Spoiler Alert: The following essay gives away key plot details from Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Omen (1974), House of the Devil (2009), Immaculate (2024), and The First Omen (2024).
I.
In 1968, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) moved into the Bramford building in the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes). The first 20 or so minutes of Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman Polanski) sees a happy couple that are more or less equals within their traditional marriage of the man supporting the woman financially and the woman tending to the house. This is an agreement that suits them. We see them at dinner parties, where Rosemary is a happy participant in conversation and able to voice her opinion and be heard.
Unfortunately this cosmopolitan bliss is short lived. Guy loses out on a big role that puts him in a mood, playing to his insecurities which he then takes out on his relationship with Rosemary. Conveniently, this coincides with becoming friends with their new neighbors. Guy confides in the older couple about the loss of this role. The next day, the part is his because the initial actor has suddenly gone blind. Now that Guy feels like the alpha, he apologizes to Rosemary for being gruff and distant and agrees with her that they should indeed have a baby. Rosemary is over the moon as this has been what she’s wanted for some time, I think she feels that a baby will bring her and Guy closer - as a manifestation of their love. But what really happens is Guy has made a pact with the Satanic cult neighbors and offered Rosemary as a vessel to bear the son of Satan and in exchange, he gets a successful career. In Guy’s (laughable) defense, he did add a stipulation that Rosemary should be left unscathed, so there’s that I guess.
What follows is an hour and change of Guy increasingly gaslighting and controlling his wife mentally and biologically, aided by his new occultist pals (neighbors, doctor) who are all of an older generation so they transpose to authority in Rosemary’s perspective. Slowly but steadily they work to undermine Rosemary’s headstrong nature and she becomes a shell of a human - she is reduced to a body to grow this demon seed at the expense of her health.
With the help of some friends who Guy is trying to push away, Rosemary comes to her senses but it’s too late for anything but to see it through. She tries to seek help and is told that she’s just being hormonal. She tries to escape and is tied down. Then she’s told that the baby died due to her escapades. Mourning the loss of her child as well as her guilt for it being caused by herself, she hears the newborn cry through the thin apartment walls. What’s that! A false wall in the closet the previous tenant had tried to block off?! Through the false wall we go, to discover the members of the cult, all well to do socialites and professionals, having a cocktail party.
Rosemary is horrified as she spots the black bassinet with the upside down cross, looking down at what she knows is her baby, she exclaims “What have you done to its eyes?”. The neighbor turns out to be the leader of the cult, he replies that they are the father’s eyes. Guy cowers in the corner - shielding his eyes. Rosemary notes that Guy’s eyes are brown, we as the audience flash our memory to Rosemary’s dreamlike rape that shows a monster with claws and red eyes. The baby begins to shriek, one of the occultists is rocking him too aggressively. The cult leader suggests that Rosemary rock him instead, asking her rhetorically, “Aren’t you his mother?”. Rosemary, much in a trance, approaches. The last scene we see leads us to believe that she is overcome with maternal instinct and tends to the child as the wailing ceases and Rosemary’s humming takes us out.
II.
Five years after Rosemary’s Baby is released, the Roe v. Wade decision wins the constitutional right to bodily autonomy - abortion is protected under the American Constitution! Despite the ruling being consistently supported by the public majority, religious conservatives were not willing to go quietly into the night. This landmark decision only meant bad things for them - it meant women were no longer trapped and would make them harder to control and keep out of power. They could choose what life they wanted freely now - with legalized oral contraception (1967) and destigmatized abortion (sweeping generalization here - state laws be whacky and obviously there’s socio-economic factors at play here that I’m not digging into).
Horror as a genre is often a mirror for society, it’s been used to process various social anxieties - mental wellbeing, racism, healthcare, abuse, promiscuity, guilt, isolation - it runs the gambit.
