Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  Ira Levin (1929–2007) was a successful playwright and novelist, celebrated for his tightly constructed, suspenseful plots, his economy of style, and the verisimilitude with which he managed to invest fantastical stories of conspiracies and occultism. Rosemary’s Baby—henceforth RB—remains his best-known work, rivaled only, perhaps, by his 1972 novel The Stepford Wives (Levin 2002), the satirical tale of a patriarchal conspiracy to kill all wives in Stepford and replace them with complacent, obedient robots. Published in 1967, RB was an instant bestseller and “became one of the most widely read and talked-about books of the year” (Skal 2001, 292). Its fame was boosted by Roman Polanski’s critically and commercially successful 1968 film version, which was highly faithful to the novel. Although the story of Rosemary’s ordeal is implausible, it struck a chord with readers and viewers and swiftly entered the pop-cultural myth pool. The basic plot—a woman is tricked into bearing Satan’s offspring when her ruthlessly ambitious husband strikes a deal with a coven of black magic-wielding witches—is familiar even to people who have neither read the book nor seen the film. The story provides a compelling evocation of the common fear that modern life gives little defense against mostly subdued but pervasive forces of evil, forces that lurk always beneath the veneer of urban modernity and behind friendly smiles. In RB, a lapse in judgment makes the heroine vulnerable to those forces. Evil creeps ever closer to her—it’s in the apartment next door, behind her bedroom wall; then next to her, in bed; and finally, monstrously, within her own body. Readers fear for Rosemary and with her as she gradually realizes that her happy life is infested with evil and that her bright world teems with danger. She faces danger in the social realm—she is betrayed and exploited by people she trusts—and in the reproductive realm—her husband turns her deep and frustrated desire to have children against her, uses it as a fulcrum in his exploitative betrayal of her—and, finally, from a supernatural force the reality of which she doubts until the very end. Absolute, metaphysical evil is real, and it works through willing human agents motivated by selfish, antisocial impulses. Levin thus suggests an affinity between metaphysical evil and antisocial human motives. The devil-worshippers’ hunger for power and Guy’s selfish ambition and psychopathic disregard for others’ suffering become the conduit through which Satan’s son—the agent of supreme, transcendent evil—finds deliverance on earth.

  Levin managed to capture the imaginations of millions of readers in his depiction of a grotesquely evil, occult conspiracy against a vulnerable heroine in a modern setting. The main characters, Rosemary and Guy, are young and fashionable liberals. They are friendly with the homosexual couple next door and have copies of the Kinsey Reports on their bookshelves. Yet their bright and busy lives, and their seemingly happy marriage, are veined with hypocrisy and deceit. Rosemary tries to trick Guy into impregnating her; Guy tricks Rosemary into carrying the Devil’s child in exchange for success in his acting career. Guy’s ruthless pursuit of status and success marks him as the antagonist of the story because he immorally obtains that status and success at the expense of others—his acting rival, his wife, her friend Hutch, and ultimately the whole world upon which he helps to unleash pure, embodied evil. Rosemary, the focal point of the reader’s sympathies, is the immediate victim to Guy’s ruthlessness, but not entirely innocent herself. She is aware of his duplicitous nature yet accepts it as part of what makes him attractive. Her acceptance of this minor evil makes her vulnerable to the massive evil that later befalls her and that she, in turn, perpetuates. Levin skillfully manipulates reader emotions and sympathies in his portrayal of an attractive, if flawed, heroine’s gradual realization that her biggest desire has been cruelly turned against her, turned into a grotesque nightmare, by the person closest to her—for no morally acceptable reason and with the aid of black magic. He tapped into a universal fascination with the occult in his invocation of black magic, “malevolent wills” that causally interact with material reality (Levin 1997a, 246). That fascination was particularly salient in the Sixties as traditional religious authority was waning and alternative belief systems were on the rise (Quinlan 2014), but it rests on a universal cognitive disposition for conceptualizing moral categories—good and evil—as transcendent forces that may be harnessed through ritual and made to influence worldly affairs (Grodal 2009, 104). Levin made the occult relevant and imaginatively present by situating its agents—the Satanic coven and Guy—in contemporary Manhattan (Lima 1974, McElhaney 2007), carefully investing his representation with authenticity. He thus not only managed to make his “unbelievabilities believable,” as he himself put it (qtd. in King 1983a, 302); he capitalized on the imaginative frisson produced by the introduction of ancient superstition in a modern environment, the eruption of supernatural forces of evil in enlightened, bustling Manhattan. God may be dead in Rosemary’s world, as suggested by the cover of a Time magazine in her doctor’s office, but Satan is not.

