The Omen

This article is about the 1976 film. For the remake, see The Omen (2006 film).

See also: Omen (disambiguation)

The Omen
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Richard Donner
Written by	David Seltzer
Produced by	Harvey Bernhard
Starring	Gregory Peck Lee Remick David Warner Billie Whitelaw
Cinematography	Gilbert Taylor
Edited by	Stuart Baird
Music by	Jerry Goldsmith
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release dates	June 6, 1976 (1976-06-06) (United Kingdom) June 25, 1976 (1976-06-25) (United States)
Running time	111 minutes
Country	Template:Film US
Language	English
Budget	$2.8 million
Box office	$60,922,980

The Omen is a 1976 American 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 wrote the novel.

A remake, The Omen, was released on June 6, 2006. This date was chosen as a reference to the Number of the Beast (666).

Plot

The newborn son of Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife, Katherine (Lee Remick), dies shortly after birth in Rome. Robert is coerced by Father Spiletto (Martin Benson) into substituting for the dead child an orphan whose mother died at the same moment, without telling Katherine. Out of concern for his wife's mental well-being, Robert agrees. They name the child Damien (Harvey Stephens). Soon after, Robert is named U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain.

While posted in Fulham, England, Robert is plagued by several mysterious events. Damien's nanny hangs herself at his fifth birthday party and a new nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), suddenly arrives to replace her. Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton) knows about Damien's origins and warns Robert that his wife is pregnant and that Damien will kill the unborn child. The priest subsequently dies when a lightning rod falls on him and Impales him through the side of his neck. Katherine tells Robert that she is pregnant but miscarries when she is knocked off a balcony by Damien.

Following Father Brennan's death, and while piecing together other clues, photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) begins investigating Damien after noticing marks on photographs of people that seem to predict their subsequent deaths. Keith travels with Robert as they investigate Damien's birth. They visit the Rome hospital but find a fire destroyed the hospital records and maternity and nursery wards. Robert and Keith visit Father Spiletto at a rural monastery. He has been burned on his right half and struck mute. They are sent to a ruined cemetery and find a dog's skeleton in Damien's mother's grave, and discover that Robert and Katherine's child was murdered to place Damien in their care. Their discoveries lead them to believe that Damien is the Antichrist.

While Robert is away, Katherine, recuperating in the hospital from her injuries. All seems to go fine, when Mrs. Baylock suddenly appears and murders her by defenestrating her and sending her crashing into a parked ambulance. Robert travels with Keith to Israel to find Bugenhagen, an archaeologist who knows how to stop the Antichrist. Bugenhagen reveals that Damien will possess a birthmark in the shape of three sixes if he is the Antichrist. Robert learns that the only way to kill Damien is to stab him with the seven daggers of Megiddo. Refusing to murder what he believes is an innocent child, Robert throws the pack of daggers away from them. When Keith bends to retrieve them, a sheet of glass slides off a runaway truck, flies into him, and decapitates him.

Having recovered the daggers, Robert returns to England and finds a birthmark buried under hair on Damien's scalp. Mrs. Baylock attempts to murder Robert, but is stabbed through the side of the neck with a carving fork. Robert flees his residence with Damien to kill him on hallowed ground and is pursued by a security detail. After breaking into a church, Robert raises a dagger to stab Damien but is shot and killed before he can do so.

Damien is placed in the care of the U.S. President, a close personal friend of Robert's. They attend the funeral of Katherine and Robert, who receive an honorable burial and blessing by a Catholic priest. Damien turns and gives a diabolical smile.

Cast

• Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn
• Lee Remick as Katherine Thorn
• David Warner as Keith Jennings
• Billie Whitelaw as Mrs Baylock
• Harvey Stephens as Damien Thorn
• Patrick Troughton as Father Brennan
• Martin Benson as Father Spiletto
• Leo McKern as Carl Bugenhagen
• Robert Rietty as Monk
• Tommy Duggan as Priest
• John Stride as The Psychiatrist
• Anthony Nicholls as Dr Becker
• Holly Palance as Nanny
• Roy Boyd as Reporter
• Freda Dowie as Nun
• Sheila Raynor as Mrs Horton
• Robert MacLeod as Horton
• Bruce Boa as Thorn's Aide

Alternate endings

Two endings were filmed. The original ending featured a child's casket with Robert and Katherine's, indicating Damien was also killed, but studio head Alan Ladd, Jr. said that this was a mistake, because you cannot kill the devil. He gave Donner additional funds to refilm the ending.

