In the course of writing and editing Horror for Weenies, I had to make some tough cuts. In the interest of space and my own sanity, I had to pare down the list of movies to be covered, which was an exercise in breaking my own heart over and over. Losing The Descent? Devastating. Shaun of the Dead? I was history’s greatest monster. Event Horizon? I practically wept.
And then there was The Omen, arguably the toughest cut of the whole process (not least of all because I didn’t cut it until the editing stage, so I’d already written a few thousand words about it). It is, genuinely, one of my favorite horror movies of all time, but I couldn’t justify its inclusion when the book already had entries for two earlier religious horror movies that were undeniably more influential—Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. There’s so much to love in this movie: Gregory Peck’s emotional gravitas, David Warner’s acerbic one-liners, the unhinged gleam in Billie Whitelaw’s eye, and, of course, those creepy fucking dogs.
So I’m thrilled to give this entry a second chance thanks to the team at Reactor. Please enjoy —unless you’re someone who would be very upset to be spoiled for a nearly fifty-year-old movie, in which case, maybe catch the next one. Oh, and if you’re a horror movie fan? Give The First Omen a chance—I’m a noted hater of prequels, but Arkasha Stevenson’s shockingly good entry into this franchise deserves your time.
The Omen (1976)
Directed by Richard Donner, written by David Seltzer
The basic idea: An American diplomat tries to lovingly pull a fast one on his wife and ends up adopting the Antichrist (hate it when that happens).
You might actually want to watch if: you’re curious about the sociopolitical ascendancy of evangelical Christianity in America, or you enjoy a good beheading.
But you should definitely avoid if: you’d prefer to avoid stories of infant death, pregnancy loss, and suicide, or if you’re afraid of dogs.
Okay, here’s exactly what happens: American diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) is racing to a hospital in Rome. Upon arrival, a priest, Father Spiletto, tells him that his newborn has died. Robert worries for his wife, Kathy (Lee Remick), who has wanted a baby so badly for so long. The priest suggests adoption, and Robert initially demurs. But in the newborn ward, a nun holds an orphaned baby up for Robert’s inspection. The priest tells Robert his wife need never know—the baby’s mother died in childbirth at the exact same moment Robert’s child died. “On this night, God has given you a son.” Robert, apparently totally on board with this, brings the crying infant to his wife, now awake. They name the boy Damien.
Five years later, Robert is the US ambassador to Britain, and he, Kathy, and Damien (Harvey Stephens) live in a beautiful stately home in the English countryside. It’s Damien’s birthday, and a large crowd of children sing “Happy Birthday” as two hired photographers roll their eyes about the theatrics. “I don’t know if we’ve just got the heir to the Thorn millions here or Jesus Christ himself,” quips Jennings (David Warner). (That’s called foreshadowing, kids!)
Holly, Damien’s nanny, poses for photos with him, but Kathy seems discomfited and takes Damien herself. Holly sees a Rottweiler under a nearby tree, which gazes at her meaningfully. A few minutes later, as the children play and ride the carousel, Holly calls Damien’s name. “Look at me, Damien. It’s all for you!” she calls, standing on the balcony with a noose around her neck. And then she jumps, the rope swinging her body back through the window as the children start screaming. The crowd stands in shock, save for Jennings, who starts snapping photos.
Robert is walking into the American embassy when he’s approached by a journalist who asks if Holly left a note, and if Robert had known she was on drugs. Several photographers are snapping photos, including Jennings, whose camera is damaged when Robert inadvertently knocks it to the floor. Robert offers to pay for the damage, but Jennings makes a cryptic remark about how Robert owes him.
Robert’s receptionist tells him there’s a priest from Rome waiting to see him, Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton, better known to a certain crowd as the second incarnation of the Doctor on Doctor Who). The priest comes on VERY strong, immediately telling Robert he must accept Jesus as his savior, confess his sins, and take communion in order to kill the son of the Devil. Robert calls security, but Brennan has locked the door. Brennan was at the hospital the night Damien was born, and witnessed the birth. “His mother was a jackal!” he shouts, but he’s interrupted by security, who haul him out. As Brennan is escorted off the grounds, Jennings snaps his photo. Later, in his darkroom, he develops the photo, which exhibits a strange flaw on the print—a line like a spear pointing down through the priest’s neck.
Back at the house, a Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw) has arrived, the new governess. She’s sort of a dark Mary Poppins, and is quite insistent on being left alone with Damien so they can get to know one another. They’re relieved to have a new nanny, until they realize they’ve both been assuming the other one hired her. She placates them, telling them the agency sent her after reading about Holly’s suicide. Alone with Damien, Mrs. Baylock says “Have no fear, little one. I am here to protect thee.”
