The Omen Information

The Omen is a 1976 American suspense horror film directed by Richard Donner. The film stars Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, Harvey Stephens, Billie Whitelaw, Patrick Troughton, Martin Benson and Leo McKern. It is the first film in The Omen series and was scripted by David Seltzer, who also wrote the novel.

A remake, The Omen, was released on June 6, 2006. This date was chosen as a reference to the Number of the Beast (666).

Plot

Wealthy American Ambassador Robert Thorn's (Gregory Peck) wife Kathy (Lee Remick) delivered their baby in a hospital in Rome, but it died shortly after birth. Knowing how much the baby's death would affect her emotionally, he is persuaded by a priest to adopt and substitute another baby whose mother died in childbirth in its place, without revealing the exchange to his wife.

Two years later, Robert Thorn is appointed Ambassador to Great Britain, and the family moves to England. The son, Damien (Harvey Stephens), grows older, and, at his fifth birthday party, a large outdoor event, a news photographer named Keith Jennings (David Warner) is present taking pictures. When Damien is handed off to his mother by his nanny, the nanny sees a black dog, leaves the party, and inexplicably goes up to the roof of their house and hangs herself in front of the crowd. Kathy Thorn blames herself because she took Damien away from her out of jealousy at the attention the crowd gave her while tending Damien earlier.

A new nanny arrives at the Thorn home and introduces herself as Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), who says she had been sent from the agency when they learned that their other nanny had died. She immediately challenges Kathy Thorn's authority when she is instructed to dress and ready Damien to attend a church wedding with them, but she does as she is told.

The Thorns travel to the church, and Damien becomes more fearful as their car approaches the church. He has a violent reaction in which he injures his mother trying to get away. The car pulls away hurridly and while the Thorns discuss Damien's reaction and whether he should be examined by a doctor, they realize he has never been sick a day in his life.

Robert Thorn returns home, and, as he approaches the child's bedroom, the black dog that was outside earlier is now in front of Damien's room, growling. Mrs. Baylock says that they found him outside and she felt that they needed a good watchdog for Damien. Thorn tells the nanny to get rid of the dog.

As Thorn leaves the house, he is badgered by Jennings about circumstances around the previous nanny's death.

Later, in his office, Thorn is visited by a priest, Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who claims to have been present during Damien's birth. He begs Thorn to accept Christ, because only then can he fight the son of the devil. He tells Thorn that Damien was born of a jackal and will kill everyone around him. The priest is escorted out by security, and Jennings takes note of the visitor, snapping pictures. While developing the pictures of the day, Jennings notices the priest has a dark object like a javelin over his head in the pictures he appears in, but the anomaly doesn't appear anywhere else on the film.

The next scene shows Kathy Thorn with Damien, traveling through a safari park, and various animals react with fear or anger towards Damien. Meanwhile, Robert Thorn is followed by the priest that met with him earlier and is pulled aside at a public event; the priest tells him that his wife is in danger and that he needs to talk to him. Jennings is also at the event, taking pictures. The pictures again show the dark anomaly above the priest.

When Thorn meets with the priest again, he is told that Damien is the son of the devil and will kill his wife's unborn child as well as his wife. The priest instructs Thorn to go to Megiddo to find a man who can tell him how to kill the son of the devil. Thorn thinks he is crazy and says never to bother him again. As the priest leaves, a sudden rainstorm comes up, and the priest is impaled in a freak accident while trying to get into a nearby church.

Thorn goes home and his wife tells him she is pregnant. Startled by this news, he also receives a phone call telling him to examine the newspaper's cover story about the priest's bizarre death. Kathy has been agitated by Damien of late, causing her to visit a therapist, and tells Robert she wants to terminate the pregnancy. Disturbed by this, Thorn decides to go to the therapist to discuss Kathy’s concerns and on his way back, Kathy has an accident that causes her to miscarry.

