Queertober Part 6: Lyle
“Movie X But With Y” is a time honored tradition in movies. Think of how many movies you’ve seen that could be described as “Die Hard but in a _____” and how many of the movies actually kind of slap. And while horror is definitely a genre that loves to X but with Y (basically the entire slasher genre is “Halloween but with ____”) that rarely applies to things like Rosemary’s Baby, where the original in question is A, a nearly universally acclaimed classic and B, directed by a child predator.
So what do we do with Rosemary’s Baby then? Attempts to remake it, make sequels or prequels or readapt the book have all been largely unsuccessful, critically maligned, financially disastrous or both. Even while we might want a new one, the high quality of the original and the surrounding baggage are millstones around the neck of any creatives taking another whack at it.
Lyle’s solution then is to go around the axis, to change enough that it’s clearly an entirely new product, but leave enough that anyone jonesing for another hit of the same stuff can definitely get it. The plot changes are significant (one toddler dies, the new baby is intended to also be sacrificed to Satan instead of being his son, they’re a lesbian couple and oh, the main character kills her wife instead of giving in at the end) but it still tastes like Rosemary’s Baby in your mouth.
Well sort of. The original film is notable for its lengthy buildup, the feeling of dread as Rosemary feels like she’s losing her mind. And as skillfully as this movie is put together for its clear low budget, its 65 minute runtime (literally half the length of Rosemary’s Baby) can’t possibly hit that point. It just doesn’t have time to build the tension the way the original film did, and it ends up kind of rushing through scenes of Leah panicking and then immediately calming down.
Not to say that there isn’t more that the movie has to offer than its baseline recreation of Rosemary’s Baby. Most of the changes seem designed to second guess an audience familiar with the original, but the gender swap is more than aesthetic. A friend of mine opens every discussion of Rosemary’s Baby with the fact that Guy is the worst boyfriend in the world, and there are ways that his gaslighting (like, actually gaslighting) Rosemary starts to feel gendered, especially as a reflection of America in the late 1960s. He feels entitled to Rosemary, to use her for his plans, in a way that feels very much like it’s informed by 60s sexism.
Lyle does seem to frame Leah’s Satanic wife as more sympathetic, and clearly more regretful. The final twist, that she wanted Leah to have a boy because otherwise she’d have to give up two girls, makes her seem less like she just wanted to worship Satan and more like Leah, and the family they were going to build, meant a lot to her, whereas Guy always seemed like he was treating Rosemary as a means to an end. This element of trust even plays into the end, when Leah uses it to get her wife into the tub where she’s giving birth and strangle her to death. How’s that for an ending?
This makes the queerness of the leads an important, but otherwise unremarked upon element of the film, which I think makes it worthwhile, because we now see another way queerness can be deployed; Subtly. Both hero and villain here are queer, and while that alters the dynamic, it doesn’t need to be spelled out why. Queerness is not a trait associated with monstrousness, but a trait that a monster can have, the same as anyone else.
But what happens if that monstrousness becomes associated with heroism? Next time we’re gonna take on the second of our two 2010s picks, 2018’s The Perfection.
