First, as a treat, some housekeeping: My pandemic newsletter has a new name! It’s inspired by my tentative wish to be a post-pandemic person who occasionally leaves the house to explore the neighborhood, if not the world. Cold War Correspondent will take you into juicy archives, politically fraught international expositions, seasonal department store displays, glamorous airport lounges, and more. And since Halloween is upon us, we’re doing A Haunting, contemplating the unsettled boundary between home and the world beyond it.
[Content warning: wallpaper, malaise, feminism]
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the pervasive merchandising of Spooky Season, and how Halloween is simultaneously a domestic and walking-around-town sort of holiday. It’s striking how many horror movies take place in or around someone’s house, or a place where people happen to be staying for a bit. Among the greats: The Exorcist (cocktail parties, attics, furniture in general); Poltergeist (TV, closets); A Nightmare on Elm Street (sleep, bathtubs); Rosemary’s Baby (kitchens, light rental renovation, the Dakota); The Shining (standard supernatural hotel and hedge maze haunting).
“Fun” horror movies like Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice make architecture and domesticity central to their stories, too: a family is moving into a new place and trying to make it their own, but there are ghosts who hate Postmodernism, or an old building secretly has supernatural architecture and demonic critters in the refrigerator, and no one realizes until it’s too late. In Beetlejuice, the confused and recently deceased Maitlands step outside their front door only to find a landscape reminiscent of Dune, complete with terrifying sand worms. Outside is scary. Inside is scary, too. The urbane Deetz family arrives with divided intensions; dad Charles is content to revel in serene birdwatching and doesn’t mind the provincial decor, while stepmom Delia believes she has been moved against her will to Connecticut to fade into cultural obscurity and die eating Cantonese takeout. Moving is always hard, but in certain ways domesticity is harder.
Watching Rosemary’s Baby, fans of Victorian literature may recognize that the Guy and Rosemary’s bedroom is decorated with yellow wallpaper. It seems unlikely that this is a coincidence. The short story of the same name by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was first published in 1892 in The New England Magazine, and has become a widely-read staple of English classes in America ever since. (I discovered a few years ago that the doctor who prescribed Gilman the rest cure that inspired her to write the story happens to be a distant ancestor of mine, which is…let’s just say it’s very on brand for that side of my family.)
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is usually characterized as an early work of feminist literature, but consider the synopsis: a woman and her husband, a doctor, move into a big rental house one summer. To treat the wife’s “nervous depression” and “slight hysterical tendency” following the arrival of a new baby, the husband insists (remember, he’s a doctor) that she avoid work of any kind and remain in the home’s nursery on an upper floor. She begins to see disturbing patterns in the room’s wallpaper and starts to sense that it has a sickly smell, that its yellow color isn’t bright and sunny but sinister and putrid. She eventually sees the figure of a woman creeping like an animal behind the paper and decides she must remove it from the wall in order to free her. The ending isn’t especially happy: she ultimately believes that she herself is trapped behind the wallpaper, circling her husband who has passed out on the floor, aghast at the state of things upon entering her room. It’s a horror movie.
Fast forward to 1965: Rosemary Woodhouse and her actor husband Guy snag a palatial, more or less affordable apartment in the movie version of the Dakota (real estate science fiction) and despite some red flags fluttering rather prominently, they take it. Something strange and hard to explain happened to the previous occupant. A highboy stands at the end of a hallway where there’s supposed to be a closet; carpet markings suggest that the elderly woman who used to live there had somehow moved it herself. They have a farewell dinner with their lovely older English landlord who regales them with stories of their new building’s status as a prominent site in the history of the dark arts. It’s the Upper West Side, though, and it’s within walking distance of the theater district where Guy hopes to become a star.
Unbothered, Rosemary and Guy set about hanging drapes, buying furniture, and hiring painters to transform the interior from gravy-brown to bright white. Workmen hang yellow and white wallpaper in their bedroom. Rosemary zeroes in on the mystery highboy closet—an architectural feature that happens to divide their apartment from that of the next-door neighbors who lead a cult of Satan worshippers—and she covers the shelves with avocado green and white contact paper. A dream. Until Rosemary ends up delivering a baby who was fathered by Satan because Guy made a Faustian bargain on her behalf, and, scariest of all, she’s both horrified and not entirely sure that she doesn’t want care for him.
