12:5:22

I finished rewatching Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980) tonight and suddenly got the urge to search for articles about Rosemary’s Baby (1968), a film I have studied and written about a lot, but which has increasingly become more curious to me as I began to think about Illuminati pop-culture and shadow governments.

A photo of a building in Inferno appears over and over (is this building itself the inferno? An architectural cauldron), which reminds me of The Bramford building in Rosemary’s Baby, the Dakota in real life.

The Bramford

The Inferno

In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary and Guy ask about the Bramford’s history while viewing an apartment in it with a realtor. In Inferno, Mark asks about the NYC Gothic building his sister lives in, which is the picture of the mysterious building that appears throughout the film. The two buildings are fictitious neighbors, both located on New York City’s Upper West Side.

The building in Inferno makes no sense. It is spatially occult, like the dance academy in Suspiria. More imaginary and psychogeographic than real. Mark studies the building in Inferno from the inside. He stares at the picture he is in. The picture is the only way out. The building is a trap. Sara, Mark’s sister, knows the answer—a key—is under her feet. But she dies in the infernal building before she can find it.

“Are you aware The Bramford had a rather unpleasant reputation around the turn of the century?” Hatch, Guy and Rosemary’s older friend tells them over dinner. “It’s where the Trench Sisters conducted their little dietary experiments. And Keith Kennedy had all these parties. Adrian Marcato lived there too….Adrian Marcato practiced witchcraft…They called it Black Bramford.”

The Bramford is, perhaps, one of the first cinematic haunted houses in a City. It is real horror in a real place at a real time. The occult disguised as urban. The Devil is a high collar criminal.

At one point, Inferno features this zoom onto a blue door frame, which reminds me of what I call the Terrible Door frame in Rosemary’s Baby.

Inferno

Rosemary’s Baby

All of this also led me to consider that Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery may just—if you squint hard enough, or, open your eyes very wide—be a kind of loose version of Rosemary’s Baby: nosy elderly Upper West Side neighbors and murderers Paul and Lillian House in 1993 are the nosy elderly Upper West Side Satanists Minnie and Roman Castevets in 1968. Diane Keaton and Woody Allen, who play a married couple, are Guy and Rosemary.

Roman Castevets, the head of the Satanic coven in Rosemary’s Baby, shares his name with Roman Polanski, the director of Rosemary’s Baby.

What is the best way to hide things? In plain sight. The Usual Suspects has that famous line about how the Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist. This line also appeared in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). Van Helsing tells Jonathan Harker that “the strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him.”

In 1968, Ira Levin, the author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, wrote a letter to the editor of Time magazine, who reviewed Rosemary’s Baby favorably but misnamed the building at the center of the story, calling The Bramford, The Branford. As Hatch goes on to tell Rosemary and Guy, The Bramford has a dark history of suicides and diabolical doings, including the murder of a notorious Satanist, Adrian Marcato. Same with Argento’s building in Inferno. Levin told Time: “I chose the name in memory of writer Bram Stoker, and I shudder to think that you may have offended his baby, who is still alive—you know who he is—and whose name is Dracula.”

What a weird letter to write.

At the “the finest obstetricians of the country,” Abe Sapirstein’s office, Rosemary’s looks at Time magazine, with this symbolic cover. Sapirstein is the elite’s doctor as he “delivers all high society babies” as well as a member of the Satanic cult.

Rosemary later receives a book on witchcraft from Hatch, who is concerned for her (Hatch mysteriously dies afterward), All of Them Witches (even the syntax of the title is creepy). In Inferno, a sequel to Argento’s Suspiria (1977), Sara, a young poet living in New York, becomes obsessed with a rare book, Three Mothers, a book about three ancient witches, the “Ladies of Sorrow,” (Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Tenebrarum), concurrent with the three Fates and Graces in Greek mythology.

All of Them Witches, writes the Vigilant Citizen, “describes the Castevet’s international secret society, which is known to practice blood rituals. Rosemary then buys more books on witchcraft. She is seen reading a passage which might describe the reason why Guy had been obtaining important roles”:

“Many people during that time died supposedly natural deaths. Since then it has been determined that the United Mental Force of the whole coven could blind, deafen, paralyze, and ultimately kill the chosen victim. This use of a United Mental Force is sometimes called a coven.”

In a “twilight state,” (half awake, half asleep. Michael Hoffman refers to Masonic psychodramas as “Twilight Language”) Rosemary is raped during a Satanic ritual by the Devil while drugged and unconscious. During the rape, she exclaims: “This is no dream, this is really happening!”

Perhaps we, as viewers, readers, vigilant citizens, people of the light, are realizing: “This is no movie, this is the real world.”

Inferno

I realize now I have always been thinking about these questions. Writing about actors, devils, demons, spells, mind control, the hidden, the unseen, the undisclosed, Faustian packs, only I was doing it mostly from a cultural perspective. I hadn’t yet connected all the dots. My preoccupations and concerns, unlike my peers, were always moral, metaphysical, ethical, philosophical. As I wrote in my January 15, 2022 post, I'm starting to fear that maybe all these great horror masterpieces from the 70s and 80s, masterpieces like The Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives, 3 Women, The Shining, Images, Taxi Driver, The Parallax View, Blade Runner, etc., were really just visions of the inevitable future (not inevitable in my eyes, inevitable in Mr Globals').

As the Vigilant Citizen writes in his pre-Covid article on Rosemary’s Baby, and the very strange—to put it mildly— real-life events that have always surrounded Polanski, and the film, concludes:

“Rosemary is representative of the traditional and naive American society of the 50s and 60s – filled with idealism and hope. But that hope was sold, drugged and manipulated by a hidden cult (formed by prestigious and respectable members of society) to forcefully give birth to a new era. Shocking events left indelible marks on the public mind, including the mysterious deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe and Martin Luther King; horrific ritual murders perpetrated by MK-Ultra patsies like Charles Manson and Son of Sam caused fear and horror. These events slapped America out of its ideals and forced it to stare at an undefinable, yet tangible force influencing society. Conspiracies and cover-ups made the news and the masses gradually discovered the existence of a shadow government. Disillusionment and cynicism ensued, causing American society to accept or to ignore the true nature of its rulers. Society became the equivalent of Rosemary who has learned of the evil nature of her baby, but nonetheless accepted the responsibility of mothering it. Today’s debased pop-culture is simply the evolution of this system. Even if one is to overlook the symbolic meaning of the movie itself, the synchchronistic occurrences surrounding its production are simply astonishing. To look at the events surrounding Rosemary’s Baby is to stare right at the dark side of Hollywood. Here are some of the events…Rosemary’s Baby can be seen as nothing more than a well-crafted movie that plays on the timeless and archetypal fear of ‘the Devil’. However, when one looks at the movie’s precise timing in American history and the incredible series of events that followed its release, the movie becomes a pivotal work symbolizing an important cultural shift in American life. The same way Rosemary discovers the workings of an international witch coven, American society “discovers” a darker side to its entertainment business and internal politics.”