Harefooted Halloween: The Omen

What I Liked: Gregory Peck’s performance is very nicely done.  You can see how happy he is with his wife and new son and his career is going in the right direction and even though he’s perhaps a bit stuffy he’s on top of the world.  That is until the devil completely shatters his reality.  Then Peck has to show disbelief in all the bad shit that keeps happening around him, slow acceptance that he’s raising the antichrist and finally full commitment to murdering a five year old who he’s known and treated during that entire period as his son.  That’s a big swing and he kills it.  Peck was dealing with the suicide of his own son the year before and my guess is he gravitated toward this material as a way to work through his personal grief.  Between this and the audacious Boys From Brazil a couple of years later Peck was part of some wild projects during this time.

Most of the deaths are presented in kind of a blunt matter of fact way.  Especially the first one involving Damien’s nanny hanging herself in front of a pack of young children gathered for Damien’s fifth birthday party.  It comes out of nowhere with an exclamation point when the rope tugs and she smashes into the window behind her.  This movie has several famous death scenes but this is the one that creeps me out a tad.  And generally the camera doesn’t linger on the corpses either.  They’re like a flash of disturbance which may make them more impactful.

Damien doesn’t speak almost at all.  That keeps the kid much more peculiar and off putting.  If he said a bunch of bratty stuff and/or giggled all throughout he would simply be an annoying little shit not unlike many others you’ve seen before.  Having him dart these dagger eyes and ghoulishly display an occasional smile is more effective.

The filmmakers were smart about what to reveal when.  They could’ve kept the whole enchilada a secret until the end but it’s good we’re in the know from the top about Peck’s son dying right after being born and Damien being adopted.  That’s a decent weird enough history to fuel the majority of the run time.  There are still diabolic twists to be had so there’s room to expand.

While heavy handed the Oscar winning score by Jerry Goldsmith is undeniably badass.  You got a booming orchestra, a driving tempo and a chorus vigorously chanting in Latin.  Very ominous.

Spoiler on this last bit in case you managed to avoid how this forty five plus year old movie ends.  Kudos to the filmmakers for going with the downer ending.  I mean they had to, didn’t they?  They weren’t going to butcher a five year old in a mainstream picture so the only way to conclude the story is to let him live.  Maybe you could try to chain him up somehow or dispel him into the mystical unknown but director Richard Donner (16 Blocks) didn’t want overtly supernatural elements in here.  He wanted to cast enough uncertainty in your mind that this could all be Peck’s delusions.  However, I don’t think he succeeded terribly well in this regard because…

What I Didn’t Like: This isn’t a huge gripe but they leave absolutely no doubt that Damien is the devil’s offspring.  They could’ve made it more ambiguous mainly by severely scaling back the nanny character’s evil as fuck demeanor and behavior.  All the other shit is more coincidental or just plain strange.

To expand on the previous paragraph, if Damien and his nanny were more modest in their approach they wouldn’t arouse as much suspicion.  Their bloodlust and insistence on having their own way from the start almost fucks up the devil’s plans for world domination.  We’re talking about the big one here, Armageddon, the apocalypse, judgment day, etc.  You don’t wanna blow it.  So as a result they look a touch idiotic by not being able to control their malevolent urges.

Overall Impressions: The Omen is considered a classic and still rock solid after all these years.  I wouldn’t say it’s an absolute favorite of mine though due to some ham fisted execution.  With Damien’s scornful glares, how the nanny keeps directly disobeying her charge’s parents, the 666 birthmark and an over the top gothic score the film veers dangerously close to schlock territory a few times.  At the same time that’s sort of the appeal.  If it were too reserved it could get boring and if it were more gratuitous it could get cartoony.

Unavoidably this movie gets compared to The Exorcist which came out three years earlier.  They both share plots about a child either taken over by a demon or is perhaps the devil himself.  Another one you could throw into the mix is Rosemary’s Baby to round out your three shades of demonic kid pics.  Rosemary is more Hitchcockian where you have no idea if supernatural shit is afoot or if this poor woman is going crazy or is being abused or what.  The Exorcist is an extreme sorta gross out film that goes for shock value with nasty makeup effects and having a little girl say and do awful things.  So the devil is definitely real in that one and you witness what he’s capable of first hand.  Finally, The Omen is a mixture of the two.  It’s a down the middle horror thriller where they do everything they can to tell you this little boy is the antichrist without him actually doing anything nefarious.  The supernatural probably exists but it’s not clear.  It’s not as outrageous but not as silly as The Exorcist and not as mysterious but not as indirect as Rosemary’s Baby.

And we need that straight shooter.  I like The Omen.  It’s pretty good.