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This article is about the 1976 film. For the remake, see The Omen (2006 film).
| The Omen | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical poster | |
| Directed by | Richard Donner |
| Produced by | Harvey Bernhard |
| Written by | David Seltzer |
| Starring | Gregory Peck Lee Remick David Warner Patrick Troughton Billie Whitelaw Harvey Stephens Leo McKern Martin Benson |
| Music by | Jerry Goldsmith |
| Cinematography | Gilbert Taylor |
| Editing by | Stuart Baird |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) |  June 6, 1976 June 25, 1976 December 23, 1976
|
| Running time | 111 min. |
| Country | United Kingdom United States |
| Language | English |
| Followed by | Damien: Omen II |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Omen is a 1976 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 penned the novelization.
Though part of a cycle of similarly-themed movies, The Omen has gained prestige over time for a number of reasons: its respectability (as a profitable major-studio film with renowned actors), its seriousness (it plays as a contemporary thriller, rather than with the knowing excesses of certain aspects of the horror genre), and the originality of the movie\'s Jerry Goldsmith score.
The movie followed a cycle of \'demonic child\' movies, such as Rosemary\'s Baby and The Exorcist, and was itself followed by sequels (see below) and a number of copycat films such as the Italian-made Kirk Douglas movie Holocaust 2000.
A remake, The Omen, was released on June 6, 2006.
Contents |
The premise of The Omen comes from the end times prophecies of Christianity. The story, set in Fulham, England; tells of the childhood of Damien Thorn, who was switched at birth with the stillborn child of a wealthy American diplomat with only the husband\'s knowledge, in order to keep it from affecting his wife. Damien\'s family is unaware that he is actually the offspring of Satan and destined to become the Antichrist. His father, Robert Thorn (named Jeremy Thorn in the original book), eventually begins to realize this with the help of a photographer named Keith Jennings, after numerous people connected to Damien die in tragic accidents. After Damien\'s first nanny hangs herself at Damien\'s fifth birthday party, a new nanny, named Mrs Baylock, arrives to tend to him. A priest who knows about Damien begins stalking Robert, and is eventually the one to first point out that Damien is the Antichrist, and that he intends to kill everyone in his way. The priest later dies in a bizarre accident (he is impaled by a church spire hit by lightning), and Katherine Thorn, Damien\'s mother, suffers a fall after being knocked over a railing by Damien. With Katherine in the hospital, Robert and Keith journey to Israel to find a man named Bugenhagen, an archaeologist who knows how to stop the Antichrist. While there, however, Katherine is killed by Mrs Baylock, who pushes her from the window in her hospital room. Robert learns that he has to stab his son with seven special daggers to prevent the end of the world. Horrified by this, he tosses the daggers aside, only for Keith to run and pick them back up. As he does, a truck rolls down the hill he is on and, seeing it at the last second, crashes and sends a glass pane into his neck, violently decapitating him. Robert returns to London with the daggers, intending to kill his son.
Returning to his mansion, Robert finds Mrs Baylock\'s guard dog awaiting him. He manages to lock it in a cellar and then goes upstairs to check whether Damien has the "666" birthmark (as explained by Bugenhagen). Seeing it on Damien\'s scalp after cutting away some hair, Robert has no doubt about Damien\'s true identity.
Damien\'s Satanic nanny attacks him from behind. After violently wrestling with her, Robert puts her out of play temporarily with a flying kick in the face. As he drags Damien downstairs, Damien kicks and screams at Robert. Bumping into a light fixture while descending the staircase, Robert and Damien tumble down the stairs, knocking Damien temporarily unconscious. As Robert prepares to exit the home, Mrs Baylock re-appears and the two struggle in the kitchen before Robert finally kills her with a roasting fork to the neck. Robert then exits, tosses a limp Damien into the front passenger seat of the car and proceeds to go to the church where he plans to kill Damien.
As he bursts through the gates of his mansion, his security is alerted and chases his car, followed by the police. Robert drags Damien to the church and, as he is about to stab him on an altar with one of the knives as directed by Bugenhagen, the police arrive and shoot Robert.
The movie ends with Robert\'s funeral where Damien is seen holding the president\'s hand. The camera lowers to Damien, who looks at the camera and gives an evil smile in one of the movie\'s most famous moments before the credits roll.
