SPOILER ALERT!
ROSEMARY’S BABY 1968
A Covenant of Betrayal: Bodily Invasion, Unholy Pacts, Maternal Power, the Spiral of Paranoia, and the Profaned Sanctuary in Rosemary’s Baby:
I know my challenge here at 150 Days of Classic Horror promised to be shorter versions of my typical work, but this film warrants my attention and is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg for what’s to come soon. It’s not easy to find the words worthy of a film that feels absolutely flawless, and leaves me stunned each time I revisit it, which is often and never enough. It’s a film that slips through easy categories and shatters the bounds of expectations of what makes a classic film transcendent, inimitable, divinely wrought, and narrative alchemy.
There’s something about Rosemary’s Baby 1968 that never loosens its grip on me—not just the thickening dread or that sly, darkly playful humor, but the sheer craft on display in every frame. It’s not that the movie hides new secrets each time I watch it; it’s that I’m always floored by the layers of brilliance that never lose their power: the way every detail becomes part of the film’s mood; the choreography of hand gestures and glances; the clothes that seem both of their moment and eternally stylish or times unsettling as in Minnie and Roman’s dress up menagerie.
If clothes make the character, then Ruth Gordon’s Minnie Castevet is dressed for an urban coven and a comedy of manners. Her wardrobe is a parade of candy-colored eccentricity, as if your great-aunt Sadie raided the witchy side of Bloomingdale’s, then asked for extra rhinestones and a brooch shaped like a fig.
More than anything, there’s the sense of place—the way New York isn’t just a backdrop, but a living, breathing character, indifferent and watchful, quietly amplifying the film’s unease. Every time the credits roll, and Krzysztof Komeda’s lyrical music arrives with the hush of a child entering an existential waiting room, innocent yet weighted, the melody lingering in the charged quiet, the camera’s gliding descent and dreamlike plunge from the sky to capture Manhattan and the Bramford, I find myself in awe all over again. At just how ruthlessly and elegantly this film captures a story, I can’t look away.
Rosemary’s Baby 1968 was adapted from Ira Levin’s (A Kiss Before Dying 1953, The Stepford Wives 1972, The Boys from Brazil 1976) celebrated 1967 novel of the same name. Levin’s taut, gripping story provided the blueprint for the film, blending psychological suspense with supernatural horror and offering a sharply modern twist on themes of trust, vulnerability, and evil hidden in plain sight. If you read the novel, you’ll see that the film remains closely tied to Levin’s vision, bringing his unsettling tale of paranoia and betrayal to vivid cinematic life.
There is significance to its import; on the threat of women’s primacy and the lure of power that seeks to undermine, contain, and ultimately invade female autonomy, seducing and betraying with equal finesse right out in the open sunlit and the minimal Mid-century space that was supposed to be hopeful, modern, and independent, surrounded by gentle colors and an almost idyllic domestic calm. Levin would revisit these themes in The Stepford Wives.
Rosemary’s world, with clean, uncluttered lines, a palette of airy whites, soft yellows, and pale golds, her airly sunlit apartment has a serene sense of order that highlights both comfort and sophistication.
But underneath the surface of Rosemary’s domestic life, a space that promises safety, possibility, and the hope of new life to come, something is coiling and brewing, and something ancient is quietly gathering strength. The hopeful clarity of clean lines and soft yellows is, in truth, a delicate façade. Just beyond the reach of that domestic optimism, forces both seen in and unseen on the other side of the modest pantry door, there are those who are waiting: neighbors who seem intrusive yet harmless, rituals that appear routine, and dark traditions that slip past the boundaries of reason.
What’s waiting to undermine this peace isn’t just a conspiracy of others, but the creeping realization that control is an illusion. Within the walls of the Bramford, every open space harbors a hidden potential for invasion; the kindly smiles, the jovial conversations, the quirky charms of an odd elderly couple, all dissolve into a silent, relentless pressure. The threat lies in the way trust is twisted and agency is quietly unraveled, not just by the clandestine violence or chaos, but by the slow, almost invisible shifting of power.
