| The Omen (1976) |
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| Director: | Richard Donner |
| Writers: | David Seltzer |
| Starring: | Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, and Billie Whitelaw |
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The Plot: While visiting Rome, Robert Thorn’s (Gregory Peck) wife, Katherine (Lee Remick), goes into labor with their first child. Unfortunately, the child dies shortly after being born, but Robert is approached by a priest, Father Spiletto (Martin Benson), who offers him the chance to substitute the child with a newborn orphan whose mother died on the same day. Knowing that the death of their only child would tear Katherine apart, Robert agrees to the switch and decides that he and his wife will raise this child as their own. They decide to name the child Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens), and soon they are off to England for Robert’s position as a US Ambassador. Their first years together as a family are everything that this couple could have ever hoped for. When Damien starts to get older though, strange things begin to happen. At Damien’s fifth birthday party, his nanny commits suicide while proclaiming that she does it out of love for him. The new nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), arrives under mysterious circumstances and moves a very scary rottweiler in with the family. After a short while, Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), from the same hospital/monastery where Damien was born, shows up with grave news for Robert. He claims that Damien is the son of the devil, the looming antichrist who has been foretold to bring grave destruction to the world. To back up this story, Robert also meets photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) who has several frightening photographs that also point to some form of supernatural terror afflicting the Thorn family. Could all of this be a scam, or is young Damien truly the antichrist? |
| The Review |
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Before turning the movie on and watching it for the first time in nearly a decade, I knew that I would have a slight bias towards the movie. As I mentioned above, The Omen was a film that I grew up watching. In the same way that Friday the 13th had never petrified me as a kid, neither did The Omen, but it was always a refreshing film to sit down and watch. I was always enthralled by it, and I loved it for introducing me to Gregory Peck. While sitting back down to familiarize myself with the movie, I did find certain segments within the movie to be rather dead, I can’t deny this. While watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder how other audiences, viewers who did not grow up watching the movie, might react to the pacing of the film. Yet, every time I started to let my mind wander, I found myself slowly falling back into the clutches of Donner’s growing tension. A tension that is built and highlighted by what is arguably one of the very best scores in film history. “Ave Satani,” by Jerry Goldsmith, is easily one of the most unnerving and over-the-top scores ever put to celluloid. Despite being a massive clashing of sounds that essentially scream “Danger!” to the viewer, Donner uses the score to great effect and only pulls out the big guns when necessary. Without this amazing score, what would this movie be? A shell of its self, to be sure.
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| The Conclusion |
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