20 Most Highly Rated Horror Movies On Rotten Tomatoes
8. Rosemary’s Baby
Rating: 99%
The first of two Roman Polanski films deemed the cream of the horror genre by Rotten Tomatoes is his 1968 satanic pregnancy horror Rosemary’s Baby starring the waifish Mia Farrow as a young housewife who finds herself unwittingly carrying the Devil’s seed after she and her husband move into a creepy NYC apartment building populated by even creepier, Satan worshipping neighbours.
It’s a horror with an emphasis on psychological scares rather than the kind of ‘jump out of the shadows and make you sh*t your pants’ scares all too common today. In fact, some of its most effective moments are scenes in which you don’t see much at all.
The scene where Rosemary meets her Devil hybrid newborn for example is much scarier by not showing what the hell spawn actually looks like. Done today, it’s likely the scene would’ve shown some animatronic Garbage Pail Kids-esque abomination.
Funnily enough, a remake was once briefly in the works with Michael Bay producing. As somebody who sexually identifies as an explosion, Bay’s version would’ve probably featured both an animatronic devil baby and Satanists blowing up left, right and centre. Thankfully, that ill-judged project was scrapped.