What Rosemary fears isn’t only what’s lurking outside her door, but the knowledge that safety, in this bright and hopeful home, has always been conditional. And everyone’s mask slips off when she begins to watch too closely, revealing the machinery of manipulation that’s been pulsing away behind her back, and within the dreams that disturb her. These lucid dreams leave her feeling uneasy and unsure of what’s real once she wakes up. “This is no dream! This is really happening!”
Every glance and gesture carries a tension between self-possession and quiet influence, as if the film is warning us that the very spaces we trust most can sometimes become the very settings where we end up surrendering more control than we realize.
Rosemary’s Baby endures not because of its notorious reputation or its genre trappings, but because it is still unsettling and beguiling in ways that no summary can really capture. It’s a film you don’t just watch so much as take it all in, absorb it scene by scene, uneasy feeling by uneasy feeling, as it quietly reconfigures your trust in the world, and how people can so easily betray us.
Mia Farrow stars as the iconic imperiled and innocence lost — Rosemary Woodhouse, a young woman who moves with her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), into the Bramford, a storied, aging brownstone apartment building in Manhattan shrouded in rumors of dark happenings. Their lives seem charmed: a fabulous new home, rising career hopes, plans to start a family, yet beneath the façade of urban domesticity, something ominous takes root.
Mia Farrow as Rosemary: An Exquisite Portrait of Fragility and Innocence:
Mia Farrow’s performance as Rosemary is the glowing heart at the center of Rosemary’s Baby—a presence so nuanced, so quietly powerful, that the film’s entire world seems to draw its breath from her. Farrow captures Rosemary’s innocence with an ethereal touch, her every expression delicately poised between wonder and dread. With her wide, questing eyes and that unforgettable veil of pixie-blonde hair, she embodies a kind of luminous vulnerability, beauty not defined by glamour, but by a raw openness to the world’s mysteries and dangers.
Farrow’s portrayal is breathtaking in its authenticity. Each gesture, trembling, hopeful, or aching with suspicion, feels both spontaneous and deeply considered. She moves through each scene with a dancer’s physicality: light on her feet in moments of domestic joy, yet growing ghostlike and hollow as suspicion and fear eclipse the bright interiors she inhabits. There’s a palpable music to her silence, a poetry in the way her features convey volumes, whether in tentative laughter, a quickening whisper, or the silent tears of someone who feels the world slipping out from under her.
Her innocence is not naiveté, but a kind of luminous trust, a faith in goodness that the film is designed to test at every turn. By drawing from the most delicate corners of vulnerability, Farrow makes Rosemary’s journey a wrenching and universally human ordeal. Even in her waning strength and drawn, pale beauty, Farrow glows with that haunting radiance, summoning a purity that makes Rosemary’s suffering deeply affecting and her small moments of rebellious courage all the more heroic.
Few performances have so vividly distilled the essence of innocence under siege. Mia Farrow renders Rosemary not just as a victim, but as a fully alive, feeling woman whose genuine spirit, beauty, and pain linger with us long after the film dissolves with Komeda’s last note. Her work here is a study in emotional transparency, each note played with a subtlety that makes the horror feel more penetrating, richer, deeper, and achingly real.
Rosemary and Guy’s elderly neighbors, the eccentric and quite intrusive Minnie and Roman Castevet, quickly ingratiate themselves. Guy, an aspiring actor, soon falls under their influence, his career suddenly flourishing as Rosemary suffers a series of unsettling experiences: strange dreams, a violent encounter that leaves her mysteriously bruised and scratched, and the news that she is pregnant.
