Notwithstanding that Ira Levin's novels garnered him a huge following and financial reward, his published works are almost inevitably etched on the retinas of those to whom their titles are familiar, through the immensely successful films that were made of them. Chief among these was Rosemary's Baby (1967), translated to the screen in 1968 by Roman Polanski, and setting a standard in the gothic macabre that was to create a seemingly inexhaustible taste for satanic themes among filmgoers. Its success undoubtedly spawned such movie progeny as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976), themselves giving birth to further generations of offspring, to date, as far as Omen IV.

Levin was an adept at creating an apparently mundane domestic atmosphere in which it gradually becomes clear to the reader that innocents are being hemmed around by evil from which there appears to be no escape. On the screen, the pallid features of Mia Farrow, as the young wife Rosemary, who has been drugged and impregnated, with her husband's connivance, by the seed of the Devil himself, came to be iconic for a generation. The atmosphere of evil that pervaded the screen had its origins in Levin's fictional skills.

He was not a prolific novelist — only seven titles since scoring his first success with A Kiss Before Dying in 1953. But he made most of those fictional excursions count in terms of critical and financial success. Thus, The Stepford Wives (1972) was filmed twice within 30 years, in 1974 and 2004, with Katharine Ross and Nicole Kidman, respectively, in the role of a young married who realises that her cosy small-town counterparts have in fact been replaced by sexually and domestically compliant androids by their husbands.

The Boys from Brazil (1976) was an an ingenious fable about a plan by the renegade Nazi prison camp doctor Josef Mengele to re-create the Third Reich. It was filmed in 1978 with a distinguished cast that included Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck.

Levin also wrote for the theatre, his ten plays over a quarter of a century ranging from essays in realism to thrillers, and including a musical Drat! The Cat!, which was produced in New York in 1965. Two of his plays, No Time for Sergeants and Deathtrap, had long runs on Broadway.

Ira Levin was born in New York in 1929, the son of a toy importer. He was educated at the Horace Mann School, in New York, and Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. In 1948 he transferred to New York University, where he took a degree in 1950.

In that year he also came second in a CBS scriptwriting competition. However, NBC bought his plot for a story — about an aging invalid who outwits her nephew and nurse who want to murder her for her money — for $400, and when he graduated, he began his working life as a writer for NBC television, contributing scripts for its series Clock and Lights Out. He subsequently also wrote for the ABC US Steel Hour.

He was also writing novels, and his first success came in 1953 with the suspense story A Kiss Before Dying. This set the style and tone for his subsequent fictions with its complicated twists and turns. The novel's unscrupulous young protagonist, Bud Corliss, wants to marry his fiancée, Dorothy, heiress to a copper fortune, but she becomes pregnant by him, a circumstance that will undoubtedly lead to her being disinherited by her father. Intending, now, to woo her sister, Bud gets Dorothy to write her own suicide note by asking her to translate a suitable passage from Spanish, of which she is a student. Her murder accomplished, he goes to work on the sister, but as success seems assured in her direction, he meets an unexpected and grisly death, with appropriate irony in a vat of molten copper.

This adroit performance won Levin the Edgar Allen Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America, and was hailed as the most promising writing debut of the year. Soon afterwards Levin was called up for military service, which he served in the US Army Signal Corps. But his creativity was at work here, too, and led to his adaptation of the Mac Hyman novel No Time for Sergeants, a tale of a hillbilly recruit who manages against all odds to survive in the modern US Air Force. It became a Broadway hit in 1955, ran for two years, and was made into a film of the same title in 1958, using Levin's script.

For the next ten years Levin devoted himself to TV and playwriting, with Interlock (1958), Critic's Choice (1960) and General Seeger (1962), without having a success to rival that of No Time for Sergeants, though Critic's Choice, in which a theatre reviewer is compelled to write a devastating notice on his wife's play, did make it to the screen with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball in 1963.

Levin's second novel did not appear until 1967, but it was radically and immediately to transform his fortunes. Stomach-churning stuff, Rosemary's Baby was calculated to send a frisson of horrified unease through all pregnant women. Indeed, Levin confessed that he had refused to let his pregnant wife read it and (not wholly without the publicity bandwagon in view) warned young pregnant women everywhere to eschew it likewise for the sake of their mental peace.

Book and film combined became one of the defining phenomena of their times and in those inevitable peaky-feeling moments young women everywhere went around describing themselves as “looking simply Rosemary's Baby, today”. The novel sold five million copies.

It was succeeded by This Perfect Day, whose protagonist, Chip, inhabits a Utopian world of the future whose over-organisation, however, stifles him. Chip plots to escape to an island inhabited by free spirits, from where he can plot the sabotage of the computerorganised society that he has fled. Although technically competent, the book somehow failed to catch the imagination as Rosemary's Baby had.

But Levin was back to form with a vengeance in The Stepford Wives. The protagonist, Joanna, one half of a couple who have settled in a pretty Connecticut commuter town, comes first to puzzle at the docility and lack of mental horizon of her fellow young wives, and then to doubt her husband, as he eases into enjoying a social life from which women are excluded. At first she can share her doubts with a handful of similarly vivacious friends. One by one they docilely succumb to the general uniformity. And then it is her turn . . .

The Boys from Brazil was followed by Sliver (1991) in which a young woman moves into an apartment house whose landlord is systematically murdering his tenants. Sharon Stone played the heroine in the screen adaptation of 1993. Son of Rosemary (1997) was inevitably on a hiding to nothing when compared with Levin's original inspiration.

Levin was twice married and twice divorced. There were three sons of his first marriage.

Ira Levin, novelist and playwright, was born on August 27, 1929. He died, apparently of a heart attack, on November 12, 2007, aged 78