‘Apartment 7A’ Isn’t the 1st Movie to Cash in on ‘Rosemary’s Baby’
Few horror movies from the 1960s have the power to terrify modern audiences quite like Rosemary’s Baby, so it’s no surprise that the film inspired a prequel called Apartment 7A. While many fans are only familiar with the original movie, there are a few other entries in the Rosemary’s Baby franchise. Here’s a look at them from start to finish.
‘Apartment 7A’ and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ are part of a long Satanic tradition in pop culture
It was the late 1960s, and Satan was in the air. During that time, The Rolling Stones released “Sympathy for the Devil,” The Beatles plopped Aleister Crowley’s haunting visage on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and a devilish showman who went by Anton LaVey started the Church of Satan. Part of this trend was Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby, which was the first popular depiction of a woman giving birth to the Antichrist.
The film shocked the world and inspired a made-for-television sequel called Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby. Almost nobody saw it and absolutely nobody liked it. Afterward, Zoe Saldaña starred in a miniseries titled Rosemary’s Baby, which transplanted the original story from New York City to Paris. Like the previous TV entry in the franchise, this one didn’t make much of a dent.
‘Apartment 7A’ has a lot of competition
While attempts to turn Rosemary’s Baby into a major horror franchise have failed, the original film still had a huge impact on horror cinema. Two of the biggest horror films of the 1970s — The Exorcist and The Omen — revisited the theme of Satanic children, with the latter being about the Antichrist.
Less famous movies have taken their cues from Levin’s yarn as well. Rob Zombie’s grungy The Lords of Salem is a retelling of Rosemary’s Baby set in Salem, Massachusetts. It trades the quiet fears of the original with over-the-top dialog and gore. Annabelle, despite being a film about a killer doll, takes much of its aesthetics from Rosemary’s Baby except it’s about as interesting as watching paint dry. If Apartment 7A doesn’t live up to Rosemary’s Baby, hopefully it’ll be better than Annabelle.
The author of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ said the book impacted people’s religious views
Rosemary’s Baby may have had an impact outside of pop culture. In a 2003 article republished by The Criterion Collection, Levin discussed how people reacted to the film. “The movie of Rosemary’s Baby attracted some of the hostility I had worried about while writing the book,” he recalled. “A woman screamed ‘Blasphemy!’ in the lobby after the first New York preview, and I subsequently received scores of reprimanding letters from Catholic schoolgirls, all worded almost identically. The [Catholic] Legion of Decency condemned the film, but the film turned around and condemned the Legion; when the film became a major hit despite, or because of, its C rating, the Legion, already on its last legs, was disbanded.
“Lately, I’ve had a new worry,” he added. “The success of Rosemary’s Baby inspired Exorcists and Omens and lots of et ceteras. Two generations of youngsters have grown to adulthood watching depictions of Satan as a living reality. Here’s what I worry about now: if I hadn’t pursued an idea for a suspense novel almost forty years ago, would there be quite as many religious fundamentalists around today?”
Food for thought!
