At this time of year, when the moon turns orange and the witches fly, we think back on Rosemary Woodhouse, the unwitting mother of Satan’s son from Rosemary’s Baby, and Marguerite Perrin, the batshit-crazy “God Warrior” from Trading Spouses.

One is fictional, one is very literally in the flesh, but both are sisters under the skin.

Rosemary and Marguerite have each, in their different ways, decided that the world is full of witches — and not the Molly Weasley cook up some dinner with a spin of the wand kind, but malevolent, soul-sapping hags — give or take a Ruth Gordon chatterbox with a Noo Yawk accent and a brash way of barging into your apartment to quiz you on the price of the drapes.

At first Rosemary — sweet, hip, Mia Farrow-esque Rosemary, so proud of her edgy Vidal Sassoon boy bob — laughs at the idea ("in this day and age!") Then a good friend hands her the book All of Them Witches, which holds a clue to the true nature of her neighbors, the baby she is carrying, and the strange dream she had at the time of conception that involved a wolf-like beast with claws and slit pupils.

Eventually Rosemary will ask her husband where his mark is ("the mark they put on you when you join") and when she finally does see the baby ("What have you done to his eyes!") and is told that he has his father’s eyes, she puts two and two together, cringes away from the black-veiled bassinet with its dangling upside-down crucifix, and goes right straight out of her Mia Farrow mind.

But Rosemary’s flip-out is a pale and WASPy thing compared to the screaming fit of Reality Show Marguerite. Marguerite seems to have read something a bit more supermarkety than All of Them Witches — the Left Behind series perhaps.

As a self-described “God Warrior” and “rectified Christian,” she is switched into a New Age home on Trading Spouses, and the New Age wife goes to live with Marguerite’s rather easygoing doughboy of a hubby — the idea of the show being to create maximum culture shock.

And lovely Marguerite does not disappoint. She brings both the shock and the awe.

From the moment the cameras roll, Marguerite is high maintenance a-Go-Go, witnessing at the children, admonishing the family to come to church with her, which they do. By contrast, when New Age Dad holds a laid-back solstice ceremony with some neighbors in the backyard, Marguerite rejects it with every fiber of her excessively-filled-with-the-Spirit body. Scenes soon follow where she righteously vomits on the grass.

Vanity, it turns out, is not one of Marguerite’s vices and she speaks forthrightly into the camera, missing tooth front and center. When she and her temporary spouse go on a local radio show and the chitchat turns to psychics and astrology, the moon face reddens, the blood boils, cardiac arrest seems imminent and she storms out of the radio studio, muttering “I want my God and I want my family,” lapsing into garbled noises that sound alarmingly like speaking in tongues.

From her very first show, Marguerite was an overnight sensation. It was not until the final show that she became s a YouTube phenomenon.

By this point, the new kids are going slack-jawed and ironic when she speaks and the temp spouse is showing the strain of being a much too tolerant Kumbaya kind of guy. As Marguerite is driven away in the studio-provided limousine, she sits in the backseat and begins, very dangerously, to reflect on her experience. By the time she arrives at her home in a sleepy Louisiana parish, she is, as the therapists say, “full” — that is, ready to blow.

What follows is a Reality TV classic — we’re sure you’ve seen and screamed over it many times. But join us this Halloween as we revisit that magic moment when the immortal words were first spoken that would be mimicked and lip-synced in many a subsequent YouTube video bearing tags like “God Warrior” and “Crazy Woman.”

That moment when tiny Marguerite looks into the abyss, the abyss looks back into her, and, blasted with revelation, she declares at the top of her lungs:

“Dark-sided! Everything is dark-sided!”

MONEY QUOTE: (husband, off screen) “I’m glad you’re home.”

Only Rosemary Woodhouse has seen this same rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

Realizing she had become a national joke
and YouTube sensation, Marguerite got
her gastric bypass and had the good sense
to laugh along with everyone else,
turning it all to financial advantage.

Happy Halloween, M.P.

Find out what happened to Marguerite after “stardom” hit
Visit the Official Marguerite Perrin website
See the Marguerite Perrin bobblehead
And don’t miss the corn candy treat that is
Marguerite’s hilarious rap song.