THE OMEN (1976) has evolved to take on a whole new meaning of real world horror
(And it's maybe not in the way that you think...)
“From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore… turning man against his brother, ’til man exists no more.”
As a kid, being raised by a crazy religious mother meant that when I was granted permission to watch horror movies whose plots were fuelled by the supernatural fears of Christianity and Catholicism — such as The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Stigmata, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and yes, The Omen original trilogy, which she owned as a DVD boxset — I was geared into viewing these films as not just scary horror entertainment, but as propagandistic portents of plausible demonic terrors to be genuinely afraid of, such was the nature of the upbringing she prescribed.
She was a convert to the Mormon church in the mid-1990’s, but the fire-and-brimstone zealotry of her interpretation of Christian beliefs was more akin to those of a fundamentalist or evangelical bible-thumper. She told me she once had an exorcism performed on her by Mormon bishops, when she was allegedly possessed by a demon. (If that ever really happened, it sure didn’t exorcise her toxic narcissism.) She had me baptised when I was 13, in an event beset by the faults of a leaking baptismal pool, and my inability to hold both my legs underwater while being dunked, meaning that it took 6 attempts (uh-oh!!) to completely submerge me under the water so that the ceremony successfully counted. Then, when I lost my faith a few years later, and eventually mustered the courage to tell her I didn’t believe in God and Satan and Heaven and Hell and all that jazz anymore, her response was a doozy. My mother tearfully informed me that because I no longer believed in God, nor any of the accompanying lore inherently entailed by that core belief, I was now doomed to be damned to Hell, while she was fated to go to Heaven, and when Judgement Day came, and the great final battle between Heaven and Hell would commence, she was going to have no choice but to kill me on the ensuing battlegrounds of the war. So that was fun for me to hear.
In what I think you can permit me to reasonably describe as her state of imponderable delusion, her perception of films and TV shows containing any semblance of biblical iconography ingrained within them was rendered almost wholly literal, practically even gospel.
The Exorcist? A dire warning to heed!
The Omen? An apocalyptic prophecy of events to come, an inevitable reality that may have already begun! (And that’s before you get to the third film with Sam Neill, which she held in especially high spiritual regard, but that’s a story I’ll save for talking about The Final Conflict proper.)
Hell, do you remember that show, Sleepy Hollow? I watched it for the delightful dynamic between Tom Mison’s Ichabod and Nicole Beharie’s Abbie, and the rivetingly ridiculous schlocky fun of a show that started with the amazing image of the Headless Horseman wielding a shotgun, and proceeded to ramp up the insanity with every passing episode (which worked for its great first two seasons, before fizzling out with its mediocre last two seasons). My mother, however, said she watched Sleepy Hollow because she believed it seriously dealt with things that could actually exist in our real world, and that it was “more realistic” than Angel or Supernatural (the latter of which she also reckoned depicted biblical lore accurately and realistically, because of course she did).
All this to say that The Omen spooked me as a child because of the dual factors of it being a very well-made horror movie, and it being sold to me as rooted in reality by my mother’s belief system. The various making-of documentaries for the film didn’t help matters, either, what with the persistent claims of a devilish curse having supposedly befallen the production, as had allegedly also happened on The Exorcist and Poltergeist, hinting at a pattern that made it seem as though any films that dared to be about Satan, demons, Hell, or evil spirits in general, were all marked for misfortune and damnation by the forces of darkness. It wasn’t until many years later that I’d find out that of course most of these purported “curses” were largely the product of shameless marketing tactics, mere promotional spin weaving sporadic coincidences and random tragedies together into retroactively fathomable patterns of paranormal interference, generating hype and audience buzz by exploiting the religious fervour deeply embedded in American culture.
Religion and capitalism — a match made in heaven, or in hell, depending on who you ask.
It’s been a very long time since I last watched The Omen, and there were some respectably appreciable things I’d forgotten about how well constructed it is overall. Namely, the cinematography from Gilbert Taylor (of Dr. Strangelove and Star Wars fame, to name only a couple), in collaboration with the vision of director Richard Donner, is something my adult self can now see is a masterclass in composition, blocking, and exploration of the depth of the spaces in any given scene, with a grand eye for scale, and oodles of doom-laden atmosphere enhanced by its moodily muted colour palette, and dreamlike anamorphic lensing. You’d hardly know this was Donner’s first theatrical feature film, because the man had the juice from the get-go, and his sterling work directing the hell (pun half-intended) out of this movie is what nabbed him the gig of directing Superman.
