• Directed by Richard Donner
• Written by David Seltzer
• Starring
  • Gregory Peck
  • Lee Remick
  • David Warner
  • Billie Whitelaw
  • Harvey Stephens
  • Patrick Troughton
• Produced by Harvey Bernhard

Not only does history repeat itself, as the truism states, but it seems that with the pace of society picking up, we’re running through the cycle faster than ever. Why, it was only in the ’70s that The Exorcist brought out the first cycle of movies that dealt with Satanic manifestations; right now, we’re on the (fortunately) waning end of a repeat cycle of the same. (Granted, there was some added impetus to the second go-round aside from a natural cinematic lifecycle, given that whole Millennial rollover thing — and as Dogbert pointed out, there are few things more ominous than BIG ROUND NUMBERS.)

The Omen is one of that first crop, and it deserves kudos for following the trend without slavish imitation (leave that to the Italians, who turned Exorcist ripoffs into an entire genre in its own right). Some of the themes are still front and center, naturally: corruption of the innocence of childhood to pure EE-vil, and an intrusion of palpable religion into the “too mature for that” world. But, as must happen with all movies that follow a trend instead of beginning it, the stakes have been raised. The Exorcist dealt with a menace that was diabolical; The Omen ups the ante to the level of the literally apocalyptic.

American in Rome Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) is placed in a quandary; his wife Kathy (Lee Remick) has just given birth to their first son, who has unfortunately died. Before Kathy is informed, though, Father Spiletto (Martin Benson) at the hospital makes Robert a deal: They have another infant boy whose mother died that morning in childbirth. Wouldn’t it be best for all involved if the Thorns unofficially “adopted” the orphan to replace their own? And Kathy never need know.

Did I mention that this baby boy was born at 6 AM on June 6th?

“You’re auctioning the TARDIS? My TARDIS?? How could you?!”

Soon getting a new assignment in Britain as the American Ambassador (Robert’s well connected — his college roommate is the U.S. President), Robert and the wife and kid (now named Damien Thorn — ain’t that just a wee bit over the top?) move to a palatial estate on the emerald isle, where the years flow like a whole bunch of still photos in a picture album. Eventually Damien grows into five-year-old actor Harvey Stephens, who apparently was cast for his ability to smile like a possessed Linda Blair. And suddenly things start happening in their perfect life. Things like Damien’s nanny joyfully hanging herself in front of all the tot’s at Damien’s birthday party — an occurence which doesn’t seem to bother Damien overmuch.

Other ominous things start happening in Robert’s life. Like the dishevelled Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton, second of the Doctors Who), who barges in on Robert and babbles something knowing what went on in the Roman hospital, claiming that Damien is EE-vil and that Robert needs to take the Eucharist daily to protect himself. All of which he immediately dismisses — but when Damien has a violent reaction to approaching a church for a wedding (they didn’t take their child to a church EVER in that five-year period?), he starts to lend some small credence to the priest’s rantings.

There’s also the sepulchral new governess, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), who appeared under rather vague circumstances soon after the previous one’s necksnapper. She’s very obviously devoted to Damien, enough so that she quietly gives his parents sass back. And she also looks pretty damned EE-vil herself.

I don’t care how good your references are, you look like death warmed over. Go ‘way.

Although Robert is the one who knows the secret of Damien’s birth and has gotten unsettling clerical visits, Kathy also gets some spook-outs. One was the fact that, when Damien had his hissy fit about going to church (not that I really feel for the Thorns, I have that same battle every Sunday morning), it was Kathy’s face he attacked. And the second one is when Kathy takes Damien to the Windsor Safari Park; first he spooks all the giraffes just by looking at them (demonstrating the Antichrist’s long-prophecied power over ruminants, I guess), and then their car is attacked by a pack of baboons just because Damien smiled at them. (Is it too much to ask that we get to see a poop-flinging monkey at some point? Apparently.)

Eventually, just to get Father Brennan off his back, Robert agrees to listen to him for five minutes. Brennan recites a verse of apocalyptic poetry and tries again to convince Robert that Damien is EE-vil; as a throwaway detail, he also tells him that Kathy is pregnant, and that Damien will kill first the unborn child, then Kathy, and then finally Robert. So when Robert goes home and finds Kathy despondent over her just-found-out pregnancy, he finally sits up and pays attention.

Too bad the priest just died in a bizarre accident involving a lightning rod atop a church steeple…

Right about here is where things started to unravel for me. See, I take religion seriously. For me, it’s not just a backdrop, a cultural wellspring from which to draw powerful imagery for the purpose of jitters; it’s a for-real Big Deal. So I actually stop and think about things, and so far the things I’ve thought haven’t been great.

See, Father Brennan’s of the adamant opinion that the Eucharist can stave off the power of the Antichrist. Maybe it can; Robert never goes to Mass to find out. But if that bit of the sacred has real-world efficacy, then why is there no protection from dark forces afforded Brennan when he makes his way to a churchyard; apparently, nebulous demonry doesn’t care much about the protection of holy ground. But on the other hand, Damien has an extreme panic attack on the steps of an Episcopal church, which would contradict the above. (By the way, that looks like a major boo-boo that’s probably a concession to dumb-ass Americans; in the Commonwealth, what we call the “Episcopal” church is just called Anglican, or Church of England.) On the other hand, if holy ground is anathema to Damien, then how could he have been born at a Church-run and presumably blessed and consecrated hospital? But on yet another hand (jeez, I’m channeling Tevya), if both the Catholic and Anglican churches have claim to the protections of sanctified objects and grounds, how are we going to define “holy ground” anyway? Paging Duncan MacLeod…

“You think my Linda Blair impersonation is good, you oughtta see my John Travolta!”