Horror as a genre is often a mirror for society, it’s been used to process various social anxieties - mental wellbeing, racism, healthcare, abuse, promiscuity, guilt, isolation - it runs the gambit. Horror imitates life as art in a way that other genres cannot (Sci-fi being the exception), it can take the raw concept and then change a core detail about it that makes you view it other worldly and presents a way to neutrally reflect on where we have been and where we are going void of the real world. One such sub-genre is the demon seed trope of body horror which is a fascinating lens in which to reflect on society’s general perspective through the decades on the right to choose and can further lend us support in this dark time where we are yet again fighting for our own bodily autonomy.
One of the most clever things about this sub-genre is that the origin of the horror is coming from within the Church (the monster is in the house!). Movie censorship law went through heavy changes in the 1960s that ended the restrictive practices of the Catholic run Hays Code. One of the topics regulated was how religion was presented on screen - it needed to be in a positive light. Just before Rosemary’s Baby came out a more liberal take on regulation took effect thanks to new leadership. This cleared the path to subvert the morality associated with religion and use it to show the evil that lurks within the restrictions that the dominant Catholic church have been in favor of. It allowed horror to use religious themes and settings to demonstrate that morality inflicted by force is evil.
Cut to: 4 years after the Roe decision.
The Omen (1976, Dir. Richard Donner) opens with a distraught father who is an up and coming politician seeking help from the clergy to replace his new born that had died (we find out later this was a nefarious murder plot by an evil sect of the church) to prevent his wife from mourning. He thinks he can do a baby swap. The swap works! Robert (Gregory Peck) and Katherine Thorn (Lee Remick) create a great life for young Damien (Harvey Stephens), they are the picture of a classic traditional American family. Robert climbs the career ladder and has realistic dreams of someday presidency, Katherine keeps house and the role of political wife. Then Damien turns 5 and literal hell breaks loose.
Aside from my personal feelings that Damien is the single scariest child in all of cinema, it seems like his mom begins to feel this way too. Damien starts to recoil from proximity to attending mass, animals at the zoo freak out when he looks at them. Kathy finds out she’s pregnant and turns to her husband’s approval for an abortion. He says no because of the political dreams he holds - she tries to explain that she doesn’t want another Damien and that her first pregnancy was so awful but no, Robert’s political status is the important thing.
In a twist, Damien straight up tries to kill Kathy knocking her over a second story ledge from his tricycle - instead he causes a miscarriage and puts Kathy in a full body cast. Long story short, Damien’s nanny (a Disciple of Hell tasked with making sure that Damien is safe) decides that Kathy is a threat to Damien so she throws her out the hospital window, this time Kathy really dies. That sends Robert over the metaphorical ledge, he recognizes his shortcomings and that he probably shouldn’t have lied to his wife about their baby’s stillbirth and replaced the baby with the antichrist and he probably should have been supportive when Katherine came to him with her misgivings about Damien. Live and learn (in Robert’s case, he actually doesn’t live...).
On a historical note, Kathy’s abortion would have been in the UK since the family was stationed there and continuing the pregnancy would have caused her duress so it would have been legal for her there same as if they were living in Post-Roe (pre-overturned) US. Additionally, The Omen came out the same year that the Supreme Court ruled that spouses didn’t have veto power against what a woman chooses (Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth).
Both The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby help set a baseline for approaching bodily autonomy within horror tropes.
Both The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby help set a baseline for approaching bodily autonomy within horror tropes. In the decades that follow their releases the fight for the right to choose ebbs and flows from the forefront of debates and politics and with the changing tides horror chooses to zero in on other various topics and soap boxes.
III.
Enter Ti West’s House of the Devil, it’s 2009 and college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) needs $300 to put a deposit down to get her own apartment and get away from her horny, loud dorm roommate. Sam is a responsible and studious gal. She accepts a sketchy babysitting gig in a remote location. Turns out, the people who hired her murdered the real home owners, set up a pentagram offering in the attic with their blood and are now using Sam in a moonlit ritual involving a lot more blood and some animal skulls. She breaks free but the damage is done. She feels something inside her, taking hold quickly. Sam is an updated heroine, she kills a few of her captors, grabs a gun and flees the scene but it’s too late, she feels the monster growing inside her (kinda like Alien). She attempts suicide, fails, and lays unconscious in the hospital. At the movie’s close we learn that both her and the baby will make a full recovery. Here’s a girl who was just trying to improve her life so she could study better and now this. Seems hard to imagine a world in which we would hear this story and say, yup - the moral thing to do here is to carry to term.