Jennings calls for Robert Thorn to meet him, and he shows him the photographic anomalies, and Thorn tells him about the priest's warnings. Jennings said he is now involved because he found an anomaly on a picture of himself in which he has no neck. He takes Thorn to the priest's residence, which he has access to due to the police investigation into his death, and they find an odd collection of crosses and Bible pages everywhere.

They travel to Italy together to find the monk that gave him Damien at the hospital. The monk, now severely injured due to a fire that burned the hospital down, writes out the name of a cemetery that lies in ruins, the former site of a shrine dedicated to the devil-god Techulca. Thorn calls his wife to tell her he wants her to leave London and travel to Rome.

At the cemetery, they find the gravesites of both Damien's mother and the Thorns' baby—the mother's grave contains a jackal's remains, and the other grave contains a baby whose skull was crushed. Thorn realizes his baby was murdered in order to swap its place with Damien. As they leave the cemetery, they are attacked by a pack of dogs led by a black dog, and manage to escape. Back at the hotel, Thorn receives a phone call and finds out his wife has apparently jumped to her death from her hospital room. In his grief, he tells Jennings that he wants to go to Megiddo and that he wants Damien to die.

They travel to Jerusalem and find that Megiddo is an archaeologic dig, almost completely underground. A man appears and takes them to Bugenhagen, the man the priest told Thorn to find. He insists on talking to Thorn alone. He gives Thorn seven special daggers, explaining their significance and how to kill Damien. He also tells Thorn that Damien will have the mark of the Beast, three sixes, somewhere on his body.

Thorn and Jennings leave, and Thorn has a change of heart, flinging the bundle of knives away saying he won't kill a child. Jennings goes after the knives, saying he will do it, and is decapitated by a flying pane of glass catapulted from the back of a runaway truck.

Thorn flies home, with the knives, and battles the black dog and nanny as he shaves Damien's head to look for the mark of the Beast. He fights them off and carries Damien to his car, where they follow him and continue to attack. He manages to seriously injure both and drives Damien to a church.

Damien panics and struggles as Thorn drags him to the church. Meanwhile, the police have seen Thorn fighting the nanny and dog and follow him to the church. As Thorn raises his hand with a knife to kill Damien, the police shoot him.

The final scene shows Damien, now heir to Thorn Enterprises, attending the Thorns' funeral in the care of Thorn's old college roommate, the President of the United States of America.

Cast

• Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn
• Lee Remick as Katherine Thorn
• David Warner as Keith Jennings
• Billie Whitelaw as Mrs Baylock
• Harvey Stephens as Damien Thorn
• Patrick Troughton as Father Brennan
• Martin Benson as Father Spiletto
• Leo McKern as Carl Bugenhagen
• Robert Rietty as Monk
• Tommy Duggan as Priest
• John Stride as The Psychiatrist
• Anthony Nicholls as Dr Becker
• Holly Palance as Nanny
• Roy Boyd as Reporter
• Freda Dowie as Nun
• Sheila Raynor as Mrs Horton
• Robert MacLeod as Horton
• Bruce Boa as Thorn's Aide

Alternate endings

Two endings were filmed. The original ending featured a child's casket with Robert and Katherine's, indicating Damien was also killed,^[1] but studio head Alan Ladd, Jr. said that this was a mistake, because you cannot kill the devil. He gave Donner additional funds to refilm the ending.

Music

An original score for the film, including the movie's theme song Ave Satani, was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, for which he received the only Oscar of his long career. The score features a strong choral segment, with a foreboding Latin chant. The refrain to the chant is, "Sanguis bibimus, corpus edimus, tolle corpus Satani" (Latin, "We drink the blood, we eat the flesh, raise the body of Satan"), interspersed with cries of "Ave Satani!" and "Ave Versus Christus" (Latin, "Hail, Satan!" and "Hail, Antichrist!"). Aside from the choral work, the score includes lyrical themes portraying the pleasant home life of the Thorn family, which are contrasted with the more disturbing scenes of the family's confrontation with evil.