The use of yellow wallpaper in Rosemary’s bedroom is almost certainly a deliberate reference to the short story. Rosemary correctly clocks that something bad is happening (and her initial guess, that the coven wants her baby for one of their rituals, is close) but she doesn't figure out what’s really happening until it’s too late. The thing to do was move out as soon as Ruth Gordon first rang the doorbell. All along, Rosemary is pushed and bullied into doing things that other people think is best for “the baby”: the weird vitamin drink, the oddly fragrant talismanic necklace, the doctor who scolds her for reading up on the basics of pregnancy and birth, and the creepy neighbors who track her comings and goings like sentries. It’s only Rosemary’s women friends, whom she sees and opens up to for the first time in many months at a holiday party, who confirm her suspicions that unexplained weight loss, pallor, and constant pain are not normal and her doctor must be a nut. (A nut, yes, and also a committed Satanist, as it turns out.)
What happens to Rosemary in the subsequent years? Does she dress her son, the Prince of Darkness, in a little sailor suit and try to get him into an A-list preschool? Does he take piano lessons, or play tennis? What do her friends think? We never get to actually see the baby at the end of the movie (just, famously, Rosemary’s terrified face) and we’re left to wonder what their future is like. It’s a macabre version of the life Rosemary wanted—which is depicted in a dream she has where she holds the expected “little Andy or Jenny” with adoring relatives by her side—but doesn’t get to have.
Everyone connected to the coven accuses her of going mad, in much the same way as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protagonist is assumed to need a rest cure for nervous hysterics. But hysteria is an entirely non-crazy response to having one’s reproductive life hijacked by a group of loons, and it would have been a totally sane response to being locked away and forbidden to work while caring for an infant, especially in the late 19th century. It makes me think twice about the Calgon TV ad campaign from the 1970’s and ‘80s in which an exhausted mom takes a bubble bath in an effort to escape from her family, pets, job and the horrors of a ringing telephone. The tagline is “take me away,” but she doesn't actually get to go anywhere: she has to escape from everyone inside her own house.
Halloween, the night on which the veil between the living and the dead is supposed to be thinnest, is also a night on which the boundary between the domestic sphere and the outside world is fraught with judgment: are you prepared with treats when the bell rings? Are the children supervised? Are their costumes age-appropriate? Is Halloween itself actually Satanic and if so, should it be eschewed and condemned in a self-righteous huff? Is everyone eating too much sugar?
In a wonderful early episode of You’re Wrong About, the podcast of kings, co-hosts Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes unpack some of the urban legends I remember from my own childhood, namely that some fiendish person was putting razor blades in apples or candy bars during Halloween (to what end, no one knew) or that terrible calamity would befall children being watched by a loopy teenaged babysitter. Marshall astutely points out that most of the legends in this vein, all of which presuppose that kids are in some unspecified sort of danger, began to proliferate in the 1970’s and ‘80s, the Calgon Era, around the time when American women were working outside the home in significant numbers for the first time since World War II. Since the nebulous threats posed by these legends can only be prevented by “mom being home all the time,” it makes you wonder what their agenda may have been.
The true terror of Rosemary’s Baby is what happens at the very end of the movie. Not Mia Farrow’s expression (which really is spine-chilling) but her tenderness toward the baby after coven leader Roman Castavet encourages her to rock him to sleep. She’s still horrified at what has happened, but the baby in the black-draped cradle is her son, and she is his mother, right? Shouldn’t she want to care for him? This devotion, which is something we claim to value in America, is the very thing that the ghouls responsible for excising paid family leave from the Build Back Better plan are counting on: that moms will unfailingly sacrifice their health, wellbeing, and potential to protect and care for their children. Outside is scary. Inside is scary, too.
Want to haunt your elected representatives this weekend? Don’t mind if I do! Find their contact info here and give them a piece of your mind along with a bag of Hershey’s miniatures with all the Krackles missing.