Music

Untitled

An original score for the film, including the movie's theme song Ave Satani, 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 "Ave 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.

1. "Ave Satani" – 2:32
2. "New Ambassador" – 2:33
3. "Killer's Storm" – 2:51
4. "Sad Message" – 1:42
5. "Demise of Mrs. Baylock" – 2:52
6. "Don't Let Him" – 2:48
7. "Piper Dreams" – 2:39
8. "Fall" – 3:42
9. "Safari Park" – 2:04
10. "Dog's Attack" – 5:50
11. "Homecoming" – 2:43
12. "Altar" – 2:00

On October 9, 2001, a deluxe version of the soundtrack was released with eight additional tracks.

1. "Ave Satani" – 2:35
2. "On This Night" – 2:36
3. "The New Ambassador" – 2:34
4. "Where Is He?" – :56
5. "I Was There" – 2:27
6. "Broken Vows" – 2:12
7. "Safari Park" – 3:24
8. "A Doctor, Please" – 1:44
9. "The Killer Storm" – 2:54
10. "The Fall" – 3:45
11. "Don't Let Him" – 2:49
12. "The Day He Died" – 2:14
13. "The Dog's Attack" – 5:54
14. "A Sad Message" – 1:44
15. "Beheaded" – 1:49
16. "The Bed" – 1:08
17. "666" – :44
18. "The Demise of Mrs. Baylock" – 2:54
19. "The Altar" – 2:07
20. "The Piper Dreams" – 2:41

Reception

Box office performance

The Omen was a massive commercial success in the United States. It grossed $4,273,886 in its opening weekend and $60,922,980 domestically on a tight budget of $2,800,000. The film was the fourth highest grossing movie of 1976.

Critical reception

The Omen received mostly positive reviews from critics and is considered by many as one of the best films of 1976, as well as one of the best horror films ever made. The film holds an 84% "Fresh" rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes. 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."

On the flip side, The Omen appeared in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time 1978 by Harry Medved (co-author of the Golden Turkey Awards) and Randy Dreyfuss.

The Omen received recognition from the American Film Institute. It was ranked number 81 on 100 Years... 100 Thrills, a list of America's most heart-pounding films. and the score by Jerry Goldsmith was nominated for AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores. The film was ranked #16 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Similarly, the Chicago Film Critics' Association named it the 31st scariest film ever made.

Awards and nominations

The film received numerous accolades for its acting, writing, music and technical achievements. Jerry Goldsmith won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and received an additional nomination for Best Original Song for "Ave Satani". Goldsmith's score was also nominated for a Grammy award for Best Album of Original Score Written for a Motion Picture. Billie Whitelaw was nominated for a BAFTA film award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. She was also awarded the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress. The film also received recognition by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Harvey Stephens was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut – Male. David Seltzer's original screenplay was nominated by the Writers Guild of America for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen and for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture. The film was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film. Gilbert Taylor won the Best Cinematography Award from the British Society of Cinematographers.

Parodies

The movie was spoofed in Mad Magazine as "The Ominous" and on Saturday Night Live as "The Ointment". In 1998, Demian appeared in a episode of SOUTH PARK, where, in the beginning confronts jesus christ, but ends making friends with the south park gang, excepting Cartman.

Novels

• David Seltzer, The Omen. (Futura, 1976).
• Joseph Howard, Damien: Omen II. (Futura, 1978).
• Gordon McGill, Omen III: The Final Conflict. (Futura, 1980).
• Gordon McGill, Omen IV: Armageddon 2000. (Futura, 1983).
• Gordon McGill, Omen V: The Abomination. (Futura, 1985).

Both the movie and the novelization 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 Huber Jennings, Father Brennan becomes Father Edgardo Emilio Tassone, et cetera). The second and third novels were novelized forms of their respective movies and more-or-less reflected movie continuity. 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 a single 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 form, 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 exactly the same words which begin David Seltzer's novelization of the first film, bringing the series full-circle.

See also

• List of fictional Antichrists

External links

• The Omen at IMDb
• The Omen at the TCM Movie Database
• The Omen at AllMovie
• The Omen at Box Office Mojo
• The Omen at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Omen script