Robert and Kathy bring Damien to a wedding, against the wishes of Mrs. Baylock. As they approach the church, Damien becomes increasingly agitated, staring with horror at the building. As Robert steps out of the car, Damien explodes, screaming and scratching at his mother’s face and hair. They drive off quickly. At home, Kathy waves off Robert’s suggestion of a doctor, saying Damien’s never been sick a day in his life. “Yeah, he never has, has he?” Robert muses. The idea seems to trouble him.
Before bed, Robert goes to check on Damien, but in the hallway he’s accosted by a growling Rottweiler. Mrs. Baylock steps out of Damien’s room and strokes the beast’s head. They found him outside, Damien loves him, and she thought they could use a watchdog. Robert tells her to have the dog rehomed. Some days later, Kathy takes Damien to a drive-through safari park and discovers he doesn’t get along quite as well with other animals: giraffes run from the car, and a gang of baboons swarm them, screaming at him through the windows. That night, Kathy tells Robert that she’s afraid and wants to see a psychiatrist.
A troubled Robert agrees to meet with Father Brennan once again. On a park bench, Brennan tells him Kathy is in danger. The priest recites what is, essentially, a nursery rhyme about the apocalypse: “When the Jews return to Zion and a comet rips the sky, and the Holy Roman Empire rises, then you and I must die.” The Book of Revelations predicted it all, he says. He tells Robert to go to Megiddo and find a man named Bugenhagen (a name we’re somehow supposed to take seriously), who can tell him how Damien, the son of Satan, must be killed. He tells Robert that Kathy is pregnant, and that Damien will kill her and the unborn child—and when he’s certain to be the sole heir to Robert’s estate, he will kill Robert, using Robert’s power and riches to claim the earth for the Devil. Robert tells Brennan he never wants to see him again and starts to leave. “You’ll see me in hell, Mr. Thorn,” the priest says. “There we will share out our sentence.”
As Brennan leaves, a strong storm seems to blow up out of nowhere. Lightning strikes a nearby tree and he runs for it, climbing a churchyard fence. The church doors are locked, and Brennan tries another entrance to no avail. Lightning strikes a utility pole atop the church, which detaches and plunges down to the ground with deadly speed, impaling Brennan where he stands.
At home, Damien is making a standard amount of noise for a little kid, but Kathy is on edge and asks Mrs. Baylock to take him elsewhere. Robert, concerned, asks how she is. She tells him she found out that morning that she’s pregnant, but she wants him to agree to an abortion.
An anonymous phone call tells Robert to check the newspaper: there, on the front page, is a photo of Brennan’s corpse under the headline “Priest Impaled in Bizarre Tragedy.” Robert is officially freaked out.
Robert goes to see Kathy’s psychiatrist, who tells about Kathy’s “fantasies” that Damien is alien, or evil, and may not be hers. For her to have another child would precipitously endanger her already-fragile mental health, says the doctor. He’d like Robert to agree to the abortion as well, but Robert vehemently refuses. He drives like a maniac on the way home, his journey intercut with scenes of Damien zooming around the house on a tricycle while Kathy tends to plants on the second floor interior balcony. As she stands on a table by the railing to attend to a hanging plant, Damien and his tricycle, with dreadful inevitability, run directly into the table, knocking Kathy over the railing. She falls a full story to the floor below, blood trickling from her mouth as Damien looks on.
At the hospital, a crowd of reporters pepper Robert with questions about Kathy. In intensive care, he learns that Kathy has a broken arm, a concussion, and internal bleeding: she’s lost the pregnancy. When she wakes up, Kathy murmurs “Don’t let him kill me.”
At home, Robert looks in on Damien. Mrs. Baylock is asleep, but the dog is still there. The phone rings: it’s Jennings, asking Robert to his apartment. He needs to speak to him about Father Brennan. In his darkroom, Jennings shows Robert a photo of Holly, the nanny, at the party the day she died. There’s a smudge on the print, a shadow that echoes the rope around her neck after her death. A coincidence? But then, multiple photos of Father Brennan and the mysterious line, which points directly at the spot where the weather vane impaled him. Jennings, intrigued, has done some digging. The coroner’s report was normal save for one thing: a small mark on Brennan’s thigh, three 6s arranged in a triangle. Robert’s mind jumps to a concentration camp, but the biopsy revealed it to be a birthmark.
