Natalie Erika James’s Apartment 7A tells the story of Terry Gionoffrio, a young woman who was groomed to bear the Antichrist before Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse’s story began.
In this film, Terry (Julia Garner) is an aspiring dancer who breaks her ankle and becomes addicted to painkillers in the aftermath of her injury.
Walking in a drug-induced haze around the Bramford apartment building in New York, Terry is found by none other than Roman and Minnie Castevet. Played by Kevin McNally and Dianne Wiest, the two crotchety Bramford residents bring her up to their apartment and put her to bed. She wakes up, disoriented, but eventually Roman and Minnie prevail upon her – with the same characteristic bluster and odd joviality that spiced the original film – to move into their spare apartment so that they can care for her and help her get back on her feet.
Terry is confused by this but also pleased: She sees it as an opportunity to straighten out her life, though she is warned by her roommate when she gets home that all of this is very, very strange, and that the Castevets could be maniacs for all she knows. Overriding all practical protest, Terry decides to take them up on their offer.
James’s film is a faithful homage to the original film in many ways. First, once she is installed in the Castevets’ second apartment, Terry finds herself subjected to the same – and I mean sometimes line-by-line and shot-by-shot repetitions – of what Rosemary and Guy were subjected to in the 1968 film.
Terry, a performer like Guy, hears from Minnie that she has “a most interesting inner quality,” and that she has the potential to be a star. This conversation happens in Minnie’s kitchen while she and Terry wash and dry the dishes together—just as Minnie and Rosemary had done back in 1968.
The color palette is the same, as are the camera angles, as the original film.
Dianne Wiest tries to convey that same brassy, no-boundaries nosiness Ruth Gordon did more than fifty years prior. Kevin McNally, meanwhile, emulates Sidney Blackmer’s oily friendliness and saccharine manners.
Of course, the largest and most obvious debt of this film to its 1968 predecessor is the reproductive conspiracy at its heart.
The central drama of the film is that Terry is unwittingly drugged by her neighbors and raped by Satan so that she will become pregnant with the Antichrist.
Like Rosemary, Terry initially believes this rape and impregnation to have been a terrible dream, and she only slowly recovers her awareness of what really happened to her—partially through talking with people, partially by reading books that she finds in the Bramford.
She wears the tannis root necklace that we remember from Rosemary’s Baby; her obstetrician is Abe Sapirstein; her neighbors are nosy and overinvolved in her life.
The very end of the film includes the opening lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby, though sung in a lower key.
But the newer film also makes explicit some crucial ideas that the first film left unstated.
Toward the end of the film, Terry goes to a church – having begun to understand the truth about the baby she’s carrying—and she meets a nun.
The nun turns out to have known a previous young woman whom the Castevets groomed; evidently, Terry is not unique or special but is merely one in a long line of potential vehicles for the Antichrist. The nun quickly realizes that Terry is not just a potential vehicle but actually already impregnated with the Antichrist. The nun drops to her knees and begins praying to God: “If this baby is born, God have mercy on us all!”
James’s film makes the powerful but implicit theology of Rosemary’s Baby explicit: No one, especially a member of the Church, should be rooting for the survival of this pregnancy. It is actively un-Christian to want this baby to come into the world.
Apartment 7A sees in Rosemary’s Baby a template for how to terrify Americans about the straitened circumstances of women’s reproductive rights but makes that template starker, less ambiguous.
Nowhere is this clearer than when Terry visits an abortionist.
Rosemary’s Baby, remember, centers on a young woman who desperately wants to have a child and rejects the idea of an abortion outright, even when pressed by her friends to consider one in order to save her own life. Like The First Omen and, before it, The Omen, Apartment 7A centers instead on a young woman who has no desire whatsoever to have a baby, here because she knows it will derail her dancing career.
As a result of this knowledge, and spurred by the nun’s panicky warning, Terry goes to speak with her former roommate, who knows of an abortionist.
Of course, since the film is set in the mid-1960s, abortion was still illegal in New York State – even in cases of rape – and so Terry is forced to seek an abortion from an illegal abortion provider. Together, Terry and the former roommate journey to a back-alley, secret abortion provider. They both look afraid but determined.