As her pregnancy advances, Rosemary grows increasingly isolated and distrustful. Doctors minimize her pain, friends are pushed away, and the Castevets intensify their hold. The everyday rhythms of city life and marriage become laced with suspicion, anxiety, and a creeping sense of conspiracy. Hutch (Maurice Evans), Rosemary’s trusted friend, initially rattles her with ominous gossip about the Bramfords’ dark past, stories of witchcraft, strange deaths, and unspeakable rituals that blacken and scandalize the building’s reputation. As Rosemary’s suspicions grow, Hutch attempts to warn her. On his way to deliver unsettling information, he mysteriously falls into a coma, silencing his efforts to protect her. Subtle acts of theft, such as the coven taking belongings from their intended victims, hint at ritualistic intentions. Rosemary connects these disappearances to the practice of casting spells using personal items. After Hutch’s death, Rosemary receives a cryptic clue, discovering an anagram involving the book “All of Them Witches.” She painstakingly uncovers the hidden message, realizing it reveals the true identity of her neighbor, Roman, connecting him to a notorious witchcraft lineage. This book, Hutch leaves for Rosemary, shrouded in notes and underlined passages, becomes the key that finally lays bare the coven’s plot. It exposes Roman Castevet as Steven Marcato, son of the Bramford’s infamous devil-worshipping Patriarch. These fragile clues confirm Rosemary’s deepest fears and propel Rosemary from bewildered innocence toward the harrowing truth lurking within her home and her womb.
Brought in by Minnie and Roman to oversee Rosemary’s pregnancy is Dr. Abraham Sapirstein, played with a calmly sinister streak by Ralph Bellamy, who enters the picture with all the outward confidence of a respected obstetrician, but there’s a chilling contrast between his composed authority and Rosemary’s visible suffering under his care. Underneath all that bedside manner, his role is complicit and menacing as he manipulates Rosemary; he’s firmly in the coven’s corner, quietly keeping tabs on Rosemary and steering her away from anyone who might actually help. Sapirstein represents the medical establishment’s betrayal of women.
As her pregnancy progresses, she becomes deathly thin and almost ghostly pale, her face drawn, her body frail, every movement shadowed by exhaustion and pain. It’s clear that whatever’s happening isn’t normal, yet Sapirstein dismisses her agony, brushing off her fears with a clinical calm that only heightens the horror. The pain is so unbearable that Rosemary cries out in desperation, “Pain be gone—I shall have no more of thee!” Still, he insists she soldier on, becoming the embodiment of that terrifying authority who refuses to listen, all while Rosemary’s strength seems to slip further away under his unyielding watch.
Haunted by the feeling that something is terribly wrong, Rosemary’s search for truth unravels the terrible secret: her child’s conception was manipulated by this coven of witches, with Guy complicit in exchange for his ambitions to seek rising stardom. The baby she delivers is not just hers, but the offspring of something unholy—a child meant to bring darkness into the world. Her little Andrew is the devil’s son.
Rosemary’s Baby is at once a story of trust betrayed and innocence invaded. It quietly transforms the familiar—marriage, motherhood, home—into a landscape of menace and dread, drawing us into a spiral of fear as what should have been Rosemary’s ordinary, hopeful new life becomes the stage for the extraordinary and the profane.
This isn’t just a horror film, or a psychological thriller, nor a film about devil worshiping, or even a New York story. It’s a painting of dread, paranoia, and invasion, as precise as it is surreal, where every detail thrums with intention.
The missing paintings in the Castavets’ apartment leave a conspicuous rectangle of emptiness, suggesting an orchestrated secrecy about their identities. Strange herb gardens in Minnie Castevet’s kitchen, filled with tannis root and mysterious plants, their pungent smell lingering as a recurring motif of suspicion. The faint sound of a recorder drifting through the apartment’s walls—distant, eerie, and childlike, as if signaling secret rituals behind closed doors. Whispered voices and thin walls, so every innocent noise becomes suspect, heightening Rosemary’s sense of isolation. A hidden door connecting apartments, blending private and public spaces, making safety feel porous and staged. Unsettling tokens of care from Minnie and Roman, like herbal drinks, shakes, each laden with false cheer and underlying menace. Peculiar talismans: the charm locket with tannis root, a gift presented as protection but reeking, literally, of danger. Laura-Louise, played with jittery gusto by Patsy Kelly, barges into Rosemary’s apartment like she’s volunteering for neighborhood watch and community theater in the same breath, plotzing on the sofa, needles flying, kvetching louder than her knitting clacks, and making the sacred art of sitting still look like an Olympic sport in comic chaos. Ritual chanting and laughter seeping through the walls at night, creating the sense of a community united by something occult and inaccessible to Rosemary. Roman’s piercing eyes and pierced ears. And Minnie’s outlandish fashion sense. The black, sinister crib with its unnerving mobile, just visible in the Castavets’ apartment near the film’s end—a chilling symbol of what’s been orchestrated.