It’s interesting that I watch what happens to Sam and think to myself how could anyone be rooting for the spawn of Satan to come out ahead in this, but then I remember some of the statements that have been made by people in authority in recent years. Take Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court in 2018, then Senator Kamala Harris asked Kavanaugh if he could think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions for male bodies. Kavanaugh’s quoted response was “I’m not aware - I’m not - thinking of any now, Senator”. THEN WHY ARE WE LETTING THE GOVERNMENT HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE DECISIONS FOR FEMALE BODIES, BRETT??
Three years later, Jonathan Mitchel, the architect of the Texas Heart Beat Act (SB 8 - which severely limits access to life saving procedures for women in the state of Texas and has yet to be overturned despite valiant attempts of opposition) made this written, public statement in his “friend-of-the-court” brief regarding the case: “Women can control their reproductive lives without access to abortion; they can do so by refraining from sexual intercourse.” Is that the answer, Jonny? Can’t think of anything better? And so men are also refraining from sex, right? Or no, we’re not making that decision for male bodies.
They would have us go back to being Rosemary at the end of Polanski’s movie - to see the baby and accept it even if it is chaining us in the process - trapping us in a life that we did not choose.
IV.
Two years ago, when the Supreme Court decided to overturn our Constitutional right to bodily autonomy - what they were focused on was stripping over half of the country of their ability to make choices for themselves. They would have us go back to being Rosemary at the end of Polanski’s movie - to see the baby and accept it even if it is chaining us in the process - trapping us in a life that we did not choose. They would have this at the cost of true life horror stories where now ten year olds who were raped are having to travel across state lines to get an abortion rather than carry their rapist’s baby through to term in their ten-year-old child-bodies or women who want to be mothers dying in the emergency room from things like ectopic internal bleeding because they couldn’t get the healthcare they needed that would have allowed them to live so that they could safely see their dreams of becoming mothers actually come true. No no.
So now, 56 years after Polanski sets the demon seed mainstream stage here we are revisiting the trappings of bodily autonomy within horror. Using the trope of satan pregnancies to focus in on female victimization and loss of power. Really, who here is actively rooting for the spawn of Satan, the symbol of evil incarnate? This is a question that 2024 is asking quite loudly. This spring we got The First Omen, a prequel to The Omen from the 70s as well as Immaculate, which is not a ‘quel of any kind - just its own thing but same family sub-genre.
The First Omen (Dir. Arkasha Stevenson) is a movie where you should probably have a good guess about what’s going to happen. We find out about a nefarious plan by this off the rails sect of the church that has decided that the way to get the youths to come back to God is by showing them what real evil looks like - so they are going to bring about the birth of the Antichrist to scare people into faith. It’s a pretty long scheme. Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) hasn’t yet taken her vows as a nun, she’s living with another novice (nun in training) who convinces her that it’s important to party at least once to know what they are giving up by taking their vows. In Margaret’s one time letting her hair down, attending a disco and drinking, her moral code is broken and Satan takes hold.
She finds out she’s pregnant and also uncovers the secret files that help expose the plan (straight forward). She tries to escape, she gets taken back and held against her will. She gives birth to Damien who is carried away to do a baton pass with our old pals the Thorns. Oh, but twist! She had twins. The other was a girl, which is of no further use since they have a sired male now. The baby girl, Margaret, and Margaret’s half sister (who was at the orphanage Margaret was working at and also regularly raped by Satan to try and get a boy offspring but she was too young so she just kept having miscarriages, again - not a great movie, pretty bleak) are left to burn to death, along with the Satan demon who is lurking behind a curtain (sure?). The girls escape and head to the woods where they lead a quiet seemingly happy life together - no boys allowed.
While the birth of Damien should not be surprising here, the life that gets written for these two (three if we count the baby) victims in the aftermath is really interesting for 2024. That in the wake of so much violence and horror, these women found their own way and escaped their tormentors. In a world where history and our understanding of what comes next, this movie gives us something new - in its own way saying “hey, how about we try something different this time?”.