  RB opens with a conflict between Rosemary and Guy, a conflict that is rooted in evolved gender differences in reproductive psychology and one that paves the way for the monstrous exploitation of Rosemary. Rosemary desperately wants babies; Guy is not ready, “nor would he ever be ready, she feared, until he was as big as Marlon Brando and Richard Burton put together” (86–87). Rosemary and Guy have divergent, incompatible ideas about happiness. When Rosemary’s friend Hutch warns them about the Bramford, which he claims is unnaturally accident ridden, Rosemary and Guy make light of his talk of bad houses: “ ‘Maybe there are good houses too,’ [Rosemary] said, ‘houses where people keep falling in love and getting married and having babies.’ ‘And becoming stars,’ Guy said” (28). In the depiction of this conflict, RB follows an ancient biological pattern. In species that reproduce sexually, females by biological necessity tend to invest much more heavily in offspring than do males. The minimal investment necessary for a human female to produce viable offspring is years of dedicated labor and massive physiological expenditure; for males, the minimal investment is the time it takes to impregnate a woman. This asymmetry in minimal investment has given rise to evolved psychological gender differences in humans, as in other species. Women tend to look for partners that have the resources—cognitive, physical, and material—necessary for protecting and providing for her and their offspring. Status and power are reliable cues that males possess such resources. Thus, men evolved to be more motivated than women to competitively pursue status and power because women tend to find such assets attractive in a partner (Buss 2012, Conroy-Beam et al. 2015). Guy’s ambition is attractive to Rosemary, but the conflict between them arises because Guy’s pursuit of status and power is so important to him that it excludes reproductive commitment. He pursues status and power for their own sake—not to accumulate resources that he can invest in the reproductive economy of his union with Rosemary.

  Guy’s ambition has given him some success in acting and a good income; they are “flush” (33) and can afford Rosemary’s dream apartment. She is “busy and happy” (35) decorating the apartment according to schemes she has been collecting since high school. However, as Rosemary herself recognizes, Guy is also “vain, self-centered, shallow, and deceitful” (128). Rosemary is willing to accept those character traits as part of the package. “And yes he might lie now and then; wasn’t that exactly what had attracted her and still did?—that freedom and nonchalance so different from her own boxed-in propriety?” (129). Rosemary actively encourages Guy to deceive when doing so will help her reach her goals. When they are offered the apartment in the Bramford, Guy reminds her that they already committed to another apartment. “We signed a lease, Ro; we’re stuck.” She encourages Guy to lie and break the lease: “You’ll think of something, Guy.” When he does come up with an effective lie, Rosemary commends him: “You’re a marvelous liar” (10). Moreover, Rosemary herself is willing to engage in deception to achieve her goals: “her plan was to get pregnant by ‘accident’; the pills gave her headaches she said, and rubber gadgets were repulsive . .
. Indulgently he studied the calendar and avoided the ‘dangerous days,’ and she said, ‘No, it’s safe today, darling; I’m sure it is’ ” (87). She is playing a game that is much more dangerous than she realizes. Guy’s selfish ambition is so strong that he is willing to sacrifice his own wife and use her deepest desire against her in exchange for professional success. The Satanists need a breeding vehicle; Guy needs their black magic. As he says to Rosemary when she discovers that she has given birth to Satan’s offspring: “They promised me you wouldn’t be hurt . . . And you haven’t been, really. I mean, suppose you’d had a baby and lost it; wouldn’t it be the same? And we’re getting so much in return, Ro” (301). It’s a feeble defense. She has been deeply hurt, and gotten nothing in return. She has been used as a means for Guy to reach his goal.

