Handlung

A young couple trying for a baby moves into an aging, ornate apartment building on Central Park West, where they find themselves surrounded by peculiar neighbors.

Rosemary Woodhouse, a young Catholic homemaker dreaming of starting a family, and Guy, her struggling actor husband, move into The Bramford, an imposing New York City building with a dark past. Surrounded by unsettling stories about mysterious residents and eerie occurrences, the new tenants befriend Roman and Minnie Castevet, their amiable next-door neighbors. Shortly after, Rosemary gets pregnant. At last, things are looking up. However, as alarming hints of a sinister conspiracy emerge, suspicion and mental agony get the best of her. Undoubtedly, the inexperienced mother-to-be is overreacting; no one wants to cut Rosemary off from her circle of friends. Then again, why is everyone so conveniently eager to help? And above all else, why is Guy allowing it?—Nick Riganas

In 1965, in New York City, the housewife Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband, the actor of commercials Guy Woodhouse, move to the Bramford building to the former apartment 7E of Mrs. Gardenia on the seventh floor. The lady died after three weeks in coma and Rosemary and Guy intend to have children of their own. They renovate the apartment, and Rosemary befriends the dweller Terry in the laundry, who speaks highly of Minnie Castevet and Roman Castevet, who rescued her from the streets and treat her like a daughter. Soon Terry commits suicide, and Rosemary tells the police officer that the girl loved Mr. and Mrs. Castevet. Minnie invites Rosemary and her husband to have diner with her and Guy goes, despite the initial complaint to the invitation. He immediately befriends Roman, and soon he has sex with Rosemary fainted while she has weirdest dreams. She gets pregnant and Minnie asks her to change her obstetrician to the famous Dr. Sapirstein, who prescribes herbs prepared by Minnie instead of vitamins to her. She begins to wither away with pain and when her friend Edward "Hutch" Hutchins visits her, he is impressed with her appearance. He schedules a lunch with Rosemary to show his discoveries, but he never appears, and she learns that he is in coma. When she meets a common friend at his funeral, she gives a book to Rosemary that Hutch asked her to give while he was in coma. Soon Rosemary learns that the Bramford is a coven and Roman is the son of a notorious devil worshiper. She believes her baby is in danger and tries to escape from the witches. But who can help her?—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into an apartment in an opulent but gothic building in Manhattan. Their landlord, Edward "Hutch" Hutchins, attempts to dissuade them: the building has an unsavory history. They discover that their neighbors are an amiable elderly couple, Roman and Minnie Castevet, and Guy starts spending much time with them. Soon, strange things begin to happen: a young woman Rosemary meets in the laundry room seems to commit suicide, Rosemary has strange dreams and hears strange noises, and Guy becomes remote and distant. Then Rosemary gets pregnant and begins to suspect that her neighbors have unique plans for her child.—Goth <brooks@odie.ee.wits.ac.za>

After moving into a creepy apartment in Manhattan with her husband, Guy, Rosemary Woodhouse begins to experience odd, unpleasant things happening to her. Guy becomes enchanted with their eccentric neighbors, Roman and Minnie Castevet after the elderly couple's ward seems to commit suicide. Then Rosemary becomes pregnant. A caring Minnie keeps giving her weird concoctions for the pregnancy, and Rosemary does not feel well. As the tagline says, praying for Rosemary's baby is the only solution.—alfiehitchie

New York City, fall of 1965: Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse (Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes) are a young married couple who rent an apartment in the gothic and splendorous Bramford building in Manhattan. At first, their friend and current landlord Edward "Hutch" Hutchins (Maurice Evans) tries to dissuade them from doing so: the building has a rather unsavory past. It has been occupied by cannibal killers, Satanists and witches, such as the Trench Sisters, Keith Kennedy, Pearl Ames--and the sinister Adrian Marcato, who created a scandal in the late 1890s by claiming to have conjured "The Living Devil."

Rosemary and Guy decide to move in anyway. Guy is an actor with a fledgling career. He's done plenty of TV plays and commercials, which have made him good money; but he wants great parts. Rosemary is a gentle soul, originally from Omaha, Nebraska, where she had been raised in a Catholic home and had attended convent school.

