The Omen (1976) Review
The imagination can be a terrible thing. That is why for better or worse most horror movies work better with what they don’t reveal to the audience. Think of how much better the start of Jaws (1975) was without seeing too much of the shark or Alien (1979), when the title beastie was lurking in the shadows.
It was on the August Bank Holiday Monday 1981, the night before I returned for the new school year, that I first came across a movie called The Omen. During that day as a family we had been round to see my Dad’s brother Uncle Michael for the customary meet. As we left, my Dad and his brother indulged in that sort of ongoing conversation older people always seem to have that infuriates their kids who were told ten minutes ago that we were leaving.
During the course of their conversation they talked about watching The Omen that night on TV. The movie’s name meant nothing to me, so when I went to bed that night I thought of little else except the imminent return to school. Then I heard THAT score carrying up from the living room TV, the one that earned Jerry Goldsmith a well deserved Oscar. Just from the score alone my mind imagined all sorts going on downstairs on the TV all much gorier than what actually graced the screen. It sounded horrible. In truth the movie was much, much tamer than most, but I didn’t know that at the time.
A couple of years passed and with the advent of video I rented the movie from the local Flicks. I was right; the movie, whilst compulsively watchable, is tame. My Auntie Debbie and I sat in my Nan’s living room, watching a badly panned and scanned copy that omitted much of the scarier detail – hooray for wide screen – and bizarrely turned from colour to black-and-white from the point that we meet the character Carl Bugenhagen, an un-credited Leo McKern.
I wasn’t much older than perhaps fourteen at the time, but I had already become a hardened horror veteran. My eleven-year old cousin Jason ventured into the living room curious to see what it was that Debbie and I were watching. We warned him that he wasn’t old enough to watch the movie (look at me talking!) and that perhaps he should join the other family members outside that were enjoying the summer sun and a laugh. Jason was adamant that he should stay and watch the film with us. He assured us that he would be ok. To my eyes in watching the film he did indeed seem ok. He was rapt and said nothing throughout.
The thing was he wasn’t all right. The Omen had scared him to death. Apparently that night Jason had cautiously tiptoed into his mum’s room hoping perhaps to jump into bed with her for comfort. My Auntie Sandra, Jason’s mum, asked to know why. At this Jason started to cry thus irritating the situation. Jason, wiping snot from his running nose, knew now that he was at a point of no return. If he told his mum why he couldn’t sleep he was going to get a telling off for being stupid and if he chose to tell his mum it was nothing he was going to get told off for pretty much the same thing. He should have kept his mouth shut, for not only did he get a ticking off, and probably a slap or two for his troubles, he was further ridiculed by the rest of his family even till this day. Why? He told his mum that he couldn’t sleep because he knew that Damian was the son of the Devil and that by knowing this he would die. In a way that very night Jason kind of did.
Even after The Exorcist (1973) showed that kids and the devil worked well together at the box office, the script for The Omen, or The Antichrist or The Birthmark as it was known at various stages, had been refused by each studio until Warner Bros took it on. However, remembering that they already had the potentially lucrative Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) on their slate (it wasn’t), The Omen got put into quick turnaround. After a conversation with Alan Ladd Jnr, Fox, one the studios that originally turned it down, picked it up. Director Richard Donner revised the original script to ground the concept more in reality. This meant that all references to covens, witchcraft and the suchlike were removed.
David Seltzer has stated that he wrote the script strictly for the money. Be that as it may, it still makes for an extremely persuasive piece of writing, tying Biblical foretelling with gory set-pieces that have entered into film legend. Richard Donner came to the movie after almost a decade and a half of TV work, including the likes of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and The Six Million Dollar Man (1974-1978) and both treated their subject matters realistically, leaving the incidents within The Omen open to being coincidental rather than anything to do with Satan’s offspring.
However, whenever it comes to pushing the movie Donner is more than happy to throw the coincidence theory out of the window and relish the opportunity to talk about the movie’s alleged curse. Why do Hollywood types do it? It ain’t big and it ain’t clever! If there was REALLY a curse on the movie, would it have made it big at the box office and provided a springboard for Donner to direct the then up-and-coming Superman (1978) movie? No I don’t think so!
Shot in six to eight weeks The Omen went on to gross $60million domestically. Originally the budget was set around $2.5million, which included Gregory Peck’s salary, the location work, the lot! The only additional cost was asking for a little to re-shoot the ending and $25,000 for composer Jerry Goldsmith to do the score. Goldsmith’s fee was money well spent. The soundtrack he provided went on to win an Oscar for Best Original Score, the only Oscar the late composer won in his long and notable career.
In much the same way that the 2006 remake did, Donner’s movie pointed out the significance of the three sixes for its release date in America – 6th June 1976. As audiences watched the movie, on this release date, posters were put out in readiness for when they left the auditorium, stating ‘Today is the SIXTH day of the SIXTH month of Nineteen-Seventy-Six’. Apparently something so simple and also so crass had quite a profound effect on many of the people leaving the movie, freaking them out completely – talk about needing to get a life!