The mood Polanski conjures is so immaculate and inexorable, it almost feels like a spell. Even its moments of humor or domestic calm are laced with a kind of exquisite malice, suggesting that comfort is the cruelest illusion of all. Mia Farrow’s fragile grace as Rosemary is the soul of uncertainty, making every room she enters feel both sanctuary and snare.
In the harrowing aftermath of betrayal, Rosemary’s Baby builds toward a moment where the meaning of motherhood eclipses even the most profound fears. Staring into little Andy’s (Adrian’s) unearthly eyes, “What have you done to his eyes?!” (she screams). “He has his father’s eyes,” Roman coyly comforts her.
Rosemary finds herself at the threshold between horror and something both older and deeper: the instinct to love and protect her child, no matter his origins. That haunting question—“Aren’t you his mother, Rosemary?” posed by Roman in the iconic climax as she gently rocks her little boy in the black bassinet, lands with seismic force. It crystallizes the film’s emotional climax, posing not only a moral dilemma but also recognizing the singular, transformative bond of a mother to her child. Despite the supernatural terror, betrayal, and the realization of all the evil that has conspired against her, Rosemary’s primal, elemental, fierce, unyielding maternal impulse silently asserts itself.
I can’t wait to explore this masterpiece in a deeper, more revealing way at The Last Drive In. I want to offer just this: the promise of an essay that takes nothing for granted, that attempts to do justice to the emotional, aesthetic, and philosophical currents flowing beneath the film’s notorious surface. There’s so much more to Rosemary’s Baby than its twists or shocks; for me, it’s a film about vulnerability, transformation, paranoia, silencing women, the shifting shadows of trust, and, of course, motherhood. And I can’t wait to share why it feels inexhaustible, still new, and still necessary, fifty years on. I recently watched it on my birthday, and am still struck by its sense of being utterly mesmerizing, almost alchemical. And then suddenly you’re acutely aware of your own vulnerability.
Every ritual, whether whispered incantations behind closed doors or the unsettling social ceremonies of Rosemary’s intrusive neighbors, feels charged, precise, and ambiguous, as if the very walls of the Bramford have absorbed a liturgy of secrets. These moments aren’t just spectacle; they root us inside a private mythology, where everyday rituals become gateways to the uncanny and the unspeakable.
And nothing—but nothing—and no one—could have conjured Minnie and Roman Castevet with the peculiar electricity, sly depth, and frightening authenticity that Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer summoned at the heart of Rosemary’s Baby.
Minnie is unapologetically gauche. She drapes herself in loud prints, chunky jewelry, and an arsenal of funky hats. To me, this brings to mind pincushion pastels and the sort of necklaces that double as divining pendulums, baubles, and jangly bracelets. Minnie’s headwear could have its own billing: floppy, beaded, occasionally flower-topped, each one perched with the confidence of a seasoned scene-stealer.
Forgive my endless descriptives. It’s hard to stop envisioning Minnie without poetic indulgence.
With her quilted coats and dresses in pattern collisions, Minnie is like a walking box of assorted bonbons, each piece of jewelry and every boldly patterned scarf a different surprise, sweetly mismatched, kitschy, and irresistibly eye-catching. Her accessories cluster around her like a flock of noisy birds, each one a burst of color. And they’re all competing for attention, all of it creating a look that’s as whimsically cluttered and unpredictable as a curiosity shop window after a small earthquake. The total effect is less “understated Upper West Side” and more sorceress at Sunday bingo. It all leans toward playful excess.
With pride, she sports accessories with attitude: Brooches the size of demonic talismans, over-the-glasses chains, and bags that seem to carry everything but a sense of subtlety.
Ruth Gordon’s costumes are the wearable equivalent of a fabulous ’60s raspberry Jell-O mold: politely Mid-century but packing deeply subversive energy just beneath the surface. Minnie Castevet’s wardrobe is an incantation in polyester and paste gems—one part busybody, one part occult ringleader, and 100% unforgettable.
