'Rosemary's Baby' gets a modern spin.

• Author: Donadio, Rachel
• Position: Living

Byline: Rachel Donadio

PARIS -- "Rosemary's Baby,'' Roman Polanski's 1968 horror film about a woman impregnated by the devil, may seem somewhat campy in retrospect, but it has influenced scores of filmmakers and spawned innumerable imitators. Now, it has given birth to a remake -- set in contemporary Paris, made for television and directed by the esteemed Polish-born director Agnieszka Holland.

The new version is far gorier, but also aims to be more psychologically complex. For her first foray into genre projects, Holland, a veteran of both European art-house cinema and American cable television, said she wanted to transform "Rosemary's Baby'' into a dark, post-feminist meditation on the loss of control that women feel with pregnancy and on the seduction of money and power.

The four-hour miniseries is scheduled to run on NBC this week, but on a Friday evening in early March, Holland, 65, was on the set in a real hospital. She was overseeing a scene in which a very pregnant Rosemary, played by Zoe Saldana of "Avatar'' fame, tells an obstetrician-gynecologist that she's pretty sure her husband is in league with Satanists.

"There are some things in this ultrasound that I've never seen before,'' the gentle doctor says, with no discernible irony, in an early take. (There would be many more takes.) "Doctor,'' Rosemary says, terrified and breathing heavily, "in my building there are witches! My husband is one of them!'' (The doctor looked unconvinced.)

In the Polanski original, Mia Farrow played Rosemary as a guileless housewife, a lapsed Catholic from Omaha, Nebraska, with a pixie haircut and a lot of time on her hands in New York City in an era when a young couple could reasonably rent a palatial apartment on Central Park West. She is slow to realize that her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), has made a deal with the couple next door to donate their child to Satan in order to advance his acting career.

The new version, with a screenplay by Scott Abbott and James Wong, a writer for "American Horror Story,'' radically updates the Ira Levin novel that was the source of the original film. This time around, Rosemary, a ballet dancer, is the breadwinner, and she has struggled to get pregnant. After...