In the abortionist’s office, we see Terry lying flat on her back on a very thin set of towels on a table with an older woman poised at her feet with a tray of formidable looking tools and instruments. Terry is awake and unanesthetized, like many of the American women who underwent illegal abortions before 1973 in the United States.
We see her face, gripped in fear and pain, as the abortionist begins the procedure. But Terry panics, kicking the woman away from her, and then the woman seizes up in a horrific state of rictus— evidently, Satan’s spawn is able to exert real and direct power in utero, even over people who are outside the womb.
Terry and the friend who had accompanied her to the abortionist flee.
The scene – both for them and for the viewer – is suffused with both panic and uncertainty. We don’t understand what just happened to Terry any better than they do; the scenes afterward are breathless, disorienting.
Apartment 7A ends in a significantly different fashion from the other two 2024 films about reproductive horror.
Cecilia in Immaculate and Margaret in The First Omen both manage to get away in the end. Sure, they are forced to carry their demonic pregnancies to term, and they give birth under extraordinary duress and very much against their will. But they survive.
Terry, in the final scene of Apartment 7A, manages to halt the Satanic conspiracy, but it costs her her life. With a somewhat numb look on her face, she shouts to the crowd of conspirators she is surrounded by in Minnie and Roman’s apartment,
“Hail Satan!” Then she begins the final and best dramatic and dance performance of her life. The song “Be My Baby” comes on the hi-fi, and Terry – her makeup smudged and her face still oddly numb looking—performs a bizarre interpretive dance, at once provocatively erotic and extremely aggressive. At some moments, she swings her hips seductively, and at others, she lunges forward, seeming ready to bite the men and women who are watching the mother of the Antichrist perform for them. At the end of the song, she jauntily poses, seating herself on the frame of an open window.
Before anyone can stop her, she just tips herself out, and the song goes quiet. She deliberately plunges both herself and her baby to their deaths.
Now, James had to end the film with Terry’s defenestration because this is how Terry’s death happens in Ira Levin’s novel and Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby. But in both the novel and the original film, we never learn exactly how Terry got launched out the window. I always assumed Minnie and Roman pushed her out the window deliberately, once they realized that they had a more suitable Satan-spawn-vehicle in their cute new neighbor Rosemary Woodhouse.
In James’s interpretation, Terry’s death is a suicide, undertaken because she realizes she cannot and will not bring the Antichrist into the world.
This interpretation of Terry’s death may have originated in James’s imagination, but I suspect it originated in James’s reading and interpretive extension of Ira Levin’s novel.
In the book Rosemary’s Baby – but not in Polanski’s 1968 film – Rosemary goes through an agonizing process of debating what to do with herself and her baby once she sees that he is, in fact, Satan’s son.
The first and most compelling option, to Rosemary, is to grab the baby and hurl herself and him out the window, to their deaths.
I have given a lot of thought to why the original Rosemary’s Baby film cut this moment. It may have been because interior monologue is hard to convey in film. But the film does that brilliantly at other points, simply by having Mia Farrow talk to herself. So I’ve come to the conclusion that Polanski’s film wants to leave Rosemary’s agency in the end in a far more reduced, qualified state. Perhaps this should not be surprising, coming from Polanski. His film doesn’t even allow Rosemary the option of imagining any other way out, apart from becoming the unwilling, semi-catatonic mother of Satan’s son.
James’s film wants to restore that way out and give it to Terry. There is a way to defeat and defraud the malign forces that have gathered against Terry: She can choose to die.
Now, that’s an extremely distressing place for the blistering feminism of this film to turn. Is James really offering up suicide as a serious alternative to forced pregnancy? I think yes and no. On the one hand, the film points out a bitter reality: Women who are denied access to abortion but need one will find a way to get one, even if it ultimately costs them their lives. This is no horrific fantasy but well-established historical reality.
This was indeed the reality all over the news in the 1950s and 1960s before the legalization of abortion.
On the other hand, what we already know as we come to this film— assuming we’ve all seen or at least heard of Rosemary’s Baby—is that Terry is not the last woman to fall to the diabolical rape schemes of the Bramford coven.
