The Omen (1976)

The Omen was one of the great horror success stories of the 1970s, becoming a runaway box-office phenomenon partly thanks to one of the most aggressive and ingenious marketing campaigns of its era. 20th Century Fox reportedly spent more promoting the film than they did actually producing it — a gamble that paid off spectacularly when the movie became one of the year’s highest-grossing releases and one of the defining horror hits of the decade.

At heart, The Omen is really rather old-fashioned hokum:
a glossy tale of Satan rising to power through an influential but unsuspecting political family.

And yet it works magnificently.

Director Richard Donner keeps the film moving briskly while encouraging performances pitched at near-operatic intensity. Almost everyone involved seems permanently on the verge of emotional collapse, which somehow suits the film’s apocalyptic melodrama perfectly.

The story follows American diplomat Robert Thorn, played by Gregory Peck, who unknowingly adopts the Antichrist at birth after his own infant son supposedly dies during childbirth. Young Damien grows into an unsettlingly blank-eyed child around whom mysterious deaths, bizarre accidents, and satanic warnings begin accumulating with alarming frequency.

Soon priests are impaled,
photographers are decapitated,
nannies hang themselves publicly,
and furious baboons practically launch revolutions at safari parks.

Subtlety is not exactly the film’s strongest suit.

Still, The Omen delivers this escalating madness with such conviction and style that it becomes enormously entertaining.

The real scene-stealer is undoubtedly Billie Whitelaw as Mrs Baylock, the terrifying nanny and devoted “apostate of Hell” who glides through the film radiating sinister calmness and absolute devotion to Satan’s little prince. Opposite her is perhaps cinema’s most adorable servant of darkness:
the rottweiler guardian dog that follows Damien about like some infernal family pet from the underworld.

Meanwhile Jerry Goldsmith contributes one of the great horror scores of the era, a thunderous choral masterpiece filled with satanic chanting and ominous grandeur. Goldsmith deservedly won the Academy Award for his work, and the score remains one of the film’s greatest strengths.

At times it is so overpoweringly dramatic that it practically threatens to swallow the entire production whole.

Interestingly, parts of Goldsmith’s score bear remarkable similarities to later passages in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, particularly the choral arrangements. Whether intentional homage or coincidence, the resemblance is difficult to ignore.

The film also helped usher elaborate death scenes into mainstream horror cinema in a major way. The famous decapitation sequence remains impressively staged even today, while the impalings, falls, hangings, and assorted catastrophic accidents gave audiences a level of stylish on-screen carnage that felt unusually grand for studio horror at the time.

Some viewers found — and still find — The Omen genuinely terrifying.

Personally, however, the film plays more as lavishly mounted camp entertainment than nightmare fuel. It is sinister and atmospheric certainly, but also deliciously overblown and wonderfully theatrical in places.

Naturally, success led to sequels.

Damien: Omen II followed, expanding the story reasonably effectively before the increasingly absurd The Final Conflict pushed matters toward outright silliness. Later entries drifted into straight-to-video territory, at which point mercy finally intervened and the franchise quietly collapsed for a time.

One does occasionally wonder what became of Harvey Spencer Stephens, the cherubic child actor who unknowingly became one of horror cinema’s most iconic embodiments of evil.

Curiously enough, The Omen has appeared in at least one publication listing the “worst films ever made” — a judgement that feels wildly unfair, even if one acknowledges the film’s occasionally ludicrous excesses and thunderously melodramatic tendencies.

No, The Omen is not sophisticated horror.

But it is:
stylish,
elegant,
hugely entertaining,
beautifully mounted,
and gloriously over-the-top.

Richard Donner crafts the material with enough polish and confidence to elevate what might easily have become ridiculous camp into something genuinely iconic.

And in the end, Fox laughed all the way to the bank.

The film reportedly grossed over $250 million worldwide and cemented itself as one of the most commercially successful horror films ever made — proving once again that audiences will always flock enthusiastically to well-packaged tales of Satanic doom, exploding priests, and evil children glaring ominously from beneath terrible bowl haircuts.