Browsing Tag

Rosemary’s Baby

Posted on May 7, 2026

Reproductive Rights in Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow

Guest Post

Brandon West

Reproductive rights are human rights, says Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s 2019 thriller film Swallow. This easily-overlooked English language film uses body horror to explore the myriad fetters with which modern American society aims to constrain the female body. The film follows a young woman, protagonist Hunter (Haley Bennett), who finds herself encircled on all sides. Since Hunter is the product of rape, her “right-wing, religious right” mother views her as a burden. Meanwhile, her wealthy husband views her as a baby incubator, a means to carry on his family name. Thus isolated, Hunter seeks bodily autonomy in one of the few avenues open to her: consumption. And so, she develops an acute case of pica, consuming such materials as a marble, a thumb tack, and a battery. Yet, even in this arena, Hunter’s control proves inadequate, subject to male supervision. When Hunter’s pica causes complications with her pregnancy, her husband scolds her and hires another man to supervise her at home.

Read more

Posted on June 13, 2016

Rosemary’s Baby and 60s Youth

Dawn Keetley

Born in the late 1960s, I am—for better or worse—one of Rosemary’s Generation. Historian Steven Mintz describes a “sea change” in behavior and attitudes in the youth of the 60s and 70s: “their parents’ concern for their well-being became translated into their own search for personal fulfillment.” Often characterized as “idealistic and rebellious,” 60s youth were also “uniquely self-absorbed, materialistic, and narcissistic.”[i] No single cultural product can define a generation, but Roman Polanski’s film, Rosemary’s Baby, released on June 12, 1968, certainly embodies something of 60s youth—as did, I would add, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (also 1968) and Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976).

Headlines of the 60s worried about spoiled, defiant children and, as Mintz puts it about “parents who let their offspring bully them.” A 1960 issue of Newsweek asked “Are We Trapped in a Child-Centered World?” Other articles posed the questions “Is the Younger Generation Soft and Spoiled?” and “Child Monarchy in America?”[ii] Read more

Back to top