The two men visit Brennan’s quarters, where every inch of wall space is papered with thousands upon thousands of Bible pages, covering even the windows. Dozens of crucifixes and crosses hang on the walls, and the priest had kept a diary dedicated entirely to Robert’s comings and goings, including press clippings. He also had a stack of clippings related to strange phenomena—a comet that changed shape into a star on the day Damien was born, Damien’s birth announcement (June 6th, at 6 am). Robert breaks down and confesses that his own son is dead—he doesn’t know whose son he’s raising. Jennings wants to help him find out, but Robert demurs: it’s his own problem to solve. But as it turns out, it’s Jennings’ problem too: he shows Robert a photo he took of his own reflection in a mirror, where a sharp black line bisects his head from his body.
In Rome, Robert and Jennings arrive at the site of the hospital where Damien was born, only to discover it burned in a terrible fire not long after they took Damien home—a fire that conveniently started in the basement, where all the records were kept. Father Spiletto, the head priest who encouraged Robert to adopt Damien, survived but was gravely injured. Robert and Jennings set out to see him at a monastery in the countryside. On the way, they discuss the poem Father Brennan recited to Robert, and decide that the apocalyptic time it describes is… right now.
They arrive at the monastery to find that Father Spiletto, badly burned, has been nonverbal since the fire. Another priest tells them that through limited written communication, Spiletto confessed to having abandoned Christ, scratching three 6s onto the floor (the three sixes represent the Devil, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet, a perversion of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Robert presses Spiletto for answers about Damien’s mother, and Spiletto is able to write a single shaky word: Cerveteri. It’s a ruined, pre-Christian Etruscan cemetery north of Rome. The men arrive at the cemetery after dark, hopping the fence into a menacing, overgrown landscape of rubble and whistling wind. They find the grave, two adjacent headstones reading Maria Scianna and Bambino Scianna, dates of death: June 6th. Robert is shaken by the possibility that his biological son is interred in this bleak place. The two pry open the mother’s crypt, revealing a decaying canine skeleton. Jennings wants to leave but Robert insists on opening the child’s tomb as well: he has to know. Inside, a baby’s skeleton, with a traumatic injury to the skull. “They murdered him,” Robert breathes. A growling alerts them as a pack of wild dogs emerge from the trees on all sides. The men are beset by the dogs, escaping narrowly.
Kathy wakes up in the hospital to a call from Robert. He wants her to leave London immediately: the embassy will transport her to Rome. Attempting to get changed, she’s startled by a figure in the room: Mrs. Baylock, looking perfectly evil, has arrived to finish what Damien started. Kathy plummets from her hospital window, plunging through the roof of an arriving ambulance to her death.
Robert’s phone rings with the news, and Gregory Peck does a lovely and devastating bit of acting here. All he’s done has been to make Kathy happy and keep her safe, and he’s failed. When Jennings returns to the room, Robert is prostrate with grief. Jennings has found more information on Megiddo, the town Brennan told them to visit. It’s an archeological site in Israel, its name derived from Armageddon (lovely spot for a vacation). “Kathy is dead,” Robert intones. “I want Damien to die too.”
The two men arrive in Megiddo, picking their way through a sprawling dig site. They locate Bugenhagen (an uncredited Leo McKern), the exorcist Brennan sent them to find, a real character who deserves a spinoff of his own. Bugenhagen dismisses Jennings and tells Robert how to kill his son: it must be done on the altar of a church. Ritual knives must be driven into Damien’s body in the shape of a cross, ending both his physical and spiritual existence. “This is not a human child,” Bugenhagen reminds Robert, but Robert wants proof, so Bugenhagen tells him to look for a birthmark of three sixes, which all the apostles of Satan bear. Robert is skeptical: he’s bathed his son for years, knows every inch of his body, but Bugenhagen insists. It’s somewhere on the boy, possibly under his hair.
After, Jennings demands to know what Bugenhagen’s instructions were, but Robert is bending under the weight of his task, the murder of a little boy he’s raised as his own son. “I won’t do it!” he shouts, throwing the bundle of knives as far as he can. Jennings goes after it, telling Robert “if you don’t do it, I will.” He kneels to retrieve the knives. Up the road, a workman leaves his truck, but the handbrake releases and the truck begins to roll backwards down the hill. The back tires hit a pile of construction materials and the truck slams to a halt, but a sheet of plate glass slides off the truck bed, decapitating Jennings as he raises his head in alarm. This is shot in gloriously over-the-top slo-mo, a gruesome replica of David Warner’s head rolling to a stop in the street as Robert tears at his hair in rage and sorrow.
