Originally posted October 21, 2013
It’s time to look back on one of the almost forgotten series of horror films in semi-recent history: The Omen franchise. Note that I will not be addressing the 2006 remake (The Omen: 666) nor the attempted television spin-off (Omen IV: The Awakening). I will only be addressing the original full-circle trilogy, which in my still continuing career as a film enthusiast, was my first morbid curiosity as a child, frightening me before ever even saw the films.
The story starts with The Omen (1976), directed by Richard Donner, who would go on to direct Superman: The Movie (1979). You’ll have a hard time finding two films by the same director more different then these two. The first installment of the series is still well regarded and deservedly respected to this day. The film stars the legendary Gregory Peck as US Ambassador to England, Robert Thorn. The story is painfully tragic from the start. When his wife Katherine (Lee Remick) gives birth, Robert is told that the child did not survive. In screenwriter David Seltzer’s novelization, Katherine has been noted as being mentally fragile, and Robert fears for her stability in the wake of her child’s death. The hospital chaplain (Martin Benson), offers Robert an opportunity to spare his wife the pain of the loss by replacing their child with a healthy child whose mother has also died. Robert is told that “God will forgive this little deception,” and he agrees. They name the child: Damien Thorn.
The family enjoys a full five years with the child before things start getting weird. Their nanny happily hangs herself at Damien’s fifth birthday party, after making hypnotic eye contact with a strange Rottweiler. The new nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), arrives to replaces her, and while the Thorns accept, they are bewildered by her disposition and the liberties she takes with Damien (played by Harvey Spencer Stephens), such as allowing the dog to stay in his room. Katherine takes Damien to the zoo, but the animals either run away or frenzy around him. Damien flips out and scratches at his mother rather than enter a church. Damien has no more understanding of the horrifying events occurring around him than his parents, adding another layer of tragedy to the tale: at this point, Damien has not chosen this. He is a normal looking child, the director does not attempt to make him a creep-factor on his own.
Robert is repeatedly approached by Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), and warned of the child’s origins, though Robert dismisses him as mentally ill and has him escorted out, but not before he declares one of the most terrifying sentences in the history of horror: “I saw it’s mother… It’s mother was a jack-” his warnings need not be complete for its effect to be.
Eventually Robert agrees to meet with him, and is told that his wife is again pregnant, and that somehow Damien will avert the birth. After this meeting, Father Brennan is killed in the film’s most famous sequence, being impaled by a lightning rod from the top of a church. That is just plain bad luck. After his death, a photographer by the name of Keith Jennings (David Warner) reviews photos that he took of him after his visit with Robert. He finds a bizarre narrow shadow entering the priest’s shoulder, predicting his death, as well as a shadow around the neck of the suicidal nanny in another photo, and also notes a shadow in a photo of himself. Jennings informs Robert of his concern. Meanwhile, Damien speeds through their mansion on a tricycle and knocks Katherine off of a footstool while she is tending to flowers, and she falls an entire story to the floor. While Robert visits her in a hospital, he learns that she has miscarried.
Roberts had enough of the shit, and travels with Jennings to Rome to uncover Damien’s origins. They find the hospital that Damien was born in has burned to the ground, annihilating all records, along with most of the staff, and the maternity ward. They track down Father Spiletto, the Chaplain who offered Robert Damien, and learn the fire has gravely injured him and he has been rendered mute. He writes ‘Cervet,’ indicating a cemetery in Cerveteri. Isn’t Cervet (Cher-vet) a beautiful word? It’d be a good name for a death metal band. Anyway, they go to the cemetery and uncover two graves, one containing the skeleton of an infant with a shattered skull, and another with the bones of a jackal; Damien’s biological mother. This sequence and everything it indicates is so painfully obscene, so violently vulgar, that it’s hard not to share Robert’s reaction. The followers of Satan’s conspiracy have murdered his child, and replaced it with a one of inhuman birth. Robert and Jennings night doesn’t really get any better as they are then set upon by a pack of Rottweilers. It should be said to anyone encouraging breed-specific legislation that this scene was terribly difficult to shoot, because the dogs were timid.
Robert calls Katherine in the hospital, telling her that she will be escorted to be with him in Rome. He is soon called back and informed that she has died, after we see she was probably defenestrated by Baylock. Jennings returns to the room they stay at finding Robert curled up his bed: “Kathy is dead. I want Damien dead too.”
They then head over to Israel to meet with Karl Bugenhagen (Leo McKern), who explains to them that they will find a birthmark in the shape of three sixes to prove Damien’s status as the Antichrist. He then equips them with the seven daggers of Meggido, the only weapons that can kill the child. In spite of all he has learned, Robert still cannot cope with the idea of murdering a child. He discards the daggers on the street, and when Jennings goes to retrieve them, he is decapitated by a sheet of glass.
On the plane ride back to London, Robert appears to be a hollow shell of his former self, with nothing left to lose, wielding the daggers silently. He returns to his mansion and uncovers the sequence of sixes beneath a sleeping Damien’s hair. He is attacked by Baylock but he dispatches her with two sharp implements in both sides of her neck, avenging the murder of his wife. He throws Damien’s ass in the car and drives to a nearby church, but is pursued by the fuzz after speeding through a gate. As he prepares to kill Damien on the church altar, (a scene evoking Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his own son as commanded by God) the police burst in, shooting him down. It is worth noting that this film was Gregory Peck’s first film appearance since the death of his own son, which led to producers having reservations regarding even sending him the script.
At the twin funeral of the Thorn couple, they are given their last rites in an honorable service. We may never know if Robert attained salvation and forgiveness for his deception after his death. As the camera pans down, it is revealed that Damien has survived, as he smiles at the camera. Evil has spit in the face of innocence, and it is laughing hard.
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) often overshadows The Omen as the more frightening film to tackle the subject matter. But Friedkin’s direction of William Peter Blatty’s Catholic love letter granted us a reprieve, as good triumphs over evil. In Donner’s film, we are given no mercy. Evil has prevailed. After the rise of the Counterculture in the 1960’s, America’s “Loss of Innocence,” in the Vietnam war, and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, The 1970’s became a breeding ground for darker, more pessimistic themes in film, and no American horror film of the period epitomizes that better than the first installment of this trilogy. But the film has had a positive effect as well; Richard Donner attributes his entire career in theatrical film and the meeting of his wife to The Omen, while the film’s proceeds allowed 20th Century Fox and George Lucas to complete Star Wars. The late Jerry Goldsmith won his only Academy Award for Best Original Score, for creating what may be the most frightening film soundtrack recorded so far.
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