The sartorial magic behind both Rosemary’s Mod minimalism and Minnie’s retro maximalism belongs to Anthea Sylbert, who was the film’s costume designer and a trailblazer in her field, later renowned for her Oscar-nominated work on Chinatown and Julia. In Rosemary’s Baby, she created a visual duet between Mia Farrow’s ethereal chic and Ruth Gordon’s camp-colorful chaos, using clothes as character. Sylbert’s genius is making every paisley and sequin serve the story, leaving Minnie as the best-dressed witch this side of Central Park West.
Film historians and critics alike have long regarded Gordon and Blackmer’s performances as the lifeblood of the film’s dread and dark wit. Ruth Gordon’s Minnie is often described as a force of nature—one reviewer captures her “hustling, staccato vitality,” likening her presence to “a sprite in clashing housecoats, flitting from kindness to command with witchy irrepressibility… a cheerful plague injected in doses of neighborly affection.” — (Matthew Eng in his essay “We Need More Villains Like ROSEMARY’S BABY’s Minnie Castevet,” published by the Tribeca Film Festival’s online journal.)
Gordon was awarded an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a testament to her ability to turn Minnie’s nosiness and eccentricity into both a source of charm and existential dread. She is the apartment’s malignant fairy godmother, gifting advice laced with poison.
Sidney Blackmer provides the perfect counterpoint as Roman—urbane, elusive, exuding a velvety menace behind every pointed phrase and witty remark. Blackmer brings a refined and gracious Mephistophelean finesse, every gesture measured, every smile edged with the grace and danger of an old-world conjurer. Blackmer played Roman with “the effortless confidence of a man who has always moved in dark corridors.” (Vincent Canby of The New York Times.) His measured gestures and sonorous voice infuse Roman with equal parts grandeur and guile, a conjurer in evening clothes presiding over the hidden rituals of the Bramford.
Together, Gordon and Blackmer are described as a duet of deviltry so convincing you can nearly smell the talcum and tannin. Their chemistry is unsettling, and their comedic timing is impeccable. Critics point to their ability to blur boundaries, nurturing and predatory, comic and chilling, grotesque and intimate. They are the living heartbeat of the Bramford, the whimsically macabre puppeteers orchestrating Rosemary’s undoing with a neighborly smile.
If Rosemary’s Baby is a spell, then Gordon and Blackmer are its most potent incantation, transforming the ordinary into the diabolical with nothing but a laugh, a glance, a dish of chocolate (‘mouse’) mousse, or a lingering, seemingly innocent question at the apartment door.
Stay tuned—for a true descent into the heart of the Bramford is coming.
THE MEPHISTO WALTZ 1971
Paul Wendkos’s The Mephisto Waltz (1971) stands as one of the more stylish, unsettling entries in the wave of occult horror that followed the late-’60s boom. Adapted by Ben Maddow from Fred Mustard Stewart’s novel, this supernatural drama brings together a cast led by Alan Alda still a few years away from making TV history as the sarcastic mensche and lothario Hawkeye Pierce on MAS*H., here he plays Myles Clarkson, Jacqueline Bisset is his wife Paula, Curd Jürgens as the enigmatic pianist Duncan Ely, and Barbara Parkins as his seductive daughter Roxanne. Bradford Dillman, William Windom, and Kathleen Widdoes support the central quartet, each swirling into the strange world conjured by the film.
Feature & Interview with Iconic Actress, Dancer, and Photographer, Barbara Parkins
Paul Wendkos enjoyed a remarkably prolific career spanning film and television, moving with ease between genres and formats. He first drew Hollywood’s attention with his stylish 1957 superior film noir The Burglar starring Dan Duryea. Other supernaturally tinged features include the TV Movie, Fear No Evil (1969), starring Louis Jourdan. This atmospheric horror introduces a psychiatrist ensnared in a string of eerie deaths linked to a haunted mirror and occult rituals, establishing a recurring supernatural investigator for a proposed series. A follow-up to Fear No Evil, this TV movie continues the story of Dr. David Sorell (Jordan who revisits this character) as he investigates black magic and devil worship, blending psychological horror with supernatural intrigue in another stylish Wendkos production. Wendkos also directed the compelling conspiracy thriller The Brotherhood of the Bell 1970, which delves into the disturbing power of a secret society that manipulates its members’ lives and fates. It features Glenn Ford as a man facing the supernatural undertones of fate and control.
