The Birth of The OctOmen – The Omen (1976)

 Hello and welcome back to the Third Row for this, the first entry in this October's franchise run, tentatively titled The OctOmen.

Naturally, we're kicking things off with the one that started it all – Richard Donner's 1976 classic, The Omen.

 Honestly, watches like this are a big part of why I enjoy doing focus projects like this. There's something I genuinely enjoy about taking movies I've seen many times, taking a deeper look at them, and finding new aspects of them I either never noticed or simply didn't properly appreciate before.

Which is the attitude I came out of rewatching this movie, that again, I have safely watched enough times to be in the double digits before this, with. After all those viewings, this is the first time I think I've really figured the two big reasons that this movie works as well as it does while many of the later sequels...well...we'll get back to that.

The first of the big reasons for this - one that’s easy to take for granted nowadays - is that the movie leans hard into the fact that, while it's a horror story, it's also a mystery. It feels a bit strange to say nowadays since, like Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby before it, this is a movie that’s become so ingrained in our popular culture that the twist is taken for granted. You say the name 'Damien' and people immediately jump to 'Antichrist', even if they've never seen the movie before. That's how completely we take the reveal for granted.

It's never as prominent or subconsciously suicidal as something like 'Let's check the basement', but few phrases in horror throw up quite the distinct red flags of the assurance 'Your wife need never know'.

In the movie itself, however, Damien is simply an adopted child of unknown, if sinister, origin. There are hints early on, but the most overt are presented in an unreliable format, most prominently from a priest played Patrick Troughton, who plays it with just enough of a manic edge to make you wonder just how much of what he’s saying is truth and how much is hyperbolic and fueled by religious fervor.

This isn’t to say it’s all presented completely grounded in reality, of course. From Damien’s first birthday, the movie establishes an unusual air about him and the freak accidents that seem to occur in connection with him, but it’s predominantly in the way the movie presents itself around him. Damien himself, as played by Harvey Stephens, is played as your average five-year-old for the most part. Most of the tells of his inhuman lineage are in the writing, direction, and Oscar-winning score by Jerry Goldsmith.

Okay, also the fact he turns full-bore crazy when he gets near a church.
I DID say 'most.'

Which is probably as good a segue as any I could ask for to address the other component that makes this movie work - the people making it. That seems like a rather perfunctory thing to say, but there is something to be said for how much this story is helped by the effort that Richard Donner and his cast lend to it.

The casting of Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn goes a long way to helping make this movie land for me. Part of this is, admittedly, likely an effect of the natural gravitas an actor like Peck brings to just about any role he plays. Another part of this, to both his and the overall movie's credit, is that this version, of the three takes on this story*, makes a more concerted effort to try and present Thorn as a more relatable and sympathetic person.

*I'll be saving most of the focus of the book for this till the back end of this article, but it's coming up here just to help emphasize the point in question. I promise, I'll keep it reeled in until later.

After revisiting the novel coming into this, I found myself really appreciating the decision of the filmmakers to spend some extra time showing us the lives of the Thorns as a happy family before starting to turn the screws on them. This also applies in a big way to Lee Remick as Katherine Thorn, who feels more like a fleshed-out person in this version of the story rather than the magnet for tragedy of other versions thanks to us getting to see her in normal day to day circumstances before the family starts being put through a wringer.

As the stories go, they did consider giving the movie a happier ending...
Well, as happy as the choice between 'The Devil Wins' and 'Gregory Peck's Career Reel Now Includes An On-Screen Kid Killing' can get.
Not for nothing, I feel like we got the overall better deal.

The supporting cast also help lend to this feel. Alongside Troughton, Donner populates the rest of this movie with a stable of reliable characters in the likes of David Warner, Billie Whitelaw, and Leo McKern who do a lot for taking characters that, under other circumstances, could have felt cartoonish - again, keep reading, I'll explain - and keeping them just grounded enough to keep the audience invested in where everything is going.

