There’s a pretty basic horror-movie hook to The Omen, the 1976 classic about a couple who inadvertently adopt the Antichrist. What if your seemingly innocent young child was actually evil incarnate? That taps into many parents’ primal fears, and it provides for plenty of disturbing moments, connecting a pure, helpless child to heinous acts of violence. It’s no surprise that The Omen was a hit, capitalizing on the popularity of horror movies like its obvious influences The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as paranoid political thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View.
But where do you go from there? Once the child’s evil has been revealed, what’s left to explore? Producers of subsequent Omen movies and TV series have struggled to answer that question, while attempting to recapture the appeal of the original movie. In various sequels, prequels, remakes, and spin-offs, the Antichrist child Damien Thorn has grown up and passed on his demonic legacy, but the story always circles back to focus on the unexpected dangers of raising Satan’s offspring. With prequel The First Omen now in theaters, here’s a look at how this chaotic franchise stacks up.
Omen IV: The Awakening (1991)
Released theatrically overseas but aired as a Fox TV movie in the U.S., this semi-reboot was meant to kick off a new Omen franchise but instead signaled the end of the Omen movies for the next 15 years. It’s not hard to see why; this is a stilted, sanitized retread of the original, which only gets appealingly weird just as it’s about to end. Damien is gone, replaced by his previously unmentioned daughter Delia (Asia Vieira), who’s adopted by a bland couple in suburban Virginia. People start dying around Delia, but the bloodless kill scenes are so toned down for TV that two of her victims just succumb to plain old heart attacks. The Awakening mixes things up by adding New Agers to the opposition along with the requisite priests and nuns, although its progressiveness ends there. “The Bible didn’t mean to be sexist,” a priest tells Delia’s adopted mom, Karen York (Faye Grant), about the possibility of a female Antichrist. The movie has no such qualms, however, equating Delia’s early onset menstruation with her blossoming evil and offering an absurd ending that diminishes her agency and undermines whatever weak menace she might have presented.
The Omen (1995)
There’s no Antichrist to be found in this failed TV pilot, which aired as a one-off special on NBC in September 1995. Instead, there’s an ancient presence known only as “the Entity,” which escapes from a missile silo in Wyoming and starts body-hopping across the country, draining its victims’ life forces somehow. An epidemiologist (William Sadler), a reporter (Brett Cullen), and a nurse (Chelsea Field) form an impromptu team to track the Entity after it wreaks havoc at a Boston hospital. The setup positions The Omen as one of the many clumsy X-Files clones that came and went quickly in the 1990s, as the team would presumably follow the Entity’s trail of death and chaos to a new location in each episode. It’s hard to see how this concept would have played out in the long term, and while Sadler is appealingly prickly as the cynical scientist, there’s nothing approaching Mulder-Scully chemistry among the main cast. Maybe if the show had lasted, the characters would have faced down Damien eventually, but the swirling visual-effects blob of the Entity is a poor substitute.
Damien (2016)
Damien is a reluctant Antichrist who takes ten turgid episodes to kind of maybe embrace his inherent evil in this single-season A&E TV series created by The Walking Dead’s Glen Mazzara. An explicit, direct sequel to the 1976 movie — even incorporating extensive clips — Damien takes place as the title character (Bradley James) has just turned 30, the designated age of his ascension. He’s a brooding war photographer who experiences vague portentous visions while the scheming Ann Rutledge (Barbara Hershey) nudges him toward megalomania. Skarsgårdian good looks aside, James brings almost no depth or charisma to Damien, who’s meant to be the chosen leader of a nascent global movement. Hershey relishes her role as the master manipulator, but the show’s murky prestige-drama moral relativism robs it of any pulpy charms, replaced by half-hearted attempts to take on modern social issues like battlefield PTSD. “Weird shit happens around this jerk-off all the time!,” an exasperated police detective proclaims about Damien in the penultimate episode, and that’s about as close as the show gets to a coherent point of view on its source material.
The Omen (2006)
It’s tempting to dismiss this remake as pointless, especially since it sticks so closely to its predecessor that original writer David Seltzer was awarded sole screenplay credit despite having no involvement in the production. And, sure, maybe it was green-lit just to take advantage of the release date of June 6, 2006 (6/6/06, get it?). But it’s competently directed and impeccably cast, and that’s more than we can say for some of its fellow ’00s horror remakes. Liev Schreiber plays a much younger version of Gregory Peck’s Robert Thorn, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, with Julia Stiles as his wife Katherine. Director John Moore and the uncredited actual screenwriters make an effort to expand Katherine’s role and make her seem less like a doormat, and Stiles steps up with an affecting performance. There are some unsettling, surreal dream sequences and some satisfyingly elaborate Final Destination–style kill scenes. Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick is suitably creepy as young Damien, but the real casting feat is a delightfully unhinged Mia Farrow as Satan-worshiping nanny Mrs. Baylock, slyly bragging that she’s been taking care of children for “almost 40 years” — that is, since Farrow gave birth to the devil’s spawn in 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby.
