The Book ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Was Almost About Aliens
Rosemary’s Baby is an enduring horror classic that helped define two scary movie subgenres: the creepy child flick and the Satanic movie. Fascinatingly, the book that inspired the film was almost about aliens. Here’s why the book took a devilish turn instead.
The book ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ was supposed to be ‘9 whole months of anticipation’
Ira Levin was a novelist who wrote popular books like A Kiss Before Dying, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil. Perhaps his most famous book was Rosemary’s Baby, which informed many people’s attitudes toward the devil and the Antichrist. In a 2003 article reposted by The Criterion Collection, Levin explained why he chose to write a horror novel about pregnancy.
“Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears, I was struck one day by the thought (while not listening to a lecture) that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected,” he wrote. “Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!” Then, aliens came to mind. Notably, many stories about alien abduction involve women getting impregnated with aliens.
Another book discouraged Ira Levin from writing about aliens
Levin’s idea was not yet complete. “I tried to figure out exactly what that fetus was growing into,” he recalled. “Genuine medical horrors were out; hardly the stuff of popular fiction. I could imagine only two possibilities: my unfortunate heroine had to be impregnated either by an extraterrestrial or the devil.”
In a sense, a popular book got in Levin’s way. “ETs had already fathered children in The Midwich Cuckoos, a novel by John Wyndham, and though that book had dealt with several children growing up rather than their mothers bearing them, I nonetheless felt I was stuck with Satan,” he said. Ironically, Levin did not believe that Satan was real, but he’d rather write about Satan than regurgitate The Midwich Cuckoos. That novel also inspired a famous 1960s horror film: Village of the Damned, which was remade by John Carpenter in 1995.
‘Rosemary’s Baby’ changed horror forever
Rosemary’s Baby was a hit. The Numbers reports that the film earned $33,397,080. Today, movies earn that much in a single day. However, in 1968, the gross of Rosemary’s Baby was a big deal.
Bits and pieces of Rosemary’s Baby found their way into so many subsequent horror films. The movie is often seen as a predecessor to two 1970s horror classics — The Exorcist and The Omen — about demonic children. Rosemary’s Baby also preceded other scary movies about evil children that weren’t quite as Satanic, such as the Children of the Corn franchise, Orphan, and Abigail.
Satanism was also a theme in some old black-and-white horror films like The Black Cat and The Seventh Victim, but it wasn’t a major theme in scary movies before Rosemary’s Baby. Since then, there have been numerous supernatural horror films about Satanic cults that have next to nothing to do with real-life Satanist groups like the Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple.
Rosemary’s Baby is diabolical precisely because it shied away from being extraterrestrial.
