The Omen Franchise: Why It Never Lived Up to the Potential of the First Movie

I’m a major fan of The Omen. Now, let’s be clear about what I’m actually saying here—I’m a fan of the 1976 Richard Donner film about the Antichrist. And yeah, I’m even a bit of a fan of the first two sequels. What I’m not a fan of is the abysmal, unnecessary hack-job remake that came out in 2006. The First Omen—somewhat better—but if I’m being honest, nothing has come close to living up to the promise of that original film.

You see, the original Omen teased something truly terrifying—the Antichrist being present in the upper echelons of world power. And what’s the most powerful position on the planet? For better or worse, it’s the President of the United States. The first Omen hinted that this was perhaps Damien Thorn’s destiny, yet all of the subsequent films chickened out from following the series to its inevitable, hopeless conclusion. As such, we missed out on what could have been one of the best horror franchises of all time, as The Omen, unlike The Exorcist, actually left the door open for more.

So let’s go back a bit and examine what made the original Omen so great. While some would say The Omen was an original idea—and it was—it can’t be denied that its path to the big screen was paved by the release of 1973’s The Exorcist, which was not only the most popular horror film of all time when it came out but one of the most popular films ever made. As such, everyone wanted to make a movie about the devil, but no one had a better idea than producer Harvey Bernhard. A mover and shaker who made his bones in Hollywood producing the ultra-successful blaxploitation movie The Mack, Bernhard had the germ of the idea for The Omen and hired writer David Seltzer, who spent a year turning it into a screenplay. The concept was great—the American ambassador to England has a son who just so happens to be the Antichrist.

Enter director Richard Donner, who was a long way from becoming the A-list filmmaker he would later be. At the time, he was a middle-aged TV director who had made a few low-budget movies, including Salt and Pepper with Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford (cue the “I’m Pepper, he’s Salt” line from the trailer). This would be his first major movie, and initially, Donner favored ambiguity—the idea that the audience should never know for sure whether or not Damien was the Antichrist. Of course, that was thrown out, as the movie makes it explicit that he’s the son of Satan, literally born from a jackal.

Besides Donner and the screenplay, there were arguably two ingredients that made it a classic—the cast and the soundtrack. Chief among the brilliant casting choices was Gregory Peck, who was a real coup to play Robert Thorn, the ambassador who unwittingly ends up the father of the Antichrist. At the time, Peck was a Golden Age Hollywood star who had lost some relevance with the changing times and was getting older. Yet Peck had played perhaps cinema’s most enduring father—Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird—and the idea of him playing a father trying to kill his child was irresistible. He was also a classy, A-level actor working in the horror genre, and his presence elevated the quality of the supporting cast, which included Lee Remick as Damien’s adopted mother, Thorn’s wife Katherine (who believes Damien is her own child), as well as David Warner, Leo McKern, Billie Whitelaw, and a terrifying little scamp named Harvey Stephens, who played Damien and was apparently a hellion on set—kicking Donner in the balls during his audition.

Then, of course, there’s Jerry Goldsmith’s incredible score, with its choral elements and Latin chants. The movie was a huge blockbuster—the sixth-highest-grossing film of the year. Critics at the time actually hated it, and many were offended that it starred an icon like Peck. Of course, the years have been kind to it, and Peck’s performance is no doubt one of the things that helps it stand the test of time. His portrayal of Robert Thorn, an aging bureaucrat married to a younger woman who gets a chance at fatherhood later in life only to lose everything, is touching—before it becomes terrifying. The movie was so big it popularized the Book of Revelation’s notion of 666 being the mark of the beast.

Now, the film ended with it looking like the President and First Lady were going to adopt Damien, but the sequel—Damien: The Omen II—chickened out. It followed Damien as an adolescent, and it’s not as high-quality a film as the original. Seltzer didn’t return to write the screenplay, and Donner was directing Superman at this point. Instead, it’s a cheaper, B-level movie, where Damien is raised by a family friend of the Thorns, played by another aging Golden Age star—in this case, William Holden. Holden is good, though not as committed to the role as Peck, but there are good elements. One is that Damien is shown to struggle with his horrible destiny, which is an interesting aspect. He’s also shown to have many people helping him along the way, and some of the gore kills are even better than the original, including a chilling death under a frozen lake and another when a character gets cut in half. It did have Goldsmith back to do the score. It only made about half as much as the original, but it did well enough to greenlight a sequel—The Final Conflict.

Now, here’s where they really screwed it up. In this sequel, we follow Damien as an adult as he slowly rises to power. Sounds good, right? Well, they kill him before he can even get close to becoming President. They ended what could have been an amazing series prematurely, leaving us all with blue balls. Granted, the third movie did at least one thing right—they got the perfect actor to play Damien: a young Sam Neill. And they got Goldsmith back. Everything else they botched, and that was it for the franchise, save for a lousy TV movie.

The Final Conflict actually does have its moments—I like the idea of Damien being obsessed with finding and killing “The Nazarene,” which involves a demented montage where we see babies being murdered left and right—some Old Testament shit right there. It also has Jerry Goldsmith back to write the score, although he took a different approach this time, eschewing the Ave Satani theme from the original. Apparently, a fourth Omen movie called Omen: Armageddon was supposed to be made immediately afterward, but I have no idea where they would have gone, as Damien is shown to be definitely dead by the time the credits roll. You even get the resurrection of Christ at the end, which, I think, is maybe laying it on a little thick—but I digress.

When I heard The Omen was being remade in 2006, I wasn’t dead set against it, as I’ve always felt it was a saga that never played out the way it could have. However, what I didn’t realize was how badly the movie’s hack director, John Moore, would rip off the original, with it being a scene-for-scene remake, albeit without any style or gravitas. It was so closely based on the original that they just reused David Seltzer’s script. The casting is atrocious, with Julia Stiles out of her depth in the Lee Remick part, while Liev Schreiber—who is usually a good actor—was twenty years too young for his role. Now he’d be a good Robert Thorn, but back then he was baby-faced. The only thing they got right was Mia Farrow in the Billie Whitelaw role, but the movie stinks, especially with Marco Beltrami’s update of the Jerry Goldsmith score. Just a putrid film all around that still somehow made money—but thankfully never got a sequel.

That said, though, I kind of liked The First Omen. I don’t think we needed a prequel, and it’s a bit too PC in that it makes the Church a willing accomplice to the devil and ties a little too much into the whole “down with the patriarchy” thing that was hot for a brief time when the movie came out. Yet, it was stylishly directed by Arkasha Stevenson, with Nell Tiger Free delivering a great performance in the lead. I also love that in its continuity, Gregory Peck is still Robert Thorn, and I wish it hadn’t bombed, as they could have ignored the second and third films and followed Thorn into the presidency. And let’s be real—how spooky would it be to get a movie where Damien Thorn, who would be in his fifties following the movie’s continuity, was an Antichrist president in charge of a nuclear arsenal? Cast a guy like Michael Shannon, and you’ve got a horror movie that would no doubt scare the shit out of people—and maybe hit a little too close to home. Again—call me, Hollywood. We’ll talk.

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