And while we’re at it, how did Father Brennan know that Kathy was pregnant? Is he some kind of prophet? Nothing else he does shows anything except an obsession with winning God’s forgiveness for his complicity in the original baby switch; is that as far as his gift of prophecy extends?

And it gets a bit sillier from here. See, there’s also been an inquisitive photographer around the Thorns named Jennings (David Warner) — I’ll assume he’s a press photographer, although specific assignments or employers are never mentioned. His innocuous photos of both the original governess and Father Brennan showed strange smudges when developed — one like a noose around the governess’ neck, the other resembling thing lightning rod that pinned Brennan down. So he takes an interest in Brennan and thus in Robert Horne, and together they take a big chunk out of the movie to go back to Rome and try to discover Damien’s real heritage.

Which is stupid, because a) Robert’s already come to believe that Damien may be all he’s cracked up to be, so the excursion serves little purpose, and b) Kathy’s just been knocked from a balcony by Damien and is in the hospital, having lost the baby. Seems that that, having had that first step of the prophecy fulfilled, Robert might have stuck around town to keep the second part, Kathy’s death, from occurring.

Not that the trip to Rome doesn’t include some nifty scenes and bits of imagery. Chief among them is Robert and Jennings’ discovery of Robert’s true son’s skeleton in a shallow grave in a ruined Etruscan cemetery (huh? no, it’s never explained well), to find that the skull was shattered — his son had been intentionally murdered so that Damien could replace him. But really, the only reason for the trip was mostly to get Robert out of the way so that Mrs. Baylock, infernal guardian extraordinaire, could work her way on Kathy.

“Whoa. Did you order anchovies on this?”

Ah, Kathy. Here’s one of the major sticking points. It’s revealed to us that, for the last little while, Kathy’s been confiding to a psychiatrist that she fears that Damien is somehow EE-vil, and even like he’s not her own son. Obviously, this revelation from the psychiatrist to Robert strikes him heavily (do those British psychs have different rules about breaking client confidence?), but what it really said to me is that maybe Robert shouldn’t be the main character here. Can you imagine how much more powerful the story would be if Kathy were the main character, ignorant of her child’s origin, simply coming little by little to an irrational, unsupportable conviction that her son is not her own, that he’s actually a being of evil? That’s a much meatier, more dramatic role.

Anyway. The conclusion hinges upon an old exorcist by the name of Bugenhagen (Leo McKern, everybody’s favorite visionary clergyman), who’s up to excavations in Megiddo outside of Jerusalem. (Another factual boo-boo: “Megiddo” is not, as Jennings, remarks, derived from armageddon, meaning “the end of the world.” Rather, “armageddon” is a Greek transliteration of har Megiddon or “mountain of Megiddo,” scene of many battles in the Old Testament and thus symbolic of the final battle in the Book of Revelation.) He gives Robert the special tools to defeat the Antichrist — a set of seven sacred daggers which must impale Damien in a certain order. All of which, I’m sorry, sticks in my craw yet again. No mention is made of where these relics come from, but one has to wonder, if God is powerful enough to make these special weapons in the first place, isn’t He powerful enough simply to smack down the Antichrist?

All the way through, if you put the pieces together, we’ve really been dealing with a theology of convenience, put together to support the movie’s chill factor. “Facts” and “verses” are trotted out that have no basis in the Book of Revelation, where most of the material comes from in its raw form. Did you know that all true servants of Satan are born with a 666 birthmark somewhere on their body? Leaving aside the entire idea of why a soul would be born already dedicated to evil, why in the world would this birthmark be in Arabic numerals, as amply illustrated throughout the movie? Would not Roman numerals — or, for that matter, Hebrew?

Probably the crowning error of them all — not in terms of theology, but simply as a plot point — is that, well, Damien never does much that seems terribly evil, aside from waving to a big black mastiff and smiling at baboons. Sure, he knocks Mommy off a stool and over a balcony, but only at Mrs. Baylock’s insistence; she gets him peddling his trike at breakneck speed and then sends him off down the hall like a bullet from a gun. All of the evil happens around him, and only peripherally involves him: Mrs. Baylock, the nebulous powers that cause “accidents,” the pack of black dogs that accosts Robert and Jennings in the Etruscan graveyard. Far from being an ominous force of evil, Damien is more a human McGuffin.

If ever McKern were to try a German accent, now would be the time.

Now, having said all of that, you might think that this movie is terrible. Not at all. It’s professionally made, the performances are uniformly good (well, Damien’s not terribly charismatic — he’s so quiet he almost seems autistic), and there are moments where visual imagery reaches out and grabs you — the aforementioned infant skeleton, or Father Brennan’s cramped flat, papered all over with Bible pages and festooned with forty-seven crucifixes. But on the whole, it misfires because it doesn’t know what it’s target is. It’s a movie that wants us to be scared, but it can’t quite explain what it is we should be afraid of, or why it’s frightening.

What I would really like to see is either a version that tells the story with Kathy as the main character, or a remake which doesn’t overtly tell us, the audience, that Damien is indeed the Antichrist so far ahead. Take out the ominous scenes of Damien with the sycophantic Mrs. Baylock or anything else that gives us more knowledge than Robert Thorn, and let us discover it, figure it out, and struggle with it as he does: is his adopted son really the Antichrist, or are the ravings of a mad priest playing on his own buried guilt about the covert adoption? No matter how plausible the circumstantial evidence may be, can he ever be convinced enough that he could kill his own son?

Now THERE’S a movie that could be scary.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • David Warner (Jennings) is a regular in the Trek universe, having played St. John Talbot in Star Trek 5, Klingon Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek 6, and Gul Madred in the TNG two-parter “Chain of Command”