The story unfolds with Myles Clarkson, once a promising pianist, now a journalist, landing an interview with dying virtuoso Duncan Ely. At first, Ely seems dismissive, but after noticing Myles’s pianist-perfect hands, he takes sudden, almost feverish interest in Myles and Paula. Under the surface, Ely and Roxanne are soul-seeking Satanists, and as Ely’s death looms, he enacts a plan to transfer his soul into Myles’s body. A perverse waltz of identity and desire follows: Myles’s talent blooms overnight.
The transformation of Myles Clarkson is both eerie and unsettling. After the ritualistic soul transference, enacted through occult ceremony and the symbolic donning of a lifelike mask, Myles, once a modest and frustrated pianist, is suddenly possessed of Duncan Ely’s formidable virtuosity. The mask, eerily modeled after Duncan’s own face, is not merely a prop but a talisman of identity, marking the exact moment the transfer is complete.
As Duncan’s body succumbs to death, Myles awakens with a talent that is impossibly beyond his own, his hands moving across the keys with newfound authority and grace. The change is almost supernatural in its clarity: where awkwardness and hesitation once reigned, now there is electricity, precision, and a chilling sense of borrowed genius. Myles’s transformation is unmistakable; he performs Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz” with the passion and brilliance that only the true Duncan Ely possessed, as if the man himself has crossed the mortal threshold to play again.
This uncanny exchange, summoned by the ritual and the mask, turns Myles into a living echo of Duncan, blurring the lines between body and soul, self and other. The film lingers on the aftermath, making every note Myles plays not just a triumph, but a haunting reminder of the price exacted by dark ambition.
His behavior shifts, and Paula, caught between attraction and suspicion, begins to sense a chilling conspiracy. The horror subtly deepens after the ritual, as their daughter Abby falls mysteriously ill and dies, marked by a symbolically oily blue substance, a detail from Paula’s nightmare that horrifyingly manifests in waking life.
In one of the film’s most hallucinatory sequences, Paula finds herself pulled into a dream that shimmers on the edge of reality, a vision so vivid and prophetic that it feels less like fantasy than a glimpse behind the veil. In this haze, Myles and Roxanne appear above her, locked in a disturbing embrace, their bodies joined by an intimacy that is both sensual and sinister. They stand together, looming over Paula as if presiding over a ritual from which she is excluded but cannot escape. The moment is charged with a sense of betrayal and helplessness, blurring the boundary between nightmare and waking life. It’s as though Paula, already beset by suspicion and grief, is being forced to witness the erasure of her own identity, her husband (who is now possessed by Duncan Ely’s soul) and the enigmatic Roxanne joined in an alliance that is at once carnal and conspiratorial. This vision is not just a manifestation of fear; it’s a psychic revelation, laying bare the new order forged by the soul transference. Myles is no longer truly hers, and Roxanne is no mere rival but the co-conspirator in the theft of his very self.
Wendkos crafts the film with a surreal, sensual confidence. The dream sequences and ritual scenes are genuinely hallucinogenic: masks abound, visuals tilt and smear, and a New Year’s Eve party throbs with surreal menace as the camera lingers on the macabre, as if time itself is spilling out of joint. In one of the film’s most visually striking and surreal moments, the human guests don elaborate animal masks, adding to the hallucinatory, unsettling atmosphere of the gathering. This inversion is heightened by the infamous appearance of the Doberman wearing a man’s face mask, while the partygoers themselves appear in costumes and masks evocative of a decadent, slightly feral masquerade.
Out from the glittery crowd, the Doberman appears, jowls sunk into the uncanny slack of a man’s mask, its rubber grin both idiotic and unsettling. Roxanne glides at his side, leash in hand, the picture of cruel poise, her every step a signal that propriety and perversity have traded places for the night. The room filled with hushed conversations, laughter, and the heartbeats of the elite surrounds this grotesque masquerade: a beast dressed in borrowed humanity, padding obediently beside its mistress.