1. "Ave Satani" – 2:32
2. "New Ambassador" – 2:33
3. "Killer's Storm" – 2:51
4. "Sad Message" – 1:42
5. "Demise of Mrs. Baylock" – 2:52
6. "Don't Let Him" – 2:48
7. "Piper Dreams" – 2:39
8. "Fall" – 3:42
9. "Safari Park" – 2:04
10. "Dog's Attack" – 5:50
11. "Homecoming" – 2:43
12. "Altar" – 2:00

On October 9, 2001, a deluxe version of the soundtrack was released with eight additional tracks.

1. "Ave Satani" – 2:35
2. "On This Night" – 2:36
3. "The New Ambassador" – 2:34
4. "Where Is He?" – :56
5. "I Was There" – 2:27
6. "Broken Vows" – 2:12
7. "Safari Park" – 3:24
8. "A Doctor, Please" – 1:44
9. "The Killer Storm" – 2:54
10. "The Fall" – 3:45
11. "Don't Let Him" – 2:49
12. "The Day He Died" – 2:14
13. "The Dog's Attack" – 5:54
14. "A Sad Message" – 1:44
15. "Beheaded" – 1:49
16. "The Bed" – 1:08
17. "666" – :44
18. "The Demise of Mrs. Baylock" – 2:54
19. "The Altar" – 2:07
20. "The Piper Dreams" – 2:41

Reception

Box office performance

The Omen was a massive commercial success in the United States. It grossed $4,273,886 in its opening weekend and $60,922,980 domestically on a tight budget of $2,800,000.^[2][3] The film was the fourth highest grossing movie of 1976.

Critical reception

The Omen received mostly positive reviews from critics and is considered by many as one of the best films of 1976, as well as one of the best horror films ever made.^[4][5][6] The film holds an 84% "Fresh" rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes.^[7] The movie boasted a particularly disturbing scene, in which a character willingly and joyfully hangs herself at a birthday party attended by young children. It also features a violent decapitation scene (caused by a horizontal sheet of plate glass), one of mainstream Hollywood's first: "If there were a special Madame Defarge Humanitarian Award for best decapitation," wrote Kim Newman in Nightmare Movies (1988), "this lingering, slow-motion sequence would get my vote."

On the flip side, The Omen appeared in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time 1978 by Harry Medved (co-author of the Golden Turkey Awards) and Randy Dreyfuss.

The Omen received recognition from the American Film Institute. It was ranked number 81 on 100 Years... 100 Thrills, a list of America's most heart-pounding films.^[8] and the score by Jerry Goldsmith was nominated for AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores.^[9] The film was ranked #16 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments.^[10] Similarly, the Chicago Film Critics' Association named it the 31st scariest film ever made.^[11]

Awards and nominations

The film received numerous accolades for its acting, writing, music and technical achievements. Jerry Goldsmith won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and received an additional nomination for Best Original Song for "Ave Satani". Goldsmith's score was also nominated for a Grammy award for Best Album of Original Score Written for a Motion Picture. Billie Whitelaw was nominated for a BAFTA film award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. She was also awarded the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress. The film also received recognition by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Harvey Stephens was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut – Male. David Seltzer's original screenplay was nominated by the Writers Guild of America for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen and for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture. The film was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film. Gilbert Taylor won the Best Cinematography Award from the British Society of Cinematographers.^[12]

Parodies

The movie was spoofed in Mad Magazine as "The Ominous" and on Saturday Night Live as "The Ointment". In 1998, Demian appeared in a episode of SOUTH PARK, where, in the beginning confronts jesus christ, but ends making friends with the south park gang, excepting Cartman.

Novels

• David Seltzer, The Omen. (Futura, 1976).
• Joseph Howard, Damien: Omen II. (Futura, 1978).
• Gordon McGill, Omen III: The Final Conflict. (Futura, 1980).
• Gordon McGill, Omen IV: Armageddon 2000. (Futura, 1983).
• Gordon McGill, Omen V: The Abomination. (Futura, 1985).