It goes without saying, yet I’ll say it all the same, that Jerry Goldsmith’s soul-rattlingly scary soundtrack is a masterpiece, and easily deserving of the Academy Award he won for it. (Though it is quite frankly shocking that this was the one and only Oscar he ever got in his prestigious career as one of the greatest composers in cinema history.)
The cast really makes The Omen hit as hard as it does, as everyone sells the material they’re given with all the deadly seriousness and weighty gravitas necessary to take what could’ve been a generic creepy-kid/religious-horror flick, wading in the waters of the gigantic splash The Exorcist left in its wake, and turn it into a fellow exemplary touchstone of the genre, and of its decade as a whole. David Warner is unsurprisingly marvellous, Patrick Troughton (The Doctor himself!) is fabulously intense, Billie Whitelaw is a skin-crawlingly shark-toothed mild-mannered menace, and Lee Remick believably conveys the inner turmoil of a mother becoming devoured from within by the paralysing fear that either something is wrong with her child, or something is wrong with her mind. But it’s Gregory Peck who acts as the rock-solid emotional anchor holding the film together, the slow descent of his crumbling sanity portrayed with poignantly stoic despair and restraint.
With all those positives, there comes the dismaying intrusion of the things about The Omen that rub me the wrong way now, as an adult with more experience and knowledge of the world than my childhood self had when he first saw the film.
Bear in mind, I know it’s only a movie, and in the context of its story, the horror of it comes from its examination of how terrifying it would be if we actually did exist in a world where the devil, the antichrist, demons, and the disturbing religious rituals required to summon or destroy all of the above, were all horribly real, and you were forced to make horrific choices in that celestial battle for the soul of humanity.
But… having lived with someone who bought into the apocalyptic parts of the lore of Christianity, I know from experience that the film undoubtedly must have had the adverse effect of convincing god-knows-how-many people over the decades that it was a genuine omen of the oncoming end times. Especially for the fundamentalist and evangelical types who take all of the Bible completely literally, and are obsessed with the end of the world, and the second coming of Christ.
This screamed out at me most of all from the first lines of the film’s famous Book of Revelations poem (which screenwriter David Seltzer completely made up; it doesn’t come from the Bible at all). Said poem begins with: “When the Jews return to Zion, and a comet rips the sky…”
At the time of writing, we are living through a historic reckoning with the genocidal consequences wrought by the ideology of Zionism, as Israel’s destruction of Palestine has reached unjustifiable levels of carnage that’s finally forced more people than ever, around the world, to see that Israel is emphatically in the wrong, and that the Zionist dogma informing so much of the motivation for all this bloodshed and ethnic cleansing is a clear and present danger. That Israel and its defenders have long sought to muddy the waters by conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, so as to quash dissent, is coldheartedly cynical, and insulting to the innumerable Jewish people of the world who — as Jonathan Glazer expressed in his 2024 Oscars speech — do not want genocide carried out in their name, or in the name of so-called self-determination.
So what’s disturbing about the film’s faux-biblical poem opening with this sentiment? The fact that it plays into the idea that Jews returning to Zion marks the beginning of the chain of events leading to the apocalypse, the antichrist, and the ultimate goal of the return of Jesus. This isn’t just the overarching plot of the Left Behind series of books and films1, which were made for hardcore conservative religious types who believe in, and pray for, the rapture. This is the dispensationalist narrative that rabidly religious people in the halls of power believe is true, want to be true, and thus shape the course of world events to hasten towards that end goal, no matter how many people are killed in the process.
