There's Something About Rosemary

Horror movies, like jokes, are ruined by analysis. The friend who introduced me to horror—by age 14, he could simulate a gunshot wound with a condom, fake blood, and Black Cat firecrackers—was outraged when his English teacher called Dawn of the Dead (1978) a satirical comment on consumerism. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see the symbolism in a mall full of zombies. What bothered him was the suggestion that his hero, George A. Romero, might be pretentious enough to consider this incidental punchline his movie’s actual subject. The producer Walter Mirisch wrote about Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): “I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America...[Nobody involved] saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple.”