Both the movie and the novelization were written by David Seltzer (the book preceded the movie by two weeks as an effective marketing gimmick). For the book, Seltzer took liberties with his own material, augmenting plot points and character backgrounds and changing details (such as character names — Holly becomes Chessa Whyte, Keith Jennings becomes Huber Jennings, Father Brennan becomes Father Edgardo Emilio Tassone, et cetera). The second and third novels were novelized forms of their respective movies and more-or-less reflected movie continuity. Interestingly, Gordon McGill retroactively changed the time period of The Omen to the 1950s, in order to make The Final Conflict (featuring an adult Damien) take place explicitly in the 1980s. Although neither the first Omen movie nor its novelisation mention what year the story takes place, it can be assumed that its setting was intended to be the year the movie was released (i.e. 1976).

The fourth novel, Omen IV: Armageddon 2000, was entirely unrelated to the fourth movie, but continued the story of Omen III. Its premise is based on the one-night stand between Damien Thorn and Kate Reynolds in Omen III. This affair included an act of sodomy and thence Kate gave the (rectal) "birth" of another diabolical entity called "the abomination" (presumably after the "abomination of desolation" from the book of Daniel) in Omen IV. This novel attempted to patch one of the Omen series' more glaring plot-holes, namely the question of whether the Antichrist could be slain by a single one of the "Seven Sacred Daggers of Megiddo" (which occurred in Omen III) or only by all of them (as stated in the first book and movie). The solution reached was that one dagger could kill Damien's form, but not his soul. This explanation was also explicitly stated in the first movie. Damien's acolyte Paul Buher (played by Robert Foxworth in the second movie and mentioned, though not seen, in the third) is a major character in the fourth book and achieves redemption in its climax.

This story was concluded in the fifth novel, Omen V: The Abomination. The novel begins with a "memoriam" listing all of the characters who had been killed throughout the saga up to that point, and which states Damien's life as having taken place in the period of 1950–1982. The story ends with the death of Damien's son, and the character Jack Mason deciding to chronicle Damien's story in book-form. The opening lines he writes are exactly the same words which begin David Seltzer's novelization of the first film, bringing the series full-circle.

See also

• List of fictional Antichrists

References

1. ^ The Curse of the Omen television program
2. ^ "Box Office Information for The Omen". Box Office Mojo. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=omen.htm. Retrieved 2010-05-21.
3. ^ "Box Office and Business Information for The Omen". IMDb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075005/business. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
4. ^ "The Greatest Films of 1976". AMC Filmsite.org. http://www.filmsite.org/1976.html. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
5. ^ "The Best Movies of 1976 by Rank". Films101.com. http://www.films101.com/y1976r.htm. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
6. ^ "Most Popular Feature Films Released in 1976". IMDb.com. http://www.imdb.com/year/1976. Retrieved May 22, 2010.
7. ^ "The Omen Movie Reviews, Pictures". Rotten Tomatoes. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1015517-omen/. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
8. ^ "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills". American Film Institute. http://www.afi.com/Docs/tvevents/pdf/thrills100.pdf. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
9. ^ AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores Ballot
10. ^ "Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments". web.archive.org. Archived from the original on October 30, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071030070540/http://www.bravotv.com/The_100_Scariest_Movie_Moments/index.shtml. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
11. ^ "Chicago Critics’ Scariest Films". AltFilmGuide.com. http://www.altfg.com/blog/hollywood/chicago-critics-scariest-films/. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
12. ^ "The Omen: Award Wins and Nominations". IMDb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075005/awards. Retrieved May 21, 2010.

External links

• The Omen at the Internet Movie Database
• The Omen at the TCM Movie Database
• The Omen at AllRovi
• The Omen at Box Office Mojo
• The Omen at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Omen script

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