Michael Myers Returns, A Stranger Things Prequel, and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: Rosemary’s Baby Turns 50
- Image of the Week: Behind the Scenes
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The A to Z of Subgenres: K is for Killer Kids
- Things We Love: Trailers from Hell
HORROR HISTORY: ROSEMARY’S BABY TURNS 50
By Joshua Lyon
In June 1968, Rosemary’s Baby kicked off a deluge of films about devilish kids like The Omen and The Exorcist, but none were as female-focused or remain as politically relevant as the mother of them all.
Director Roman Polanski stayed reverentially faithful to his source material, Ira Levin’s 1967 novel of the same name, in which young couple Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) move into a gothic building with a shady past. They befriend their quirky older neighbors, who secretly convince Guy to sell his wife’s womb to Satan.
The film maintains a delicate ambiguity about whether it’s all in Rosemary’s head until the end, but the underlying message is not as subtle. Oral contraceptives were legalized in the United States in 1965, the same year the story starts, and fights about a woman’s rights over her own body were strong. The movie is peppered with signs of the true enemy: A book titled “The Man,” near their bed. “Man,” played in a game of Scrabble. When her husband (literally named Guy) hides a book about witches, he stashes it above a copy of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.”
Rosemary has a rebellious streak, but once she gets pregnant, all her agency is crushed. She’s isolated from friends, constantly told not to read, and forced to drink foul Tannis Root. When she finally escapes, she’s handed right back to the coven. Everyone hates her chic, short Vidal Sassoon haircut.
In the final scene, Rosemary’s maternal instinct draws her to a black-curtained cradle to soothe the beastly infant, revealing the only piece of control she has left—ownership of the very thing that was forced upon her. The kid may be the son of Satan, but he’s still, after all, Rosemary’s baby.
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Behind the Scenes
Nick Castle shares a Dr. Pepper with his alter ego Michael Myers on the set of the original Halloween.
TINY BITES
HALLOWEEN TRAILER & GEORGE ROMERO BUSTED
Michael Myers is back in the new Halloween trailer, but the scariest thing in it is Laurie Strode as a vengeance-seeking grandmother with a gun. (Although the cheap-but-effective closet scare is a close second.)
Drew Goddard wants you to check into a creepy motel in the trailer for his latest movie Bad Times at the El Royale.
Forty years after George Romero sent zombies shambling through the Monroeville Mall in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, the director has been honored with a bronze bust at the shopping center his movie made famous.
Mainstream critics love Hereditary. It’s the kind of horror movie that makes them question (TIME) the whole meaning of horror movies (NY Times) and where it ranks on the list of the scariest films ever(The Guardian).
You’ll soon be able to go further into the Upside Down world of Stranger Things with three upcoming booksthat will reveal secrets about Eleven’s mother and the MKUltra program.
“A brief history of supernatural female sexuality at the movies” explains why you have to go back to the 16th century and examine why the troubled teens from fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood aren’t that different from the troubled teens in Jennifer’s Body.
IMDB describes the upcoming CBS All Access series Strange Angel as “A rocket scientist in 1940s Los Angeles is secretly the disciple of occultist Aleister Crowley.” We’re in.
THE A TO Z OF SUBGENRES: K IS FOR KILLER KIDS
Could you kill that which you create? That which is our vision of innocence? Children are sacred and to be protected. What killer kid movies ask is, what if they aren’t? What if they are to be feared? Blasting though one of our great taboos, Killer Kid movies provoke the darkest of parental, religious and societal anxieties, alternately proving deeply unsettling or darkly hilarious in the process.
Essentials: The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, The Omen, Who Can Kill a Child?, The Brood
Personal Favorites: Orphan, The Children (2008), Bloody Birthday, Goodnight Mommy, It’s Alive
THINGS WE LOVE: TRAILERS FROM HELL
Mick Garris, Joe Dante, and John Landis are some of the directors who lovingly analyze (and gently mock) their favorite movie promos on Trailers from Hell. We especially like Edgar Wright’s take on the trailers for 1977’s Suspiria, where he contrasts the U.S. and international trailers and calls them out for their bad math.