a mother seeing the incarnation of evil in her own baby- but of the two options to explain it, the suggestion that it is simply the product of a disturbed mind is by far the more unsettling. Ira Levin recently, and deservedly, received the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for lifetime achievement, and in this new series of the original books behind film classics, Bloomsbury are publishing his other novels that have made screen history. As with Rosemary's Baby, reading them after dark is not recommended. (Kirkus UK)