IS IT REALLY HAPPENING? The Postmodern Horror of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby

Abstract

This article examines Roman Polanski’s film Rose-mary’s Baby (1968) as both a symptom and a manifestation of the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s. Released in an era marked by rampant conspiracy theories and a grow-ing opposition to established hierarchies and institutions, the film constitutes a prime example of “paranoid horror.” Reflect-ing the collapse of commonly accepted metanarratives such as religion and the American nuclear family, Rosemary’s Baby ad-amantly rejects the restoration of order that earlier horror movies would have provided. In fact, by questioning ontologi-cal reliability, it epitomizes the shift from the classical to the postmodern horror narrative.