The human mask, showing off its absurd, molded smile, as if to suggest the boundaries between pet and person, predator and prey, have blurred along with the path that stretches across the party, vanishing into the maze of revelers and feral in-crowd where every mask hides something untameable.
The cinematography, praised for its “offbeat” unpredictability, uses distorted angles, mirrored reflections, and slo-mo to induce a sense of psychic vertigo.
By now, it’s no secret: Jerry Goldsmith is my absolute favorite composer. No one else leaps so effortlessly from one sensibility to the next. His versatility isn’t just impressive—it’s alchemy. Time and again, Goldsmith’s scores weave themselves into the soul of every film, conjuring entire worlds with a single, unforgettable theme. He’s penned more brilliant scores than I can count, each one a fresh revelation in cinematic storytelling.
In The Mephisto Waltz, his score draws out the film’s otherworldliness, tinging every frame with an atmosphere both seductive and corrosive. Goldsmith’s score is a conjuration that weaves itself through the film like a dark perfume, at once hypnotic and deranged, lavish and sickly sweet. It is music that kisses the skin and then tingles with cold warning, never letting you settle, pulling you into its spell that floats between desire and dread. Goldsmith composes with sleight of hand, pouring glittering piano passages through a prism of eerie instrumentation.
The waltz motif tiptoes in, graceful but skewed, as if ghosts were spinning atop a parquet floor slick with secrets. Strings shudder and bloom, bells tinkle in minor keys, and uncanny choral voices drift in as if sung by sleepwalkers under spells. There are moments when the music feels like a caress, almost romantic, then, with a subtle twist, it devolves into something warped and unholy, mirroring the film’s descent from elegance to the grotesque.
As only Goldsmith can do best, his score’s beauty is laced with an undercurrent of the uncanny, each melodic phrase sharpened with anticipation. It is a soundtrack that seduces and unnerves. Through Goldsmith’s genius, the film does not merely tell of a pact with devilry; his music makes you feel as if you, too, are dancing at the edge of the abyss.
The piece Myles plays in The Mephisto Waltz is indeed Franz Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz” (specifically, Mephisto Waltz No. 1). The film’s very title refers to this renowned piano composition, and its plot’s musical language revolves around Myles Clarkson’s sudden, otherworldly ability to perform as a piano virtuoso after a soul-transference ritual. The performance heard in the film is an actual recording by pianist Jakob Gimpel.
Throughout, the dialogue shimmers with cryptic wit. Duncan Ely’s line—“People should be born at the age of 70 and live their life backwards”—hangs over the story’s bizarre logic, summing up the plot’s obsession with aging, rebirth, and the terror of greedy immortality.
The film’s mood is thick with the textures and iconography of its era: it’s the early 70s after all, brass beds and velvet jackets, occult books and strange blue salves, shadowy gatherings where nothing is quite as it seems. The pace is haunted rather than frenetic, drawing out the dread as Paula’s investigations circle the truth, her husband’s body is no longer truly his, and her own agency will only return if she’s willing to descend into darkness herself. And what does that mean? Making her own deal with the devil? Trading places with Roxanne? Will she still get to wear Guerlain’s Shalimar?
The climax is a hall of mirrors: Paula, having lost her daughter, her new friend (Bradford Dillman anointed with the same deadly blue oil), and her husband to the satanic plot, embraces her own occult potential, turning the devil’s methods back on those who ruined her life. The film refuses easy catharsis, and what remains is transformation rather than restoration, as love and horror become indistinguishable within the inexorable dance of possession. The Mephisto Waltz may lack the high reputation of its famous contemporaries in the canon of devil worship panic of the early 1970s horror sub-genre, but it lingers in my mind for precisely these flourishes: hallucinatory visuals, a narrative that waltzes along the edge of nihilism, and performances that hum with enigmatic energy. This is horror at its most hypnotic and perverse, a tale where every embrace hides a bargain and every bargain, a fate one cannot unmake.
