minions. So they corrupt the struggling would-be actor Guy Woodhouse. By conforming to the old guard’s continued Social Darwinian plan for domination, Guy’s own career now soars, while his competition is crushed before him. Now Guy works to subvert Rosemary’s own desire to start a family with the expectation that she and her husband will raise their own child on their own terms. Instead, Guy ensures that Rosemary is little more than a vessel for the demonic offspring of the old guard. By the end of the film, when Rosemary realizes that her only hope at continued access as mother to her child lies in capitulation to the relentless and unscrupulous program of the older generation, she in fact gives in and accepts her abhorrent role in theirown bodies and reproductive choices and capacities to others’ ends.

Casting about online, I was heartened to find at least one doctoral dissertation that seems to emphasize the role generational conflict plays in Rosemary’s Baby, coming at a time in mid-twentieth century America where, for the bulk of that decade, a conflict drawn largely on generational lines played out over individual liberty versus state control, over what choices younger individuals could make to govern their own lives versus what duties they owed to their own parents and to the state, those parents writ large. And by making the Castevets and their inner circle of fellow Satanic covenists out to be almost caricaturish in their Satanism yet nonetheless successful in achieving their ends, Levin managed to make the old guard