Damien: Omen II (1978)
There’s an impressive consistency to the original Omen trilogy, but this sequel suffers slightly from rehashing many of the plot beats of the original, just with a slightly older Damien. Now 12 years old and played by Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Damien is being raised by his wealthy uncle, Richard Thorn (William Holden), and Richard’s wife, Ann (Lee Grant), educated at a top military school and poised to take over the family’s generically hegemonic corporation, Thorn Industries. A subplot about Thorn Industries’ plans for global domination via famine relief is a bit confusing, but placing Damien’s rise to power in the world of business rather than politics makes sense, and it’s easy to believe mid-level executives as the minions of Satan. Damien is mildly conflicted about becoming the chosen one, but he’s no Paul Atreides, and he soon embraces his abilities to kill his rivals and, apparently, attract all the hottest junior-high girls at his school’s cotillion. There are some memorably gruesome deaths, including a doctor who’s sliced in half by an elevator cable and a reporter whose eyes are gouged out by crows. The plot only moves forward incrementally, but it’s an entertaining progression.
Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981)
Sam Neill is by far the best actor to play Damien, and he carries this alleged final chapter as the adult Antichrist who’s fully embraced his destiny. Now 32 and the head of Thorn Industries after doing away with his uncle in Omen II, Damien is busy making plans to run for Senate, securing a position as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain (like his adoptive father), and furthering Thorn Industries’ still slightly inscrutable plans for global power. He also has to contend with the prophesied second coming of Christ in the form of a child to be born when certain stars align over a certain location. Yes, the adult Damien’s greatest enemy is a baby, and since he doesn’t know exactly which infant is the actual Christ child, he just has his followers go on a baby-murdering spree. Neill finds the perfect tone of sinister campiness, especially in a glorious mid-film monologue delivered directly to a statue of Jesus Christ that Damien keeps in an empty room in his home. “There is only one hell: the leaden monotony of human existence,” he laments, making the franchise’s greatest case for the Satanic cause.
The First Omen (2024)
Nothing about the early scenes of The Omen cried out for an expansive world-building prequel, but since that’s what happens to seemingly every recognizable franchise now, The First Omen is just about the best possible outcome. Director and co-writer Arkasha Stevenson creates a stylish and immersive modern horror movie out of a handful of details from The Omen, envisioning the life of the woman who bore the Antichrist before the baby was passed on to its intended parents. Nell Tiger Free gives a powerful, visceral performance as Margaret Daino, an American novitiate at a convent in Rome where diabolical events are being set into motion. Anyone who’s seen The Omen will know exactly what those events are, and Stevenson takes a bit too long to drop the movie’s extremely obvious twist. But there are plenty of genuine horrors along the way, adding a new perspective to the now-familiar Omen formula. Stevenson critiques the church patriarchy that has so often been the savior in previous Omen movies, grounding her story in the experience of the women expected to bear the physical burden of literally birthing evil.
The Omen (1976)
Although it pales in comparison to its forebears The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen still earns its place in the horror canon thanks to iconic scenes like the suicide of Damien’s nanny, shouting “It’s all for you!” as she flings herself off a roof with a noose around her neck. Gregory Peck brings his classic Hollywood gravitas to the role of Robert Thorn, an American diplomat stationed in Rome and then London, who’s convinced to adopt an abandoned child in place of his deceased newborn. Five years later, young Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) has grown into a sullen, malevolent figure, tended to by the mysteriously arrived Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), who’s like an unholy Mary Poppins. This Damien almost never speaks, and director Richard Donner keeps the focus on Robert and his wife, Katherine (Lee Remick), as they deal with the growing realization that their son is some kind of apocalyptic harbinger. Donner establishes the franchise’s flair for sudden yet intricate character deaths, and David Seltzer’s screenplay is simple but effective. The story ends on a perfect stinger that requires no follow-up, and every subsequent installment exists in the shadow of its elegant, chilling presentation.
By Josh Bell , 2024-04-05 16:57:20
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