At the time, it certainly paid off – the movie was one of the top grossing films of 1976 and is still considered a horror classic nowadays. Going beyond the box office, as I said before Goldsmith’s music won the movie a Best Original Score Oscar and netted a Best Original Song nomination for the movie’s main theme (one for the bar bet roster – Goldsmith pulled off a Best Original Song nomination for a piece whose title literally translates to ‘Hail Satan’; go forth and try to collect with that one.) On top of that, it was also the first major breakout success of Richard Donner’s career and went on to inspire several sequels by other hands.

How well they fared at maintaining that same balance of drama and horror…well, that’s for us to discuss later this month. Starting later this week with 1978’s Damien: Omen II.

See ya real soon, kids...

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And now, the weirdness I know some of you have really been waiting for. It's time for the first round of Apocrypha

"You think the priest you talked to is weird, take a look at the pages over there about what the other guy was into..." 

A promise is a promise.

As I said earlier, we’d be coming back to the novelization on this one. When I first started setting up for this, I did consider limiting this to just the final two books that were never filmed. Then I remembered reading this one a few years back – and how downright bizarre it gets compared to the filmed version of the script.

I can’t say this one’s on a third party, as the novel was written by the film’s scriptwriter, David Seltzer. Having said that, however, reading his pure vision for this story just further reaffirms my stance that Donner and his cast did a LOT for helping make this story work.

If I had to sum up how Seltzer’s direct take differs in a single word, I have to go with ‘pulpy.’ There’s a reason these novels gained a special shoutout in the delightfully strange book Paperbacks From Hell – they go down some weird tunnels that are very much in keeping with the oddity of the paperback horror boom of the time period. See below for a good example of what I mean here – I took pictures of the pages themselves just so people can’t say I was making this up.

My apologies in advance for the blurriness on the second page. Did some clean-up so it's legible. May try and replace this with a clearer snapshot soon.
Also, just as a heads-up, second page contains some fairly violent descriptions, albeit in brief. Just as a heads-up.

For anyone who prefers a brief summary before deciding if they want to read them, the pages include Seltzer's book-only backstory for the doomed Father Brennan (more accurately, his novel equivalent, Father Tassone) - this backstory includes an ill-fated missionary trip to African that reads like the highlights reel of an Italian exploitation film of the 'Cannibal *' variety, and a quick breakdown of his ties with a worldwide cover of Satanists working to bring the Antichrist to Earth while being the cause of every global catastrophe of the 60s and 70s in the process. Nothing makes you appreciate the movie's 'less is more' approach to the Devil's influence quite like seeing the book lean hard the other way and present an occult network to rival SPECTRE.

Finally, his approach to the characters is…again, pulp comes to mind. Before she’s even featured in the story proper, our first introduction to Katherine is establishing her as mentally unstable, to the point where when Thorn says losing the baby will kill her, it isn't hyperbole  - book Katherine sees having a kid as a psychological necessity, with the narration explaining she's already lost a few and had some incidents before they started trying to have a kid. The photographer Jennings, meanwhile, reads less like a scruffy paparazzo and more like an unapologetically sleazy muckraker, up to and including a new scene in the Middle East section of the book where he randomly skips out of the story for a few to hook up with two local women that in the end amounts to nothing more than a reason for Thorn to be disgusted with him. Finally, there’s Mrs. Baylock...I’ll level with all of you, I’ve read this twice now and I’m still not entirely clear why Seltzer puts in numerous scenes with the nanny from Hell in a degree of makeup that prompts comparisons to a whore (his word – used multiple times – by the way, not mine), but it makes for a REALLY odd turn that made me quite glad that the film opted for more of the stoic-cum-sinister approach in Billie Whitelaw’s performance instead.

I can’t say it’s necessarily essential reading if you’re a fan of the movie. It’s interesting as another take, but it differs enough that it’s not like your experience of the movie will be enriched watching it – save maybe for, like me, suddenly gaining a whole new appreciation for the movie’s sense of restraint.
Having said that, and since I already kind of plugged Paperbacks, if you want a good taste for how weird the pulp horror of the 70s and the 80s could get, this one’s a good chance to test those waters. Not as out there as they can get, but gives you enough of a taste to decide if you’re ready for more.
As stated above, the novel reads will also continue here, with the surprisingly less weird Damien: Omen II later this week.
Till then.