Last time we left off was with the success of The Omen in 1976. As one of the top ten grossing movies of its year and with it ending with Damien still loose in the world, it was a pretty safe bet that 20th Century Fox was going to try and get a sequel off the ground.
Flash forward to 1978: despite Richard Donner and David Seltzer both bowing out, the second movie pushed forward under the momentum of the previous movie's producer, Harvey Bernhard – jumping ahead seven years to see a teenage Damien coming into his own at military school.
It's the charming story of Damien coming of age on vacation at a seaside villa--
Nah, this is just for the intro.
Would be an interesting way to play a horror movie though.
This is one of those films where, even before this rewatch, something about it has felt off to me. Not in a ‘this is awful!’ way, just…it doesn’t feel like it works as well as it could. This may be the first time I’ve tried to put my finger on exactly why.
The best way I think I can sum up my problems with this movie is to call back to my thoughts on the previous movie, specifically regarding how it balances its general character drama with its horror aspects. Yes, at the center is Gregory Peck and the mystery of who this strange child he’s adopted is – but the journey to find that out is still couched in sinister attack dogs, unmarked ancient graveyards, deformed priests, and cryptic prophecies that keep the whole thing firmly entrenched in the realm of horror.
Of those elements, the last has something of a walk-on role in this sequel, and many of the rest of the trappings are either completely absent or substituted for less impressive equivalents.
I’m trying not to make too many comparison points here, but one that illustrates the point well would be in the first ‘evil’ of each movie (save for Damien’s opening, which promises a higher stakes movie than it ultimately delivers.) In the first movie, it’s the Thorn’s nanny hanging herself at Damien’s birthday – a grim little note that gets just a little setup before paying off in a horrific fashion as she steps off the roof, proudly declaring “It’s all for you!” In Damien, the equivalent moment is the departure of Sylvia Sydney’s character, literally driven to a heart attack in her room by a sinister raven who acts as this movie’s proxy for Damien’s dog.
"I won't say it. Don't even start with that 'Quoth the' nonsense, because I'm not doing it!"
The raven is probably the closest thing this movie allows itself to have in terms of any sort of demonic influence for much of its run time – and even then, save for one admittedly well-done moment of directly attacking someone, the raven mostly seems to exist as a visual cue for ‘Hey! It’s the Devil! And he’s doing stuff!’
Instead, we spend most of the time either going back and forth between Damien and his cousin at military school or intrigues at Thorn Enterprises as people try to either warn the new heads of the family – William Holden and Lee Grant doing an amiable enough job with what they’re given – and being ignored. It’s like the movie keeps itching to break back into being a horror story, only to stop itself, so even the character deaths in many cases feel like a step down.
Why this movie feels so reluctant to lean into the horror, I’m not entirely certain of. What information I have found of the behind the scenes certainly posits several theories - the director was replaced within the first few weeks with his successor being chosen for the cited ability to keep a production on time and under budget - but no definitive smoking gun. In either case, the result is a movie that feels more like two dramas that occasionally cross paths with some deaths involved.
This may be the most overtly demonic the sequel movies let Damien be.
Soak it in, cause it's angry glaring from here on out.
Unfortunately, I’m reluctant to even say they work especially well as dramas. The cast are doing well enough for what’s given to them, but many of the characters feel incomplete, with too much either vaguely inferred or simply cut out entirely for reasons that, again, I can’t link to a direct source.
One of the biggest examples of this comes in what’s supposed to be a turning point in the movie – Damien finally becoming aware of his own role as the Antichrist and what this means for him. On paper, it’s an interesting idea to play with – a humanizing moment for the son of Satan realizing his destiny is basically being forced on him. The problem as far as this movie goes is, it’s never properly set up. There’s the signs of it in the script, but they needed either a rewrite or a director more willing to really bring those out in both the scenes and the performances.
As the finished film presents it, Damien goes from just wondering why all these adults are talking about potential to him – which he doesn’t seem all that upset about as much as he is confused – to a crash course on Revelations, to freaking out briefly after the fact, and finally acceptance within the space of maybe a day or two. The movie gives us the beats and marks of the plot arc but doesn’t do the heavy lifting necessary to make it work, making Damien’s eventual turn to evil into more of a ‘because reasons’ shift. It’s tempting to lay that all on Johnathan Scott Taylor’s performance in the titular role, but he’s not bad at playing as a ‘normal’ kid and the finished ‘evil’ mode. It’s mostly the emotionally heavy material in the middle where he seems at a loss as to what to do, and to be fair to him, given how vague the movie is with his character’s journey, I can’t fault him entirely for that.
