Eighteen Film Buffs Talk About The Scariest Movies They’ve Ever Seen
Even film critics watch these movies with the lights on.
Rosemary’s Baby
Kate Jinx, The Thousands/Golden Age Cinema
The unholy trinity – a struggling actor, witches (all of them!), and a chocolate mouse with a chalky undertaste.
Based on the chiller by Ira Levin (who also wrote The Stepford Wives), Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen, but it’s also one of my go-to comfort films if I’m having a particularly bad day or am considering motherhood. Though it’s now entered into pop-culture trope territory, the actual story is quite insidious. (Much more so than Insidious.)
Beyond the lure of the beautiful Dakota Building (which fills in for the Bramford), the late-’60s style, the Vidal Sassooning and the Krzysztof Komeda score, Rosemary’s Baby is really about a woman whose ambitious, dipshit partner will happily ruin her life in order to further his own career, and get away with it. And that’s absolutely terrifying.