Immaculate doesn’t seem like a foil to Rosemary’s Baby at first but by the end it’s incredibly clear that this is a modern day dissent, stating that we will not return to our pre-roe ways as women. We will not be quietly rocking that bassinet, rearing the next generation by force and outdated assumptive maternal instinct.
Where The First Omen mumbles about progress, Immaculate (Dir. Michael Mohan) demands reform from on top of a mountain. Immaculate doesn’t seem like a foil to Rosemary’s Baby at first but by the end it’s incredibly clear that this is a modern day dissent, stating that we will not return to our pre-roe ways as women. We will not be quietly rocking that bassinet, rearing the next generation by force and outdated assumptive maternal instinct. We have a young nun-in-training, Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), who is the picture of morality (a fun foil to the often sex symbol that Sweeney’s roles tend towards), she’s an American joining a convent in Italy who doesn’t speak much Italian. She’s kind, gentle, full of faith, and wants only to serve the Lord - actually quite similar to Margaret in The First Omen.
The night that she takes her vows she is drugged (just like Rosemary and Margaret) and inseminated without consent. Unlike Rosemary, she’s technically still a virgin when the first signs of pregnancy start cropping up. She’s hailed as the new virgin Mary and treated as a saint. Cecilia starts to notice that things are maybe not what they seem, when she asks questions she’s met with the all too familiar gaslighting - that her time would be better spent resting (just like Rosemary). Cecilia does escape, also like her predecessor, and similarly too - gets dragged back and tied up to deliver the baby.
Here’s where a new final girl hero is made and we move forward beyond the patriarchal trappings of outdated morality clauses. Cecilia breaks her bonds, uses what was holding her captive to free her, makes sure that other women can’t be treated the same as her by burning up the facility and the relics used to do the “Lord’s Work” (according to the priests seeking power and earthly recognition) and as she climbs through towards the sunlight at the end of the tunnel while actively giving birth we see a close up of Cecilia’s pained, grotesques, and honest face. We hear a thud as gravity takes control and the unwelcome life leaves her womb. Cecilia rips the umbilical cord with her teeth. We hear a gurgle that might not be human. Then Cecilia walks away, finds a rock, and staggers back to where we know the baby/monster is resting and takes matters into her own hands. We never see it, just like in Rosemary’s Baby, but we know that Cecilia is free at the end of the movie. She’s going to live life on her terms and under no circumstances be forced into something that she had no desire to participate in.
I’m so sorry for giving away the end of this movie if you haven’t seen it yet, but Immaculate feels like an important ending update from Rosemary’s Baby given the span of what’s occurred since Rosemary turned to that bassinet and accepted motherhood by force. The late great Ruth Bader Ginsberg, during her own confirmation hearing (1993), said: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It’s a decision she must make for herself. When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
Rosemary genuinely wants a baby and that is used against her to help silence her. Margaret and Cecilia want a celibate life of solitude and faith which is ignored by the authorities around them to pursue their own agenda. Even though I have less rights today than my mother did when she had me in 1990, these more recent rulings with Dobbs and SB8 and Arizona’s 1864 ban (which was repealed this spring, thanks Gov. Hobbs!) are not representative of society’s views and we can see that in the shift of what happens at the end of demon-seed horror movies. The ends for Cecilia and Margaret, while still horrific, are hopeful. They walk away on their own terms. There’s no continued servitude. Evil loses. And so the real evil in our world will lose.
We are a variety of people who want different outcomes for our lives. We all deserve the ability to choose for ourselves as fully adult humans. Let’s follow Cecilia’s lead and take back what is ours - our bodies - and by way of that open endless possibilities.
Please vote.
This article was first published in Tough Cookies Volume 4, released July 2024. Physical copies available online.
All movie stills were taken from IMDB and then photoshopped to include my dog, Fred Baby Diamond.
Find my letterboxd reviews of movies discussed in this piece: Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, The First Omen, Immaculate.