Apartment Horror - vo.rs

Repulsion: Polanski's Flat as a Collapsing Mind

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) is the film that worked out how to put a nervous breakdown on screen from the inside. Before it, madness in cinema was mostly something you watched a character have — reported to you through wild eyes and a swelling score. Repulsion dissolves the distance. It locks you inside the perception of a young woman losing her grip and shows you what she sees, so that the walls of a small London flat begin to sprout hands, the plaster splits open, and the space that should be a refuge becomes the most dangerous location in the film. It is the founding text of apartment horror, and sixty years on almost nothing in the subgenre has bettered it.

Rosemary's Baby: The Horror of Being Not Believed

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 +0000

There is a devil in Rosemary’s Baby, and a coven of Satanists, and eventually a cradle draped in black with an upside-down crucifix hanging over it. None of that is what the film is about. What the film is about is a young woman telling the people around her that something is wrong, over and over, in a rising register of politeness and panic, and being smiled at and medicated and sent home. Roman Polanski’s 1968 film — his first made in America, adapted with almost fanatical fidelity from Ira Levin’s bestseller — is the definitive horror film about gaslighting, made two decades before the word entered common use. The Satanism is the alibi. The horror is the not-being-believed.