As it is, Rosemary is estranged from her family, since they don't accept her marriage to Guy, who is not only an actor, but is also of mixed Jewish/Protestant upbringing. So her life in New York is all she has: she is a young housewife dedicated entirely to making a good home for her husband, whom she adores. She has a good circle of friends, but is at core sweetly naïve and lonely.

One day in the laundry room, Rosemary makes the acquaintance of Terry Gionnoffrio (Victoria Vetri), a young former drug addict who was "rescued from the gutter" by an elderly, eccentric couple, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon). The Castavets's apartment had formerly been the front part of theirs, but is now separated by a partition.

Her friendship with Terry is short-lived. A few days after Rosemary meets her, Terry plunges to her death from the bay window. She and Guy are walking home when they see the police surrounding Terry's corpse. The Castevets happen to be walking home, too. Presumably distraught, they strike up an acquaintance with the Woodhouses and later invite them to dinner. Rosemary becomes suspicious about their new elderly friends, particularly the way that Roman insists on speaking with Guy in private. Other things trouble her, too, such as when Guy's career gets a jump start when his main rival, Donald Baumgart, suddenly goes blind. Now all he cares about is his new play.

But then suddenly, he decides he wants to become a father. Rosemary is thrilled. Evidently having studied her ovulation cycle himself, he announces the ideal "baby night." That evening, Minnie drops by to give them some chocolate mousse -- or "mouse" as she calls it. Rosemary complains of a chalky undertaste, but Guy gets angry over her ingratitude. She eats part of it, and then furtively hides the rest in her napkin.

Suddenly feeling disoriented after dinner, she passes out and has a bizarre dream. Rosemary is floating on a mattress in the sea, visits a cruise ship with the Kennedys, has her wedding band removed, is carried through the Sistine Chapel, a brief shot of the linen closet with guy saying "easy, you got her too high" then she's back on the cruise ship naked and told by the skipper go below the deck and passes by a burning church and lays down on a mattress. The unsettling dream becomes a nightmare when she finds herself surrounded by naked elderly people, a statue figure of a bearded man staring down at her, and two men tie her to a bed. Then Jackie Kennedy soothes her for not feeling well. Guy approaches her bed, but then something that looks and feels inhuman brutally rapes her. "This is no dream!" she cries. "This is really happening!" Pope Paul VI, then visiting NYC and having mass at Yankee Stadium, comes to offer her absolution.

When she wakes up, Rosemary is sore and scratched. Guy half-heartedly apologizes for having had her while she was out. Rosemary is angry, but "baby night" later proves successful. Dr. C.C. Hill (Charles Grodin) -- referred to her by her girlfriend Elise Dunstan (Emmaline Henry) -- confirms it.

Upon hearing the news, the Castevets persuade Rosemary to go to Dr. Abraham Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), a prominent obstetrician who delivers all the babies of the upper class in the city. Rosemary entrusts herself to him, accepting his odd advice and his recommendation of Minnie's strange "vitamin drinks" which include a rare herb, tannis root. She develops pain during her first trimester, which causes her to lose weight and look emaciated, alarming Hutch -- but not the doctor, Guy, the Castevets or their Saturday night gang of quaint old timers, including Dr. Stan Shand (Phil Leeds) and the obnoxious Laura-Louise McBurney (Patsy Kelly).

As her pregnancy progresses, Rosemary feels a mounting sense of dread and angst, especially since no one close to her seems to want to acknowledge her pain. She decides to throw a party for her young friends, a qualification she insists upon. She also insists that they not invite the Castevets. Her girlfriends -- including Elise, Joan Jellico (Marianne Gordon) and Tiger Hoanigsen (Wende Wagner) -- tell her she looks awful and that her pain is far from normal. She has to see a new doctor. Rosemary tells Guy, and they fight bitterly over it, but at the last minute she relents. The pain has suddenly stopped. And she can now feel the baby kicking.