  Rosemary’s willingness to overlook Guy’s moral flaws, as well as her naiveté, makes her vulnerable to his monstrous betrayal. She is cast into a “world of suffering” because of minor transgressions and lapses in judgment (Langan 2008, 57), including her acceptance of Guy’s character. Yet for most of the story, readers are invited to sympathetically identify with her, partly via focalization—the story is told from her perspective—partly via characterization. She is depicted as an attractive and vulnerable character; mild-mannered, eager to please, and somewhat naïve. Her naiveté is set in contrast to Guy’s unsentimental, even cruel pragmatism. When the Pope gives a speech on television, Rosemary is “moved.” She “was sure it would help ease the Vietnam situation. ‘War never again,’ he said; wouldn’t his words give pause to even the most hard-headed statesman?” (102). She tells Guy about the “wonderful speech.” “ ‘War never again,’ he told them,” says Rosemary, who is preparing mushrooms for dinner. Guy replies, “Rotsa ruck. Hey, those look good” (106). Guy inconsiderately dismisses her earnest, blue-eyed admiration for the Pope’s platitude. Similarly, when Rosemary asks if Guy has had sex with her as she was unconscious, he “grinned and nodded. ‘It was kind of fun . . . in a necrophile sort of way’ ” (119). Most readers will probably feel that Guy is behaving in a grossly immoral manner, but also that Rosemary is rather too quick to forgive him: “I guess I feel funny about your doing it that way, with me unconscious . . . It’s supposed to be shared, not one awake and one asleep . . . oh, I guess I’m being silly” (120). Rosemary is being massively victimized, and the reader’s sympathy for her deepens as she begins to realize the magnitude of the conspiracy against her, when she begins to fear for the life of her offspring. Yet that sympathy becomes complicated, corrupted, and blended with moral revulsion, in the ending of the novel, when Rosemary embraces her demonic offspring.

  The climax of the story inspires strongly conflicting emotions in readers who sympathetically identify with Rosemary yet register the evilness of her baby. When Rosemary discovers that she has given birth to Satan’s offspring, her first inclination is to kill the baby, to “save the world from God-knows-what” (302) by throwing herself and the baby from the window. The baby’s appearance signals its evil, in particular its horns, tail, and its eyes: “golden-yellow . . . with neither whites nor irises . . . with vertical black-slit pupils . . . Like an animal’s, a tiger’s” (295–296, 302). Motherly affection wins out over moral and visceral repulsion, however. She “couldn’t throw him out the window. He was her baby, no matter who the father was . . . He couldn’t be all bad . . . Even if he was half Satan, wasn’t he half her as well, half decent, ordinary, sensible, human being? If she worked against them, exerted a good influence to counteract their bad one . . . ” (303). Rosemary’s reflections are desperate rationalizations. As Maisie Pearson observes, Rosemary “does not face the reality of [the baby’s] horns and tail” (1968, 500). In keeping with her character, Rosemary tolerates evil insofar as it brings her happiness. Levin has used subjective narration to make us suffer with Rosemary, so we do root for her and want her to find happiness (Valerius 2005); yet she is being dangerously, recklessly selfish in her decision to let her demonic offspring survive and do God-knows-what to the world. One critic writing about Polanski’s film version in 1968 registered the moral revulsion inspired by the ending in pinpointing “the sickening triumph of evil in the end” (Carroll 1968). Evil has triumphed in that the Satanists managed to deliver the son of Satan onto the world, but it has also triumphed in Rosemary’s final acquiescence to selfish impulse. The triumph of evil becomes particularly sickening for readers who sympathetically register Rosemary’s dilemma—to kill or nurse the baby—but wish for another outcome, wish for her to be morally responsible, unselfish, and save the world from Satan’s offspring.

  Levin never tells us what the Satanists hope to accomplish by delivering the son of Satan onto the world, and he never tells us what evil Satan’s son will go on to accomplish. (Yet in his 1997 sequel to RB, the novel Son of Rosemary, Levin depicts an adult Andy who is the Antichrist and manages to kill all human life on the planet with an apocalyptic virus.) RB ends when Rosemary’s baby is born and she has made her decision. The evil that Levin makes imaginatively accessible to the reader is the evil perpetrated by human characters selfishly pursuing their own goals and harming others in the process. Evil in RB is investing conventionally male motives with autotelic significance—the love of power, status, and success for their own sake. Those tend to be perceived as legitimate motives when they contribute to a reproductive or otherwise prosocial economy, when they contribute to a collective good. But they are easily conceptualized as antagonistic—evil—when divorced from those economies. Guy is evil for recklessly pursuing his ambitions as legitimate ends in themselves and at great cost to others, most specifically Rosemary, the person closest to him, the one who should be able to trust him unconditionally. Rosemary is vulnerable precisely because she tolerates Guy’s character, his lies and ambition, without realizing that his moral faults extend to his relationship with her and their offspring. Rosemary herself is not evil, but she tolerates evil, and that in itself renders her vulnerable to perpetuating evil. The ending of RB is shocking, “sickening,” because the reader learns that Guy has pursued his own ambition not just in isolation from a prosocial and reproductive economy—he has successfully perverted and poisoned those economies in his pursuit, allowing people to get hurt and killed and his wife to be raped, impregnated, and morally compromised by Satan. Her body is contaminated with evil incarnate, a human-beast hybrid that drains her of energy like a prenatal vampire.

