‘Apartment 7A’ Enhances Its Terror with the Glamour and Horror of Broadway

[Editor’s note: This story contains spoilers for “Apartment 7A.”]

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Musicals and horror have a surprisingly deeper connection than you’d imagine. After all, “Sweeney Todd” is a masterpiece about a serial killer and cannibalism; “The Phantom of the Opera” is about a disfigured madman stalking a soprano and murdering standersby. So placing “Rosemary’s Baby” prequel “Apartment 7A” within the world of ’60s Broadway makes sense beyond just central character Terry Gionoffrio’s career as a dancer.

We meet Terry (played by Victoria Vetri) in “Rosemary’s Baby” for a brief scene before her abrupt death by defenestration. Here, she’s played by Julia Garner as an ambitious counterpart to John Cassavetes’ eager actor, Guy, in Roman Polanski’s film. Sidetracked by a career-threatening injury and taken in by those insidious old devil worshippers the Castavets, Terry finds her life — and career — on the upswing. So what if it takes a little tannis root to get cast in a Broadway musical?

“I loved that she had so much ambition in the entertainment industry and how that obviously mirrored Guy’s past impact, but that she as a character was both vessel and this kind of agent of this dark exchange, even though she didn’t understand the full repercussions of it,” director and co-writer Natalie Erika James told IndieWire.

Musical theater (and its ghosts) haunt Terry’s story, from the inadvertent echoes of Broadway dancer Joan McCracken — who became known as “The Girl Who Fell Down” after her intentional tumble in “Oklahoma!,” a sobriquet that also follows Terry — to Terry’s hallucination during the sequence in which a bedazzled devil impregnates her.

“If you want to lean into musical theater as horror, you want a sense of what the menace is,” James said. “I wanted to take it one step further … [with] the idea that evil can be part of the spectacle. And Weta Workshop did such an incredible job creating this beautiful creature, kind of eerie and unsettling. The whole thing feels very much like [Terry] has her star spotlight moment, and it’s a foreboding of the rest of the movie where it’s not going to be quite what she hoped for.”

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By the film’s end, Terry has the lead role in a Broadway musical — and the spawn of Satan growing inside her. But unlike Rosemary, Terry isn’t willing to compromise. And in a startling sequence, she dances through a Castavet party and hurls herself out an open window.

“We really wanted to create a dance that really came from Julia as Terry, as opposed to anything that was too choreographed,” James said. “She worked really closely with our choreographers, Ashley Wallen and Lukas McFarlane, and they kind of drew out the movements that really spoke to her. I love a good dance ending to a film. ‘Beau Travail’ was definitely a big reference in terms of expressing everything inside. Some of the moves, [Garner] was inspired by Iggy Pop. For me, the scene was so much about a coming back to self. It is kind of triumphant in a way. It’s mournful but also very defiant. And I remember the first take, the whole crew burst into spontaneous applause.”

The defiance was already in evidence in an earlier, even more horrifying scene during an audition in which Terry is ordered to do the choreography that led to her onstage injury. Repeatedly. Her determination eventually unravels into desperation, foreshadowing the ways in which the pact she makes with the Casavets will affect her.

“It’s obviously showing the length she’ll go and her desperation, but also her determination,” James said. “I personally have ankle trauma. I tore a ligament on a shoot once and then had to do the rest of it on crutches, so my ankle rolls really easily. And it’s just particularly horrific for me watching it. I remember in the edit suite, every time that scene came on, I would just be so tense. So yeah, you feed a lot of your own fears into your work, and just hope that people come along for the ride.”