"It is by means of a human personality entirely in his possession that Satan will wage his last formidable offence" - Father Brennan
The Omen (directed by Richard Donner and written by David Seltzer) was made back in 1976 and somehow, despite watching a great many of the classic horror movies in my late teens and early twenties, I'd never got round to watching it even if, thanks to The Go-Betweens, I knew the unfortunate outcome for at least one of the lead characters.
It's on BBC4 tonight, in the run up to Hallowe'en no doubt, but I noticed it was already available to watch on the iPlayer so last night I finally dived in. I'm very glad I did. It's a brilliant story and it's genuinely scary in places. Which most of you lot already knew.
Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) is an American diplomat living in Rome with his wife Kathy (Lee Remick). When their child dies, Thorn is persuaded by one Father Spiletto (Martin Benson) to take on another child whose mother has died in childbirth. That child is Damien (Harvey Stephens) and Robert doesn't tell Kathy that Damien is not their real son.
Both the child swap premise and the idea that a mother wouldn't recognise an imposter posing, or being posed, as her son requires quite a lot of suspension of disbelief but it's worth going with it because things soon start to get very interesting.
Robert and Kathy move to London and, at first, their life seems idyllic. Walks in the park, boating lakes, cowboy suits, and birthday cakes. Everything a normal family would do. But when a menacing dog turns up at Damien's fifth birthday party it seems to trigger a series of strange and disturbing events which begin with Damien's nanny, Polly (Holly Palance), hanging herself in broad daylight and in front of Damien and his little friends at the party.
Soon after, Father Brennan (an excellent Patrick Troughton) arrives at Robert's office and urges the ambassador to accept Christ as his saviour immediately so that he can defeat the son of the devil. "He's killed once, he'll kill again. He will kill until everything that's yours is his" Brennan desperately warns Robert before telling him he was in the hospital in Rome the night Damien was born.
Robert has him removed by security - but it won't be last he sees of Father Brennan. When a new nanny, Mrs Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), arrives to take care of Damien she seems suspiciously confident and there also seems to be some confusion as to who exactly employed her. Mrs Baylock acts very strangely towards Damien but Damien appears to like it.
She definitely doesn't want him to go to chuch - for some reason. Damien, for what it's worth, doesn't seem keen on churches either, especially Guildford Cathedral - for some reason. It starts to look as if Damien and Mrs Baylock are together in some sort of unholy, possibly even wicked, alliance.
Soon enough we see the giraffes in Windsor Safari Park running in fear from Damien and the baboons trying to attack him. There's a warning that Kathy's unborn baby is in mortal danger and that that lethal peril extends to Kathy and Robert too. It gets worse. People fall off railings and find themselves impaled by lightning rods, menacing dogs appear (the hounds of Hell?), and there's a VERY nasty accident involving a sheet of glass and a faulty handbrake. These things don't look like accidents.
As surely as these tragedies unfold, Robert Thorn finds himself thrust into a very strange and dark world. A world of very telling birthmarks, LOTS of crosses, a visit to a remote Etruscan cemetery, and a meeting with Antichrist expert (now there's a job title) played by Leo McKern (it's quite a different role to Rumpole of the Bailey), and quotes from the Book of Revelations. There are even references to the Jews returning to Zion which, watching it as the atrocities in Gaza and Israel continue to escalate, seemed uncomfortably timely.
When the photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) notices clues as to what might be happening in photos he's taken of Father Brennan and Polly he approaches Robert Thorn and the two of them take a trip to Rome together. A fact finding mission with personal significance, and no little urgency, for both of them. The terrible truth slowly, and eventually, begins to dawn on the ambassador but what can he do about it and is too late? Will the forces of evil prevail?
With Jerry Goldsmith's suitably demonic score, the whole film is saturated with looming menace but still a few scenes particularly stand out. Polly's suicide is disturbing and disquieting and the scene where Jennings and Thorn meet in Father Brennan's house was so chilling I had to put the heating on. But there were bigger scares to come and they continued right up to the end. If I'd watched The Omen as a teenager it would have scared the shit out of me. Watching it now it still did - and I bloody loved it. Oh, and if you see your mum this weekend will you be sure and tell her ... SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!
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