Yes, I think it is a good film, but be prepared for a slow build.

SO BORING.THE "DEVIL CHILD" GENRE IN GENERAL ARE BORING.

Okay, watched it last night.

I'm not sure it's even correct to call this a horror movie. Thriller? Suspense?

Yes, the subject itself is scary, and there were some scary scenes...but then, there were scary scenes in Jurassic Park.

This movie has often been written about as the first of a classic set of three devil child movies - The Exorcist and The Omen being the other two (as I mentioned in my original post above). The latter two are both fully within the scope of what I consider typical horror.

But not a few people have commented that Rosemary's Baby is a "slow burn". A slow burn to... what? The action? The scariness? With the latter two, there is no slow burn, no ambiguity, they get scary pretty quick and pretty much stay scary.

They also use plenty of make-up, special effects, and gore. And yes, RB has some, but we spend much of the movie trying to understand what's really going on, and it is ambiguous deliberately.

Polanski was an atheist who had no belief in the supernatural, so he deliberately adapted the script and screenplay to make it possible Rosemary was imagining the whole thing, there was no evil, she was just mentally unstable.

And it is this ambiguity that makes it difficult for me to call it a horror.

This movie could have been an Alfred Hitchcock movie, or even a feature length Twighlight Zone.

I certainly do believe, however, that the angle leading to final reveal cracked open a door, and then The Exorcist and (much moreso) The Omen kicked the door wide open.

Speaking of Hitchcock, I should mention, he once said the essence of drama/suspense is when the audience knows something the main character does not, and we are on the edge of our seats to see how the main character figures it out. That was the driving force of The Omen. All around Mr. Thorn was evidence that the audience recognized - the dog at the nanny suicide, the arrival of Mrs. Blaylock... not wanting to go to church... We knew what all this was about, we were in on it. He had to figure it all out.

Fast forward to a totally new school horror movie, The Cabin In the Woods. Those who've seen it know exactly what I'm talking about.

Back to RB, by deliberate design, we the audience didn't really know what was happening, we weren't in on it. It thus loses a step.

Which isn't to say that's the only way to do drama/suspense/horror. It's certainly not. The Exorcist didn't follow that template at all.

Like I said, I could be wrong. I'm just musing aloud here.

At any rate, I think that RB started something that required the latter two installments to more fully flesh out. And, to me, the right culmination is The Omen. The stakes were too low in both RB and TE. Being born in some apartment in NYC to a nobody couple, or possessing some kid is meh, what's the big deal. It took to TO to see that kid planted in a position of power to pursue worold domination that felt like it did have global consequences.

And,if we forget the latter two altogether, or evaluation based on some horror index quotient, Rosemary's Baby is a stylish, confident film that takes its goodly time, doesn't pander with jump scares or gratuitous gore for the sake of it, and tells a gutwrenching story of a woman's natal anxieties, fight for dignity, social oppression... In its own right, it may be the best "film" of the three.

PS - regarding that ending scene, yeah, I think she stuffed a napkin in its throat to suffocate it to death. The way she commanded that room ("Shut up, you're supposed to be somewhere else, I'm not hearing you") the way she asserted herself, finally not listening to her husband or the neighbours or the doctors... She'd come too far to just give in and accept this aberration. She'd been nipping and tucking things throughout the movie, she had that tea with napkin and made a deliberate move to go to the child, and those who say it stopped crying because she was nursing it, I did not see any lifting movement or tussle of her blouse - naw, she deftly took matters into her own hand, literally. That's my take!