It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation: How do you make a follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby in a way that expands on the 1968 classic without undermining its unsettling finale? Ira Levin, the late novelist who penned the original tale, failed this test himself when he released his own widely scorned sequel novel in 1997, Son of Rosemary. (It turns out to all be a terrible dream—which is almost more dispiriting than the rise of the Antichrist.)

The future for this malevolent child was left unknown at the end of the first novel and film, when the manipulated young mother (played in Roman Polanski’s movie by Mia Farrow) beheld her infant for the first time and managed to smile warmly, despite having been tricked into giving birth to evil incarnate. Producers who held the rights to the follow-up spent years grappling with what the next chapter should be. In Apartment 7A, filmmaker Natalie Erika James avoids meddling with Rosemary and her baby by shifting focus to a side character whose brief arc was no less haunting, tragic, and mysterious.

“When I first was approached about the project, I was very dubious,” James tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look. “For sure, I never would’ve signed on to do a remake of such a classic and seminal film. But it’s been a joy to be able to play within the world and the sandbox of Ira Levin’s novel and also play with the characters. I guess my motivation for taking it on was feeling like there was a different emotional journey to be explored and to do it in a way that skewed the genre a little bit.”

Apartment 7A, which will debut on Paramount+ on September 27, centers on the character of Terry Gionoffrio (played now by Ozark and Inventing Anna star Julia Garner), a down-on-her-luck aspiring dancer who becomes entangled with the coven leaders who inhabit the Bramford apartment building. Dianne Wiest plays Minnie Castevet, the elderly neighbor whose nosy demeanor is only slightly more aggravating than her secret devil worship. The role won Ruth Gordon the best-supporting-actress Oscar for the original. “With Dianne, it was about creating something really distinct, because Minnie is so wonderfully flamboyant and pushy in her way,” James says. “Even in the costume considerations, we went for more ’50s silhouettes. There’s a garishness to her character that is definitely there in the original film too, but we twisted it a bit to make it our own.”

Wiest adds her own spin to the performance, mimicking Gordon’s method of speaking with a New York accent that’s like air slowly leaking from a child’s balloon, but pulling in other influences as well. “I think the essence of Ruth still remains in this very larger-than-life character,” says James, “but our base inspiration was the voice actor for Betty Boop, Mae Questel. It’s a slightly Bronx-tinged kind of thing.”

Garner’s character, Terry (played in the original by Angela Dorian) is a young woman who crosses paths with Rosemary in the basement laundry room of The Bramford. Terry explains that the Castevets rescued her from homelessness and drug abuse, taking her into their lives and giving her free room and board. “They’re childless, so I’m like the daughter they never had,” the character explained in the 1968 movie to her new neighbor from apartment 7E. “At first I thought they wanted me for some kind of a sex thing, but they’ve turned out to be like real grandparents.”

Their actual plan is more twisted than she feared. Terry is the original woman the Castevets groom to be the mother of Satan’s spawn—although she has no clue of their motives when she first meets Rosemary. “I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for them,” Terry says. “That’s an absolute fact.”

Here’s a 56-year-old spoiler: She dies soon enough anyway. The next time Rosemary sees her, Terry is a heap on the sidewalk outside their building, having plummeted from the upper floors. It’s not clear whether she was pushed, jumped, or suffered some other fate. Police have a letter in her handwriting, but is it a suicide note? Minnie is dimly heard through the walls that night complaining, “If you’d listened to me, we wouldn’t have had to do this…! We’d have been all set to go, instead of having to start all over from scratch.” Apartment 7A promises to fill in all the blanks.

Rosemary’s Baby struck a nerve not only because of its supernatural creepiness, but because it served as an allegory for the lack of control women felt over their own lives in that era, with Farrow’s character manipulated by her fame-seeking husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), ignored by her blowhard doctor (Ralph Bellamy), and perceived by her community as little more than a breeding and nursing vessel.

“Obviously there’s always progress being made, but there’s also backslides as well,” James says. “And there’s always backlash to certain movements. In a way, the bleakest thing is we’re still discussing these issues in a similar manner to what we were 50 years ago, and that should be really sobering.”

While still setting the story in New York during the mid-1960s, James (who cowrote the script with Christian White, from an earlier draft by Skylar James) felt Terry’s story had contemporary resonance in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement. Like Rosemary’s husband, Terry is an aspiring entertainer, but a dance injury sidelines her career and leads her to the brink of poverty and a crippling drug addiction. Out of desperation, she welcomes the suspicious kindness of Minnie and her husband, Roman Castevet (played by Pirates of the Caribbean actor Kevin McNally), and buys into the promises of stardom from their young Broadway producer friend (Across the Universe’s Jim Sturgess).

As Terry tells Rosemary in the original film, she goes along with their offers and promises despite anticipating creepy motivation. She simply doesn’t imagine how empty those promises are, how much they are misleading her, or how it will lead to physical violation by a demonic entity. “The film is so much about Terry and her ability to use her body in her craft, but also how it is used against her as well,” James says. “The sexual assault has reverberations through the rest of the film and how unsafe she feels in her own body. The theme of bodily autonomy being taken away is obviously very strong in the first film as well.”

Soon, the streetwise young woman finds herself overwhelmed and trapped. “A key difference between Rosemary and Terry is that Rosemary starts as almost a hapless victim to the choices that her husband has made, and then it’s her journey of uncovering the conspiracy around her and the horror of that,” James says. In the original, Rosemary’s aspiring-actor husband, Guy, is aware of the Castevets’ plan, while in Apartment 7A, Terry is aware of only a part of it. Early on, Terry suspects she might be the one taking advantage of the seemingly doddering old couple, but she is mistaken about that too. “For Terry, I think she almost embodies both Rosemary and Guy. Terry is both the vessel, and also kind of an active part of the Faustian exchange. There’s still a wider conspiracy around her, and she’s being made to feel complicit in her own assault, which in a sense is even more horrifying.”

Among the other unexplored subjects is the coven member known as Mrs. Gardenia (played by Tina Gray), who was unseen in the 1968 movie, since it’s her apartment the young couple move into. “For Mrs. Gardenia, [you’ll] be able to see her in action when she’s really just a footnote at the start of Rosemary’s Baby,” James says. In this case, the character was a literal footnote. While touring Mrs. Gardenia’s still-furnished apartment at the beginning of the 1968 film, Rosemary glances at her desk and sees a handwritten note that—in retrospect—alludes to her misgivings about the coven’s actions. “I can no longer associate myself…” are the words Rosemary sees on the page.

As for the apartment building itself, it’s one of the more faithful elements in Apartment 7A. The real-life Bramford is the famed Dakota building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, completed in 1884 in an ornate style that resembles a Renaissance castle and that has been forever marked since 1980, when resident John Lennon was murdered outside as he arrived home from a recording studio. Apartment 7A was filmed in London, so production designer Simon Bowles (The Descent, Hyde Park on Hudson) recreated the living spaces of 1960s New York in soundstages. “We really did try to match The Dakota from the original film,” James says. “What’s really key with The Bramford is it’s a Gothic Revival building that has such an innate sense of history, and there’s such an oppressiveness to the grandness of it, the high ceilings and the finishings. We tried to depict it as if it has, not a life of its own, but it holds many secrets.”