Total disclosure, I went through numerous different variations of how to make a Devilman Crybaby joke - purely on that title - about this scene.
It's out of respect for you all that I went with none of them.
If there is any one person who could be called the MVP for this movie, however, it’s Jerry Goldsmith. Given how well his score on the first was received, it feels like if he wanted to, he could have simply kicked back and just reworked Ave Satani several times over this time around. That he not only doesn’t do that, but actively avoids trying to reuse much of the old score, repurposing a few motifs but ultimately making this its own effort, speaks particularly well for how much the man does at trying to keep the horror element going in this series.
I can’t say I regret rewatching this. As horror sequels go, it’s one I’d still put over quite a few, and if nothing else, I do feel a bit better on finally giving this a more thorough watch to really sort of my thoughts on it. It’s still a flawed movie that, for some reason, seems as reluctant as its lead to embrace its evil side, but the occasions when it lives up to its potential are a welcome saving grace.
I’m especially thankful at finally putting my finger on those shortcomings because some of them will be coming up again next time when we come to the end (…okay, let me stop laughing for a second) of the series with the increasingly misnamed The Final Conflict.
Come on back, soon.
We'll be here!
Welcome back to the reading room.
"...suddenly this is all making sense. Where the Hell was all this when I was asking for motivation?"
That was the mentality I went into this one with anyway. To my surprise, I found myself disappointed two times over when I emerged from the other side.
The first disappointment, as you might have guessed from this intro – this book is surprisingly low on the weirdness compared to the first. It does take a few elements from the novel, but Joseph Howard – in his only entry into this series based on the script by Stanley Mann and Michael Hodges – actually plays them pretty reasonably in this, avoiding things like the weird grindhouse style backstory I included snapshots of last time.
Which is where we come to the second disappointment – compared to the movie it’s adapted from, this book is…actually pretty good. I’d even argue in some regards it’s better than the movie version.
Part of this is for the admittedly predictable reason that, like many movie novelizations, Howard gets to flesh out a lot of the characters here, being able to go more into backstories and conveying feelings here than the movie does.
As a sidenote here – if anyone happens to know a resource for reading the original screenplay for this, please drop me a line. I tried finding a copy to compare to get a sense of how much of what’s making this good is Howard punching up the story and how much is things that were in the script but, for some reason or other, were left out of the film.
The biggest of these, as you can also likely guess by now, is the horror. This version of the story feels much more willing to embrace the fact that this is a story about the son of Satan and the supernatural elements that would lead to. Right from the start it even establishes a narrative rule that the movie kind of wants to play by but never actually finds a way to work in: the idea that the Antichrist will come into his powers when he turns thirteen, a bit of information that would put a good deal more perspective and impact onto Damien’s arc in the movie if they had acknowledged it.
That omission is just the first of several elements where the movie’s loss becomes the book’s gain where Damien’s evolution is concerned. Many of the character interactions that result from this are given considerably more narrative weight in this version, either through the characters actually being fleshed out more - Paul Buher is revealed to be a part of the coven watching over Damien, giving his talk with Damien greater significance as well as making the drama and ‘accidents’ of Thorn Industries far more relevant than the film let them be – or just actually taking the time and effort to explore what’s already there in greater detail – the cracks between Damien and Mark start forming prior to the latter learns who his cousin truly is, and their final conversation takes a greater emotional toll on both parties.
"I know I don't really get to do much with this movie, but keep reading the books - I turn into kind of a big deal!"
Even outside of the greater story, this version is more willing to lean into the horror aspects of individual scenes. Damien’s presented as having more control of his powers as he comes into his own, with new scenes suggesting several of the later deaths are being affected by his exerting his influence over them – one of which, compared to the movie take, offers a completely different, and honestly, more interesting version of the ending.
I know I already pointed out the scene once, but the confrontation between Damien and Mark in this version is also stronger as a moment of Damien’s demonic influence. It feels weird to say, but even the way Howard sets and presents the scene compared to the movie feels more impressive and, dare I say it, cinematic than the product we did get. It’s one of several moments where I came away from the book thinking “why didn’t we get this version in the movie?”
I’ll just say this much now for next time – The Final Conflict does mark a return of some weirdness. From here on out, the final three books are written by Gordon McGill, so the tone will be more consistent as a result.
Having said that, as a small spoiler, this isn’t going to be a ding for the next book. In fact, McGill manages to hit that sweet spot I was hoping for in this series – he gets the level of attention and fleshing out Howard has brought to this book while also working in some of the crazy elements from Seltzer’s original.
Something else to look forward to soon.
Till then.
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