The Omen was characterized by the chillingly effective use of symbolism, such as the birthmark of the number 666 on Damien\'s scalp, the effective use of crosses and statuary for foreshadowing, and the wallpapering of a room with pages from a Bible to ward off evil spirits.
| Character | Cause of death |
|---|---|
| Holly, Damien\'s nanny | After an encounter with the demon rottweiller, she happily hangs herself from the roof of the Thorns\' house. The dog hypnotized her to do this so that Mrs. Baylock would become Damien\'s new nanny. |
| Father Brennan | Impaled by a church spire that was knocked down by a lightning bolt. |
| The Thorns\' unborn child | Dies following Kathy\'s fall from the landing. |
| Father Spiletto | Dies naturally and possibly from the damage caused to his body 5 years ago in the fire that destroyed the original hospital in Rome. |
| The Thorn\'s Firstborn Son | Was killed by a fracture in the skull as soon as he was born, it was then called an accident so the Thorns would adopt Damien. The body was found buried in the grave next to the demon that gave birth to Damien in a cemetery 50 miles north of Rome. |
| Kathy Thorn | Pushed out of hospital window by Mrs. Baylock and lands on ambulance below. |
| Keith Jennings | Decapitated by a pane of glass that slid off the back of a truck. |
| Mrs. Baylock | Stabbed in the neck by Robert Thorn. |
| Robert Thorn | Shot by diplomatic police when he tries to kill Damien. |
| The Omen | ||
|---|---|---|
| Soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith | ||
| Released | 1976 | |
| Genre | Film music | |
| Length | 34:16 | |
| Label | 20th Century Fox | |
| Producer | Jerry Goldsmith | |
| Professional reviews | ||
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Original album: Deluxe Edition: |
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An original score for the film 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 "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.
On October 9, 2001 a deluxe version of the soundtrack was released with eight additional tracks.
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."
In 2005 a documentary entitled "The Curse of \'The Omen\'" was shown on British television. The production of The Omen was plagued with a series of incidents which some members of the crew attributed to the operation of a curse. They wondered if these events were due to supernatural forces trying to prevent the filming of the movie.TV Documentary "The Curse of \'The Omen\'". www.imdb.com/title/tt0487890/ Instances include the following:
The name "Damien" sounds vaguely like the English "demon," but is not at all etymologically related. Damien is the French form of the English name Damian (Latin Damianus), popular as the name of, ironically, a martyred Christian saint of the third century (see Sts. Cosmas and Damian). Another prominent Damien was Father Damien of Hawaii, who died while establishing leper colonies there — a saintly rather than demonic figure. Damien is also the first name of Father Karras in The Exorcist. The success of the Omen series inspired Marvel Comics to revive the Son of Satan series, whose eponymous hero has the civilian name of Daimon Hellstrom. Hellstrom, despite his ancestry, wielded his pitchfork for the side of good — at least until the end of this series, and a revival under the slightly-altered name of Hellstorm. Marvel Comics reportedly promised not to revive the "Son of Satan" name, in response to pressure from Christians concerned about glorifying Satanism. In June 2006, a new Hellstrom limited series was announced for the Marvel MAX line of adult comics, to debut in October of that year.http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=7468
Both the movie and the novelisation 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 Haber Jennings, Father Brennan becomes Father Edgardo Emilio Tassone, etc). The second and third novels were novelizations of their respective movies, and reflected movie continuity, more or less. 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 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 physical body, 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 the exact same words which begin David Seltzer\'s novelization of the first film - bringing the series full-circle.
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Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones. |
The film\'s original ending had Damien dying and three coffins at the funeral instead of just two. This was changed when Donner came up with the film\'s now famous scene.
| The Omen Series | |
|---|---|
| Original Films | The Omen • Damien: Omen II • Omen III: The Final Conflict |
| Remakes | The Omen (2006) |
| Other films | Omen IV: The Awakening |
| Characters | Damien Thorn |
| Films directed by Richard Donner |
|---|
| X-15 • Salt and Pepper • Twinky • The Omen • Superman • Inside Moves • The Toy • The Goonies • Ladyhawke • Lethal Weapon • Scrooged • Lethal Weapon 2 • Radio Flyer • Lethal Weapon 3 • Maverick • Assassins • Conspiracy Theory • Lethal Weapon 4 • Timeline • 16 Blocks • Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut |
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