Robert flies back to England, the knives clutched in his lap (diplomatic perks: no random security checks). He arrives home in the night, and is greeted immediately by the Rottweiler’s growl echoing through the house. The dog stalks through the halls towards him, menacing, but Robert traps it in the basement and proceeds upstairs. First, he stops in his bedroom, taking a moment to mourn his wife, and then retrieves her sewing scissors from a drawer. Next, Damien’s room. Mrs. Baylock is asleep, so Robert closes the door and starts examining Damien’s scalp, snipping away at his hair until he reveals the triple-six birthmark, just as Bugenhagen predicted.
And suddenly, Mrs. Baylock jumps him from behind, screaming, tearing at his face with her nails, trying to choke him. They struggle and he eventually stabs her with a serving fork. Damien gets knocked unconscious during the fight.
Robert tosses Damien into the car and speeds off into the night past his security detail. One of the policemen pursues him, calling for backup on a “possible diplomatic incident.” (It’s almost as if a man can’t murder his five-year-old adopted Antichrist in peace anymore.) Damien is awake now, screaming and fighting as Robert carries him bodily into a nearby church. On the altar, Robert raises the knife, and Damien pleads with him to stop, but Robert turns Damien’s head aside, preparing to kill him. The police enter, shooting and killing Robert before he can go through with it.
At Arlington Cemetery, Robert and Kathy are laid to rest as a 21-gun salute rings out and “Taps” plays solemnly. The President and the First Lady have a moment of silence as the attendees disperse, Damien between them. He turns to the camera and smiles with dead eyes.
Why it matters: The idea for The Omen arose from a conversation between producer Harvey Bernhard and his friend, an evangelical studio executive (something that’s much harder to imagine these days), about the idea that the Antichrist might already be living among us, undetected, as a child. Bernhard and screenwriter David Seltzer argued over the ultimate trajectory of the film: Bernhard wanted the script to leave plenty of ambiguity over whether or not Damien actually is the Antichrist, but Seltzer wanted to leave no room for interpretation, and ultimately won out. Director Richard Donner managed to split the difference, pulling back on any explicitly supernatural events in Seltzer’s script and allowing for perfectly rational explanations for all of the film’s strange goings-on.
Though it’s considered by some to be a pale knock-off of The Exorcist, The Omen hits a different mark entirely, taking the Satanic to a global scale. This was a significant evolution for religious horror: The Exorcist, terrifying as it was, told a small-scale story about a mother, daughter, and two priests, and though the expectation in Rosemary’s Baby is that the titular infant will usher in a new Satanic age, the movie is heavily focused on the manipulation and isolation experienced by the baby’s mother. But just as awareness of the Book of Revelation and the End Times were beginning to percolate out into American culture, spurred by the rising political and social influence of evangelical Christianity, The Omen expanded the implication of the Antichrist’s birth, connecting it directly and undeniably to the world of global politics. Seltzer drew heavily from Hal Lindsey’s fabulist apocalyptic bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, which overlaid Biblical prophecies of the End Times over current events and predicted the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Much like Lindsey’s book, The Omen takes plenty of liberties with accepted Christian eschatology—the poem that’s supposedly from the Book of Revelation was in fact invented by the screenwriter, and besides, the Antichrist is not a particularly prominent or well-developed figure in the Bible (depending on who you ask, he’s not even necessarily the son of Satan). Nevertheless, the movie popularized both the concept of the Antichrist and his association with the number 666.
The movie’s success, anchored by Gregory Peck’s undeniable gravitas, speaks to the malaise associated with the apparent decline of Western civilization and the unrest of the ‘70s, but it’s also just a really entertaining film. It does a lot with a little: there are very few special effects, just a gradual amping up of dread. And the deaths, it must be said, are fantastic, especially Jennings’ beheading by pane of glass—there’s a direct line from that scene to the Final Destination franchise when it comes to creative kills.
Say this at a party:
- “Mia Farrow played the evil nanny in the otherwise-forgettable 2006 remake, a fun little nod to her former role as the Antichrist’s mom in Rosemary’s Baby.”
- “The name for the fear of the number 666 is hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.” (If you can say this with a straight face, you’re a stronger person than I am.)
- “Gregory Peck was obviously an incredibly talented actor, but there’s a personal tragedy underpinning his grief in this movie: his oldest son died by suicide just a few months before filming commenced.”
Iconic moments: The cemetery scene is easily one of the film’s most memorable—the overwhelming impression is that our two protagonists have wandered out of the modern world and into the realm of something ancient, evil, and malicious. (This was one of the places where Donner reined in Seltzer’s original script—instead of dogs, the screenwriter had originally imagined cloven-hooved demons attacking the men.) And any creepy child on a tricycle who isn’t referencing Danny from The Shining is probably referencing Damien.
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