The Omen was a blessed success upon its release, earning a spot among the top 10 highest-grossing films of 1976. One of those ticket buyers was Wes Craven, who had already made his debut with The Last House on the Left and was gearing up for his sophomore film, The Hills Have Eyes.
“I remember thinking, ‘Big studio, won’t have a cutting edge to it. Gregory Peck, how can he be scary? I like him, but.’ And it was. I was totally amazed,” the master of horror recalled in a 2006 DVD special feature in which he waxes poetic about The Omen for some 20 minutes.
“I think [Richard] Donner is just one of our primo filmmakers.” Craven had been watching the future Superman and The Goonies director’s work since his early days helming episodes of classic TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Gilligan’s Island. “Every so often, he just knocks something out of the park with something that will play forever. Omen certainly was that.”
The Omen arrived in a time when boundaries were being pushed in entertainment, just as Craven had done with The Last House on the Left. His controversial effort admonished the media’s misleading representation of death during the Vietnam War by showing violence in all its uncomfortable detail.
“It was just a moment in culture in the ’70s where a lot of taboos were being broken, and that certainly was one where you have a child that’s totally evil. That just by itself is an outrageous idea, because the ending is you want him to kill a child. I think because of the times, with the Vietnam War and everything else, all of us were feeling like, ‘Is this the end times?’ It just feels so insane.”
Craven recognized that The Omen would always be compared to The Exorcist. While Craven also admired William Friedkin’s 1973 masterpiece — Linda Blair starred in his 1978 TV movie Summer of Fear and made a cameo in Scream — he felt that The Omen provided something different for audiences.
“[The Omen] was a delicious scare, as opposed to one that made your hair turn white. The genius of it was that it was definitely a studio presentation by a director who knew how to appeal to the popular audience. But it was very, very classy. It had magnificent montages in it. I mean, some of the things he pulled off in there in order to build tension go way beyond The Exorcist. The Exorcist was much more insular and ended up all just in that room.”
He continued, “When films last a long time, it’s because in some way or another they’re extraordinary, and they are entertainments. Certainly in the case of [The Omen], it was a film that, by staying just a notch away from the extremes of The Exorcist, made itself available to a much, much broader audience. People were able to watch it and be scared, but not repulsed and not just sickened.”
In the film, Robert Thorn (Peck) harbors from his wife, Katherine (Lee Remick), the secret that their son, Damien, is adopted. He believes this to be for everyone’s own good, but his dishonesty proves to be fatal. Parallels can be drawn to the parents in A Nightmare on Elm Street hiding the truth about Freddy Krueger from their children.
“I love stuff like that. It’s all over my movies too; somebody who has a terrible secret, and because they feel guilty about it they don’t convey some vitally important information. To think of something evil inside of your own child puts you in such a primally horrible position, totally believable that they deny it for half the picture, and just can’t believe that anything like that is possible,” Craven noted.
“Never work with animals or children” is an old entertainment adage that The Omen brazenly defies on both counts. Damien Thorn was played by Harvey Spencer Stephens at the tender age of five.
“You had to get that sense of a child that could go from looking at you like a child to somebody that was almost fully mature and was truly evil. It’s not easy to get with a child. The eyes were a very particular kind of gray-slate-blue — very much like the nanny, by the way — and he had the ability to look truly evil, which is not easy for a child. They don’t even have the concept.”
Craven had some experience working with animals — most notably the prominent dog characters in The Hills Have Eyes and its sequel — but he remained in awe of the scene in which the Thorn family’s car is attacked by baboons at the zoo.
“Just to get animals to act — to get those dogs to be as ferocious as they were, to get baboons to react in that sort of mortal terror that they seem to have and then this complete primal outrage they just had to get at this thing and tear it apart — that’s the mark of a director who thinks big and then can pull it off.
“It’s very, very rare. Donner’s one of the few directors I know that can do that. He keeps it extremely human. It’s all built around a very intimate, emotional core of your central characters, but the palette and the canvas is really big.”
David Warner’s performance as photographer Keith Jennings made such an impact on Craven that he later cast the actor as drama teacher Gus Gold in Scream 2. “I always wanted to work with him. He has that sort of bloodhound look to him,” he remarked.
“He was a great character too, and very sympathetic in a way that he was really the only person that you felt like he was totally outside of religion, in a way, and yet he had to begrudgingly admit that there was something there, because it was stalking him at a certain point. He has that very early phenomenon of the markings on the photograph. This is a photographer. He would know that it’s not on the negative.
“To him, it wasn’t faith or charity or any of these sort of abstractions. It was actual markings in his photographs. In the non-human observer, the camera itself, a mechanical thing sees something that you’re not seeing. That’s pretty scary.”
The character’s remarkable decapitation inspired Craven’s most memorable murder set piece not involving Freddy or Ghostface: the basketball-induced head explosion from Deadly Friend.
“David Warner losing his head was one of the great all-time shots in American horrific cinema. It was just such a clever way to kill the guy. So spectacular, and it looked impossible to capture and film everything in that shot, from the aspect of shocking the audience and showing it graphically but tastefully was perfect.”
Craven concluded his praise with his typical soft-spoken eloquence. “It became one of the great delicious treats to watch The Omen, this evil child and everything else in a way that was scary and beautiful to watch and sometimes quite spectacular.
“A guy at the top of his form with a really, really good script and great backup: great musician behind him, great cinematographer, great costume design and production design. Every once in a while that confluence of the perfect movie comes together just like a perfect storm, and this is one of those cases.”
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