  Levin successfully targeted evolved fears of intimate betrayal, contamination of the body, and persecution by metaphysical forces of evil. He gave the world a vivid depiction of a vulnerable and likable woman’s victimization at the hands of power- and status-crazed individuals using black magic to serve ultimate, Satanic evil. He set that story in a realistic, modern setting, capitalizing on the imaginative sparks that flew with the eruption of medieval demonology in modern Manhattan. In the world of RB, pleasant surfaces just barely cover an abyss of depravity and evil. Absolute evil is real. It’s a morally skewed world in which God is dead but Satan very much alive. Absolute evil needs willing human agents to influence worldly affairs but has no trouble finding collaborators among ordinary people—people who actively and selfishly pursue dominance and power as well as people who passively tolerate evil. RB inspired scores of horror stories depicting Satanic or demonic possession—to Levin’s consternation, since he himself did not believe in the devil but feared that literalist readers may have been inspired to fundamentalism by stories depicting the devil as “a living reality” (Levin 2012). He did evidently believe in human evil, however, particularly the evil that can result from unchecked male ambition disjointed from prosocial investment, and he deftly made readers care for his protagonist as she faced evil of ever-increasing proportions until, in the end, giving into it.

  CHAPTER 8

  Fight the Dead, Fear the Living

  Night of the Living Dead (1968)

  In George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the unburied, re
cently dead come back to life, or at least a semblance of life. The reanimated corpses—they’re called “ghouls” in the film—are driven by an apparently insatiable appetite for live human flesh. The weird phenomenon seems to be caused by “radiation” from Venus brought back to earth by a space probe. The film depicts the struggles of a small group of people who have barricaded themselves in a farmhouse for the night. The defenders struggle to understand what is happening and to ward off the attacking undead, but a deadly squabble breaks out among them. In the end, just one defender, Ben, survives the night. With daylight a ghoul-killing posse approaches the house. One member of the posse spots Ben moving in the house, mistakes him for a ghoul, and shoots him in the head. End of story. It’s bleak, it’s devastating, and it’s a very powerful film. What’s more, Night of the Living Dead—henceforth Night—gave us the modern horror zombie, the reanimated corpse that feeds on the living, is contagious, travels in hordes, and heralds the apocalypse—a monster type that has all but saturated popular culture. What made Romero’s implausible monster resonate so strongly with moviegoers?

  Romero’s film was inspired indirectly by the zombies of Haitian voodoo religion, individuals who had been robbed of their volition and all higher cognitive functioning and were kept in thrall by a voodoo priest. Those zombies came to the attention of Western audiences via colorful travelogues such as the adventurer W. B. Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island(Pulliam 2007) and inspired a number of horror films and comics, which in turn inspired Romero. Haitian zombies, however—unthreatening, mindless automatons—are a far cry from Romero’s zombies, the contagious, apocalyptic, devouring horde of the undead. Even so, it was Romero’s zombie that came to define the horror zombie, chiefly because it’s just such a damned good idea, a monstrous concept well-engineered to capture people’s attention, spark their imagination, and embody a whole range of evolved, culturally salient fears. Romero’s film inspired hundreds, thousands, of artworks—films, novels, stories, computer games, graphic novels, real-life phenomena such as zombie runs, and so on (Platts 2013, Pulliam 2007). Even the normally austere Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tapped into the fascination with zombies; in 2011 they attempted to increase public disaster preparedness via a campaign that focused on the zombie apocalypse (Khan 2011).