Rosemary's Baby is one of the greatest movies of the late 1960s and one of the best of all horror movies, an outstanding modern Gothic tale. An art-house fable and an elegant popular entertainment, it finds its home on the cusp between a cinema of sentiment and one of sensation. In its structure, a European absurdist sensibility comes to the puritan ground of America. The film updates the witch from archetypal terror to the exemplar of our contemporary fear of domination. It's an atypical horror film, one that foregoes shocks in favour of atmosphere and anxiety, a slow, edgy story from a director filled with natural exuberance; gusto pulses beneath its restrained menace. It provides a fairy-tale for adults; it preys on adult fears, especially our fear of being infantilised, and its horror lies in its enactment of the trap that closes around Rosemary, one from which there is no escape. It explores the plight of the married, the paranoia of the mother-to-be. One of its stars, John Cassavetes declared that the movie "is the most violent, non-violent picture I've ever worked in.

It reeks of mystery, horror and eeriness, with never a blow being struck." Michael Newton's study of the film traces its development, at a time when Hollywood stood poised between the old world and the new, its dominance threatened by the rise of TV and cultural change, and the roles played variously by super producer Robert Evans, the film's producer William Castle, director Polanski and its stars including Mia Farrow as Rosemary and John Cassavetes as her treacherous husband Guy. His close textual analysis explores the film's meanings and resonances, and, looking beyond the film itself, he examines its reception and cultural impact, and its afterlife, in which Rosemary's Baby has become linked with the terrible murder of Polanski's wife and unborn child by members of the Manson cult, and by controversies surrounding the director. Newton's reading of the film depends on three interrelated ideas: first, that the film presents itself as just a film, a work of art bound up in the paradoxes of performance; second, that the movie dramatizes a theatre of relations based on power, constraint and the loss of the individual will; and third, that the movie makes up a meeting-point for many of the themes and fashions of the late 1960s.