Zionism was founded by racist European colonialists in the 19th century, executed with the creation of Israel as a settler-colonialist displacement of Palestinians who already lived on the land Zionists unfoundedly claimed as rightfully theirs, and has continued on as a campaign of apartheid, dehumanisation, and massacres upon massacres upon massacres. Yet those who believe in Zionism as a good thing, to the exclusion of all contradictory reality, are blind to these notions, accepting and spreading propaganda that claims Zionism is a Jewish indigenous identity that’s the oldest of any civilisation in history, and that anyone who calls for an end to Zionism is by extension automatically calling for an end to all Jewish people, and so should be disregarded as no better than Nazis. Weirdly, this substitution of reality rejects the very real fact that white nationalist Nazi evildoers are also in favour of Zionism, and the existence of Israel, because they want all the Jews of the world to be rounded up into a single state/country, so that they’re separated from the rest of society. Even the author of the Balfour declaration, Arthur James Balfour, supported Zionism and the creation of Israel because he saw Jews as a blight on society, a blight which he seemed to believe needed to be segregated away from everyone else. He had previously voted to limit the immigration of Jews into Britain, and then in 1919, two years after his fateful namesake declaration, Balfour was quoted as saying he championed Zionism because “it is, among other things, a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason, it should receive our support.”
Back when The Omen was written in the mid-70’s, it’s not as if the Israel/Palestine issue wasn’t well-known to the world. The massacre at the Munich Olympics — the basis for Kevin Macdonald’s One Day in September, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich — happened in 1972. James Baldwin wrote his ‘Open Letter to the Born Again’ in 1979, wherein he observed:
“…the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”
So was any thought given by Seltzer, or the producers, or the studio execs, or anyone at the time, as to the ramifications of this made-up prophecy poem peddling a Christian Zionist message? Was it deliberate, or careless? And anyway, why single out a mainstream Hollywood horror movie that was designed to entertain a mass audience, and why interrogate its internal politics that could’ve been nothing but an afterthought, with no intention of seriously seeding a belief in anyone’s mind?
I don’t know. I truly don’t. I’m just saying that, given the things I’ve learned of history and religion and politics since I was a blissfully ignorant 11 or 12 year-old watching The Omen for the first time, and given the constant stream of horrors we’re seeing on the news and online with every new day, and every new atrocity carried out because religion and government have become intertwined tools of genocidal tyranny… I guess the horror of real life has outstripped any of the imaginable satanic horrors The Omen depicts. At least in this story, the sides of good and evil are clearly definable, and rooted in elements of fantasy world-building that make it all easier to digest. Maybe that’s the comfort religion offers, or the comfort of movies, or the comfort of stories, period. They’re little universes we can wrap our heads around, allowing us to see ways in which the light could ultimately triumph over the dark. A tempting alternative to the real world’s ceaseless march of Time, where there is no ending, but just one long ongoing middle, which our lives are too brief to see reach the eventual complete conclusion…
O_O
DAMN YOU, DAMIEN, YOU’VE MADE ME GET ALL DEPRESSED, YOU LITTLE SHIT.
Anyway, The Omen remains an old favourite of mine for nostalgic reasons (barring the connection to my mother’s religious hysteria, and the non-Matrix-related Zion stuff that sent me on that spiralling tirade), and I look forward to seeing if the unexpectedly acclaimed prequel, The First Omen, meets it in quality, if not perhaps even surpasses it.
Also:
Alan Sparhawk, formerly of the band Low (who are maybe my favourite band ever, yet whose existence sadly ended in 2022, after the death of his wife and bandmate, Mimi Parker), last year joined a side-project band called DAMIEN (all-caps intentional), named after the evil tot from The Omen, naturally. The band’s first single was also called ‘DAMIEN’, and the entire track is literally a songified retelling of the film’s infamous “it’s all for you, Damien!” scene.
It’s a good song, one of my most replayed of 2023, and an earworm you don’t mind catching, so I recommend checking it out, alongside the band’s full album, The Boy Who Drew Cats.
And now, onto rewatching the rest of the (increasingly diminishing-in-quality) Omen movies that I haven’t seen in forever, which definitely won’t be a slog to get through in the slightest, nope, not one bit…
Rating: ★★★★
Originally published at https://letterboxd.com.
(Interesting link here: Vic Armstrong — known for his Indiana Jones stunt-work, among so many other classic movies — was part of the stunt team for The Omen, and then almost 40 years later, he directed the universally panned 2014 Left Behind film with Nicolas Cage. So I wonder how causal a connection these two points may or may not have been to each other…)