The plot tells of the beginnings of little Damien Thorn’s possible ascent to a position of power on Earth, Damien of course being the son of that fella known as Satan. Unfortunately for American diplomat and soon to be Ambassador to Great Britain, Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) hasn’t a clue that the child he has adopted as his own is actually the Anti Christ. Thing is Robert can’t tell anyone about the adoption. He is told that his wife Kathy (Lee Remick) gave birth to a stillborn child and to spare his wife’s feelings, and at the suggestion of a priest, he adopts a child whose mother had also recently died – little knowing who it really is that he is taking home and failing to tell his wife of the switch either.
Everything is going well until Damien’s nanny decides to hang herself at his fifth birthday party – ‘It’s all for you Damien’ she smiles whilst no one else understandably seems to share her mirth. From that point on, things in the Thorn house start to fall apart. Robert is harassed by a wild staring priest, played by former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton, who says that the Ambassador’s wife is in danger if he doesn’t meet him. He has a point, literally as it happens, as soon there is a rather nasty impaling, frenzied attacks from dogs and baboons, and THAT decapitation scene.
It’s all tonnes of fun, pumped up by Goldsmith’s iconic score and performances that play it straight when it could have been so easy to ham it up. There is also the plot’s winking to the audience of how a character may be killed off that adds to the tension, and then kills them off in ways you wouldn’t have imagined. This was something that became increasingly tired as the franchise continued, but first time round it worked a treat. Indeed the most effective killing is one that isn’t indicated by means of a photograph taken, but that of Katherine Thorn as she struggles to escape the hospital only to turn and see Damien’s new and more sinister nanny Mrs Baylock (Billie Whitelaw) advance upon her. We don’t see what happens between them but the next thing we know is that Katherine plummets screaming from the window and smacks into the roof of a parked ambulance – chilling!
As for other key scenes, did you know that originally the photographer Jennings (David Warner) was meant to have been killed by a pane of glass falling from a crane above? This proved to be difficult to achieve as the pane of glass would veer off each time and land horizontally. In the end special effects supervisor John Richardson suggested that perhaps the glass slid off the back of a truck instead of falling from above. It worked, giving Hollywood its first decapitation scene. Apparently David Warner was unable to bring himself to look at his dummy’s decapitated head. I understand that also Father Brennan was originally meant to have the lightning rod go through his head and out through his backside, but again the effect proved difficult to achieve.
The scene that director Richard Donner often likes to talk about in relation to The Omen is when Lee Remick falls from the balcony. He is keen to point out that no goldfish were harmed during the making of this scene and were in fact dead sardines. The shot of Remick falling was originally to have been done by having her on a harness from a crane. Remick wasn’t keen so instead Donner came up with the idea of having the floor on a vertical wall and having Remick dollied backwards into it. It makes for a far more effective shot.
Remick didn’t get off so lightly during the rest of the filming. She also had a scene with some bonkers baboons that attack her car at Windsor Safari Park, when they figure out that the child with her is evil incarnate. To try and get the baboons to go ape they originally figured that by not feeding the baboons for a few hours and then driving around with bananas tied all around the car would do the trick. It didn’t.
Instead the baboons would casually walk up and pick a banana – no aggression at all. Next up they tried driving off with a baby baboon visible to get the desired response. Again it didn’t work. In the end an official from the zoo clinched it for the film-makers, when he suggested that he sat in the back-seat of the car with the alpha baboon – it worked! The baboons attacked big time. Those reactions you see from Harvey Stephens, as Damian, and Lee Remick are for real; they were scared to death – Remick more so when the sedated baboon woke up in the back of the car and started pulling her hair.
Composer Jerry Goldsmith was reluctant to attend that year’s Oscar ceremony; even though he had been nominated for a couple of Oscars that evening. His reason was that he had been nominated some ten or eleven times before and never won so he felt the odds of him winning this time were against him. Goldsmith received a nomination for Best Original Song – Ave Santini which it failed to win, losing out to Barbra Streisand’s Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born) but Goldsmith did go on to win for his sensational original score, which the majority of people still tend to confuse with Carl Orff’s O Fortuna from Camina Burana (still best known for being used for the Old Spice adverts).
The movie’s original ending was changed when Alan Ladd Jnr suggested that instead of having three coffins – for Robert Thorn, his wife Katherine and Damien – that the boy lived. Of course he wouldn’t have suggested it for perhaps leaving it conveniently open for a sequel or anything like that now would he? The ending now has a shot of the back of the President attending the Thorns’ funeral.
As the camera pans down we see the boy, Damien, and as Goldsmith’s score kicks in one last time the boy turns and looks at the camera. Damien smirks the evillest smirk as the words from Book of Revelation Chapter 13 Verse 18 give the audience something to muse over as they leave the viewing – ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the Beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666’. Donner takes great pride in recounting the story of how he coaxed young Harvey Stephens to give that creepy little smile at the end of the movie. Using reverse psychology he simply told the boy, ‘Don’t you dare laugh. If you laugh, I won’t be your friend.’