Rosemary's friend Hutch drops by for a visit; Roman and Minnie spot him, and suddenly Guy arrives home unexpectedly, as if they'd phoned him and urged him to rush back to the apartment. Hutch asks a lot of questions of Roman and Guy, and before he leaves the apartment, he realizes he's misplaced one of his gloves. Later, Hutch falls into a mysterious coma and dies. Rosemary receives a book from Hutch's companion, Grace Cardiff (Hanna Landy), which Hutch had intended to give to Rosemary personally. It's called "All of Them Witches," a study on witchcraft through the ages, featuring a chapter on Adrian Marcato (his appearance is familiar from the "dream") and his son, Steven. "The name is an anagram," is the final clue Hutch had left for her. Rosemary uses her Scrabble tiles to learn the horrible truth: "Roman Castevet" is an anagram for "Steven Marcato."

Now she suspects Roman, Minnie and all their all-too-helpful friends are Satan worshipers. She visits Dr. Sapirstein and tells him she'll have no more to do with them. It's just as well, Sapirstein informs her: Roman is dying and would like to go away to Europe on a farewell tour. Rosie feels guilty about her suspicions, and when the time comes, bids them a fond farewell.

But not all is what it seems. As her due date -- June 28, 1966 -- nears, she learns one strange thing after the other. Could it be that Guy is involved with witches? Witches use babies for their rituals. Has he promised them the baby? She also learns that witches use the belongings of their intended victims to blind or kill them. On a hunch, she contacts Guy's former rival, Donald Baumgart, and gets him to reveal that Guy swapped neckties with him just before he went blind.

Distraught, Rosemary packs a suitcase and goes to Dr. Sapirstein to tell him what she's learned. But his secretary's off-hand remark reveals something horrible -- the good doctor sometimes smells like tannis root, which she has learned is more commonly called Devil's Pepper. Dr. Sapirstein is a witch, too and must be part of the plot against her. Rosemary calls Dr. Hill from a payphone on the street and persuades him to see her. When she reveals her suspicions to him, he seems to take her seriously, and he gives her a sedative to help her sleep, but she is horrified when she awakens and find that Guy and Dr. Sapirstein have arrived to take her back home and Hill is unwilling to stop them, seemingly frightened of them. She manages lock them out of the apartment, but before she can call for help, Guy and the others appear in the apartment, having entered by some other means. Rosemary tries to fight them off and she goes into labor. They have to force her down on her bed, while Sapirstein injects her with a sedative.

When she wakes, Guy tells her she has had a boy and that he's fine. Later, Sapirstein tells her that the baby is dead. The coven members sit with Rosemary, collecting her breast milk, and she thinks she can hear a baby crying through the walls of the apartment. She knows they have taken the baby, and she thinks they are planning to sacrifice it for one of their rituals.

After a few days of pretending to cooperate and take her sedatives, Rosemary arms herself with a sharp butcher knife and finds the partition between her apartment and the apartment of the Castevets. Removing the closet interior, she finds the hidden doorway to the other apartment and steals inside. She looks at an oil painting of a burning church whispering "you got her too high", apparently having a flashback of the "dream". She discovers the entire coven sitting in the living room around a bassinet, including Minnie and Roman. A photo of Adrian Marcato is up above the mantle. There are other people there, too, that Rosemary does not recognize, people that seem to have come from as far away as Japan. She approaches the bassinet, which is adorned with an inverted cross, and sees the baby for the first time (not shown to the audience), horrified that the baby has strange eyes. "He has his father's eyes," Roman tells her, and the coven tells her that Satan is the baby's father, not Guy. Guy finally tells her that he made an agreement with the coven to allow them to impregnate Rosemary with the spawn of the Devil in exchange for a successful acting career. Rosemary spits in his face and sinks into a chair, defeated. Minnie brings her a cup of tea. Roman speaks more gently to her and encourages her to be the baby's mother and does not need to join their evil coven. Although Rosemary hesitates at first, her maternal instincts win and she approaches the bassinet, telling the witch rocking it that she's rocking the baby too fast. The witch protests at first until Roman orders her to leave the crib. Rosemary begins to rock the baby and sings to it.