Rosemary’s Baby, both the novel and the film, are horror classics for excellent reason. Ira Levin spent months collecting magazines and newspapers to give the novel a very specific sense of time and place that makes the book a genuinely creepy read. So of course, a bloated TV remake is on the way.
We say “bloated” because it’s a three-hundred page novel that’s being turned into a four-hour miniseries. The original movie was almost half that. But at least we get to see Zoe Saldana, according to Variety:
Zoe Saldana has been tapped to star in the Peacock’s four-hour miniseries, the net announced today. She will play Rosemary, the iconic young wife and would-be mother who, with her husband, moves into a Paris apartment that has a darkly storied past. After finally getting pregnant, she becomes increasingly suspicious that both her husband and their mysterious neighbors have ulterior motives about the future of her child.
You might notice that the book has moved from New York to Paris, as well, because apparently New York isn’t glamorous enough or something. If there’s a bright spot here, it’s that X-Files, American Horror Story and Final Destination vet James Wong is helping with the script, so at least they’ve got somebody who knows his way around horror handling the screenplay.
That said, this seems profoundly unnecessary. Part of the reason the book sold so many copies was that it tapped into a lot of anxiety over religion at the time. Now we live in a world where people mostly use religion to pick fights on Twitter, and we get a devil baby movie roughly once every year or so. But, hey, it’s NBC; let’s just be grateful they’re not making The Sound of Music a yearly event.
via Variety
(Image courtesy of s_bukley / Shutterstock.com)