Credit: Dangerous Minds / Paramount Pictures / Netflix

For a period of time, it looked as if Rosemary’s Baby was going to go down in history as the most cursed Hollywood movie ever made.

It took genuinely harrowing sets like that of The Exorcist and especially Poltergeist to even rival its crown. Nevertheless, everything that went down during the making of the Mia Farrow horror classic still makes you think twice about going into the movie industry. Even setting aside the disgusting crimes its director was accused of, there’s still something haunting about what happened to the people involved with arguably the great Manhattan horror film.

The first casualty of the film was its composer, the great Krzysztof Komeda. After completing one of the great horror scores for Rosemary’s Baby, the world seemed to be at the 37-year-old’s feet, until the autumn of 1968. While at a party, Komeda decided to push his drunken luck and carry on while on top of a rocky escarpment. The subsequent fall put him into a coma that he never woke up from, lasting four months before the plug was pulled on him.

A tragedy, but one that takes a darker hue when you consider the fate of a character, albeit cut from the film, who featured in Ira Levin’s original novel. In the book, the character tries to warn Rosemary of the witch’s nefarious puposes but who is struck with a mysterious illness. One that leaves him in a coma for four months before the plug is pulled.

Shockingly enough, it gets darker from there.

Was ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ cursed?

For a film that arguably invented the concept of so-called elevated horror 50 years before the term found its cursed way into the cultural conversation, the presence of William Castle as one of the producers was a strange one. Castle was the undisputed king of the B-movie, a purveyor of cheap shlock normally built around a stupid gimmick that would get butts in seats, only to watch a film that was pretty much by design underwhelming compared to the marketing campaign.

In fact, it was that reputation that drove him to make Rosemary’s Baby. He wanted out of the B-movie ghetto and saw a novel with the reputation that Ira Levin’s masterpiece had as his ticket out of the hellscape. He mortgaged his house to buy the rights to the novel and originally envisioned himself to direct it. However, the deal with Paramount hedged on him merely producing, rather than directing. He was one of the more high-profile people attached to the project, though, so when the movie was released and broke many existing boundaries of taste, he was buried under an avalanche of hate mail.

The stress that he was under from the deluge gave him severe kidney stones, a condition that nearly killed him. While delirious in hospital, he was overheard hallucinating characters from the film, at one point screaming “Rosemary, for God’s sake, drop the knife!” Here was Castle, hallucinating a grotesque, murderous scene involving the lead character of Rosemary’s Baby and a knife, mere months before the Manson family murdered the director of the movie’s wife, Sharon Tate.

Tate was also the second choice for Rosemary, had Mia Farrow passed on the picture.