50 Years Ago, The Omen Brought the Devil Home
Released in June 1976 (that’s 6/6, by the way), The Omen completed a cycle of films that began with Rosemary’s Baby in 1968.
The Exorcist was more than a movie. It was a cultural phenomenon, changing the course of film history and inspiring a wave of horror movies influenced by Catholic tradition — including, most successfully, The Omen. But although comparisons to William Friedkin’s film are inevitable (this movie probably wouldn’t exist without it), really The Omen is the completion of an arc that began in 1968 with the release of Rosemary’s Baby. Here, the child is not possessed by the Devil. He is the Devil.
The Omen deals with issues of bodily autonomy that are also present in Rosemary’s Baby: At the beginning of the film, wealthy patriarch Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) decides to replace his son — who, as the doctor regretfully tells him, perished “after one breath” — with another child born on the same day at the same hospital. He does so without consulting with, or even informing, his wife Katherine (Lee Remick), allowing her to go through life thinking that little Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) is her biological child.
But then the little bastard keeps trying to murder her. Seen from Katherine’s perspective, The Omen is a domestic nightmare, in which the otherwise idle wife of a powerful man — in the opening scene, Robert is appointed the American ambassador to the U.K. — is gaslit and made to feel guilty for her suspicion that the five-year-old she (or, more accurately, Billie Whitelaw’s sinister housekeeper Mrs. Baylock) is raising is, well, creepy. She’s right, but it takes multiple corroborating sources and the entire rest of the movie for Robert to come around to Katherine’s intuitive understanding that little Damien is the Antichrist-in-training.
Peck and Remick both deliver mature, grounded performances, and director Richard Donner successfully fills the movie with a steadily escalating sense of dread. All in all, it’s a pretty serious-minded affair, harnessing the familial and spiritual malaise of its era into a story that’s more of a slow-burn psychological thriller than an effects-driven gore fest. It’s when it’s time to actually shed some blood that the movie loses its horror.
Despite its huge box-office success, the reason why The Omen will forever be the junior to its more sophisticated Satanic cinematic siblings is because every time someone in the Thorns’ orbit dies — either out of devotion to Damien, or because they’ve gotten a little too close to the truth about him — the sequence that follows is, unfortunately, dated and quite silly. The inexplicable decapitation of one character by a rogue pane of glass was quite shocking for its time, for example, but in retrospect the mannequin head dipped in fake blood that tumbles across the screen is so obviously fake that it’s more likely to produce giggles than gasps.
That being said, The Omen does have one thing going for it that the many, many exorcism movies that came in the wake of The Exorcist do not: actual cultural impact. Along with quotes from the film — “it’s all for you, Damien!” — that entered the popular lexicon, The Omen’s most lasting contribution to pop culture is popularizing the association of the number “666” with Satan. Screenwriter David Seltzer pulled this then-obscure number from the Book of Revelation and made it a major plot point in the film; Damien has a “666” birthmark, for example. Now, 50 years later, even people who haven’t seen The Omen — people who were children when a zombie apocalypse wiped out most of humanity, for example — know that 666 is the number of the Beast.
