Ira Levin, who died Monday at 78 of an apparent heart attack at his Park Avenue penthouse, helped revive gothic horror in novels and films including “Rosemary’s Baby.”

A triple threat with credits as a novelist, scriptwriter, and director, Levin’s work found its widest distribution in film, a medium he did not practice. It fell to others to adapt “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Boys From Brazil,” “Sliver,” and “The Stepford Wives.”

One of his proudest achievements was adding to the language the word “Stepford,” which has come to mean something like robotic. “This made-up name ‘Stepford’ is now a popular adjective,” he told Opera News during a 1997 interview conducted at a matinee of the opera “Faust.” “You know, ‘Stepford marines,’ ‘Stepford killers,’ ‘Stepford children,’ that sort of thing. Who knew?”

Another runaway success was the play “Deathtrap,” which ran for 1,793 performances starting in 1978 and succeeded in fulfilling for Levin an ambition of one of the play’s main characters: making $2 million from a Broadway play. It was hardly the first time the furniture of Levin’s life was recapitulated with an evil twist in his art. Born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx and on the Upper West Side, Levin attended Horace Mann High School. He was the son of a successful toy maker, but resisted his father’s expectations that he would take over the business. Instead, he asked his father for a loan to support him as a writer. He won an NBC-sponsored screenplay-writing competition and completed his first novel before being drafted into the Army in 1953.

While working as a writer on training films, he managed to sell the manuscript for “A Kiss Before Dying,” which appeared while he was still in uniform. It was a murder mystery told in multiple voices and set on a campus “pretty much like Drake,” the Des Moines, Ill., university where Levin spent two years before transferring to New York University. The novel won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was turned into a 1956 film starring Joanne Woodward and Robert Wagner.

Also while in uniform, Levin began working on adapting Mac Hyman’s novel “No Time for Sergeants” for the Broadway stage. His agent got the Army to let Levin leave early to complete the play, which ran for 796 performances starting in 1955 and helped launched the career of its star, Andy Griffith.

With a best-selling novel, a film, and a Broadway smash to his credit, Levin’s career was sailing as well. He chose to continue writing plays and Broadway — his “mistress” as he once said — proved fickle. “Interlock,” a melodrama starring Celeste Holm and Maximilian Schell, opened February 6, 1958, and closed three days later. Similar runs awaited “General Seeger” (1962), “Drat! The Cat” (1965, a musical comedy), and “Dr. Cook’s Garden” (1967), about a homicidal physician with Burl Ives as the lead, much to Levin’s consternation. To make matters worse, Levin ended up as director of “Cook’s Garden” after the original director, George Scott, showed his displeasure by pushing Levin down a flight of stairs during an out-of-town tryout.

Levin fared a bit better with “Critic’s Choice,” his 1960 play directed by Otto Preminger and starring Henry Fonda as a reviewer who must critique his own wife’s play. But his next foray into writing about critics, “Break A Leg” (1979), closed after a single performance.

Perhaps smarting from Broadway’s slaps, he went back to novel writing with “Rosemary’s Baby” (1967), which became a best seller and was adapted for the screen by director Roman Polanski. The film was a smash hit, too, and was released to near-universal huzzahs. Levin’s technique of placing the ancient themes of magic, possession, and deals with the devil in the context of contemporary New York made it sing. Rosemary’s infant is born, for example, just nine months after Pope Paul VI’s 1965 visit to the city. The realism was enhanced, Levin later conceded, by the fact that his wife was pregnant at the time he wrote it. He refused to let her read it while pregnant, he later told Publishers Weekly. But “the obstetrician did read it and loved it.” (He was divorced from both his first wife, Gabrielle Aronsohn, and his second wife, Phyllis Finkel.)

Both the novel and film inspired dozens of imitators. It is hard to imagine “the Exorcist” or the career of Stephen King without them, but Levin quickly moved from pure horror to dystopian futurism with the novel “This Perfect Day” (1970) — Huxley meets Orwell — and the neological “The Stepford Wives” (1972), which made a better adjective than film. The Nazi fantasy “The Boys from Brazil” (1976) likewise spawned imitators, although by now critics had turned against Levin’s novels, too. Wrote Time magazine, “Exploiting such a monster for entertainment and profit is enough to give evil a bad name.” (The show “Break a Leg,” with its imagined violence against reviewers, emerged not long after.)

In the 1980s, Levin mined his own Jewish heritage for “Cantorial” (1988), about a haunted synagogue. The play has been produced dozens of times around the country although it had only a brief off-Broadway run. Levin described it as “the Amityville synagogue.” His penultimate novel, “Sliver” (1991), concerned a landlord addicted to spying on his tenants with hidden video equipment. (Levin’s penthouse featured a telescope that some speculated he used for inspiration for the book.) The 1993 film, adapted by Joe Eszterhas and starring Sharon Stone, was a bust, and “bore absolutely no resemblance to the book,” he told the London Evening Standard.

His final novel was a sequel, “Son of Rosemary” (1997), set in 1999, when its hero is exactly 33.

Levin had slowed down in recent years, his long-time agent, Phyllis Westberg, said. He had recently been working on a revival of “Deathtrap.”

Ira Levin

Born August 27, 1929, in New York; died November 12 at his home in Manhattan; survived by three sons, Adam Levin Delson, Jared Levin, and Nicholas Levin.

To contact obituaries editor Stephen Miller Phone: 212-901-2638 E-mail: smiller@nysun