Rosemary's Baby
Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon
Director: Roman Polanski
To many living in the tabloid news-filled internet generation, the thought of babies coupled with Roman Polanski can only conjure up images of terror and depravity. It was a similar situation in the 1960s, when the filmmaker was at the height of his directorial powers - although that depravity was limited to projections on a movie screen.
Rosemary's Baby is arguably his most famous film and ranks alongside such classics as Psycho, The Exorcist, and Halloween as defining examples of the horror genre, which have influenced nearly every thrill-and-chill movie since.
Its tale of an innocent couple moving into a creepy apartment building might seem tired these days, but the slow reveal of selling one's soul to the devil in exchange for bearing the spawn of Satan holds just as much shocking power and unsettling fear as it did on its original release.
In retrospect, that heightened sense of terror isn't all that surprising: based on the novel by the macabre-minded Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil), and directed by convicted sex offender Polanski, Rosemary's Baby now seemed destined to be a match made in the cauldrons of hell.
The film's slow, deliberate pace and lack of cheap shocks or gore are key to creating its sense of foreboding terror, but the thoroughly developed characters and well-rounded cast play an equally important part.