Rosemary’s next, and is already in queue.
In fact, Apartment 7A shows us a final scene shot from behind of Rosemary and Guy seeing Terry’s mangled dead body in front of the Bramford.
Terry’s ultimate sacrifice, which, remember, she undertakes to save humanity from Satan, is simply not enough. It’s not enough to sacrifice herself. Because there’s always another woman waiting afterward, clueless as to her imminent conversion into a vessel for Satanic reproduction.
This awareness in the film of the ultimate inescapability of the coven’s malicious and Satanic plans lies at the heart of James’s feminism.
She casts the horrific reproductive violence and dehumanization committed against the young women in the Bramford as generalizable, not specific to Rosemary or to Terry.
The mechanisms by which women are trapped and oppressed in reproductive horror aren’t about one specific woman but are applicable to any and all women of reproductive age. They are systemic, pervasive, and orchestrated.
This is the second reason why the film’s emphasis on dance is so important: Terry’s entrapment in the coven’s scheme is literally choreographed.
It is made possible only by the orchestration of many different actors, agents, directors, and other dancers.
The brutality to which she is subjected is not merely a one-on-one brutality. Instead, it involves dozens of people, acting in conjunction with a vast patriarchal plan to bring Satan’s son into the world.
The film’s emphasis on choreography updates the domestic horror of Rosemary’s Baby for the 2020s, making that horror structural.
Natalie Erika James’s ultimate contribution to the domestic horror genre is to remind us that it’s not ever just about the oppression, dehumanization, and abuse of one particular woman. It’s about the structures of power, patriarchy, and belief that make the categorical oppression of women a thinkable—and tragically desirable-thought.
Of course, this idea of the structural vulnerability of women to reproductive violence is something this film shares with Stevenson’s First Omen and with Mohan’s Immaculate. In all three of these reboots of the classic domestic horrors of the 1970s, there is a very strong sense that there is a long line of women, unwittingly waiting to be exploited and destroyed by a world that cannot bring itself to see women as human beings.
It’s not about Rosemary’s special, perfect, Marian Catholicness anymore, nor about Kathy Thorn’s sweet, devoted motherliness. The only required qualification for being tormented and abused into bearing the Antichrist is being a woman of reproductive age.
The vulnerability to domestic horror and reproductive violence isn’t personal anymore; it’s structural and intentional. In focusing on domestic and reproductive horror as structural, there’s something maybe even slightly darker in the 2024 prequels and remakes than in the original films of the 1970s. Or maybe it’s not fair to say that the 2024 reproductive horrors are darker, but I do think it’s fair to say they’re more desperate than their 1968 and 1976 predecessors.
Because in the ’70s, the general trajectory of women’s liberation was clearly upward; in 2024, in the wake of the Dobbs decision and popular slogans like “your body, my choice,” the trajectory is clearly down.
Reviewers and audience members haven’t failed to notice the political ambitions of these films nor the precipitous downturn in the fates of American women that they allude to.
Keith Harris wrote a great review of Immaculate for The Racket, calling the film “a war over Sweeney’s body,” and notes that it’s perfect to have Sweeney in such a role “just two years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision legalized forced birth in the U.S.”
Bilge Ebiri reviewed The First Omen for Vulture in similarly political terms: “So why should anyone be surprised that suddenly, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, as state after state attempts to enact religious laws depriving women of bodily agency, America is getting horror movies about people forced into monstrous births by religious institutions worried about their growing irrelevance? Whether it’s from a direct desire to be topical or a subconscious need to make our anxieties tangible, horror throws our world back at us.”
James’s film Apartment 7A, which has generally not been particularly well reviewed, has still gained notice for its politics: Casey Allen noted for Utah Public Radio that Terry’s reproductive autonomy was manipulated in a way that “feels very mindful… especially since this year has seen a lot of people in the US fight each other over abortion and a woman’s right to choose.”
Women’s political reality in 2025 may be terrifyingly close to what it was in 1970, but our discourse around how feminist horror can do political work has finally started to crystallize. And it’s crystallized with the help of feminist directors like Mohan, Stevenson, and James.
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