The Kid Slays in the Picture: With ‘The First Omen,’ a Disreputable, Disquieting, Unkillable Horror Franchise Re-Spawns

20th Century Fox/Getty Images

A pane of glass flies through a prying journalist’s head. An elevator cable snaps and bisects a doctor on his way to deliver an urgent message about jackal blood cells. A raven spooks a skeptical old lady into a fatal heart attack. These on-screen deaths read like Edward Gorey illustrations. They are all scored by Jerry Goldsmith. Their emotional impact ranges from true horror to the kind of chuckle that follows a particularly sweet crotch shot on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Initially dinged for being a B-movie riff on The Exorcist, The Omen franchise has never trafficked in subtlety. Now with its fifth entry, The First Omen, a prequel, opening on April 5, the horror franchise’s blend of bluntness— Lil’ Antichrist! What would you do?—and a taut relationship to the historical moment in which each film was released, returns. To summon to another Biblical prophecy, The Omen franchise is like the cicada horde that swarms fiercely, returns to the earth, and reemerges a generation or so later.

The 1976 original remains a lean, queasy classic. Hollywood’s icon of quiet moral rectitude Gregory Peck plays Robert Thorn, a diplomat whose marriage has struggled with fertility. In a moment of panic after being told that his infant is stillborn, he agrees to swap in an orphaned infant without telling his wife (Lee Remick). As the baby grows into a young child, the darkness and disaster ramp up. You know the rest. Animals freak out at a zoo. “Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!” A priest tries to convince Peck that his kid is the Antichrist. That priest gets killed by evil scenery. The Satanist nanny kills Remick. The journalist following Peck is killed, again, by evil scenery. Peck finally unravels the whole conspiracy. He sees the 666 on Damien’s scalp, in the world’s worst possible lice check. Peck grabs the holy daggers and readies himself to shank the Antichrist in short pants. Cops shoot Peck dead. Damien gets adopted into an even more powerful family. He spikes the camera. Fin.

Peck isn’t the only pillar of Hollywood craft that makes The Omen a Michelin-starred midnight movie. Cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove, Star Wars) uses establishing and wide shots to transform a churchyard into a Chekhov’s gun and to create one of the most haunting scenes with animals ever. Composer Jerry Goldsmith—known for Chinatown, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, and a dozen other legendary scores—won his only Oscar for his work on The Omen. The score’s central song “Ave Satani” has become a trope. The Omen was veteran TV director Richard Donner’s first film, and from this unexpected success—the premise had been bouncing around Hollywood for years—came Donner’s blockbuster run: Superman, The Goonies, Lethal Weapon.

1978’s Damien: Omen II is the most purely fun. If you squint, you might see a version of Linklater’s Boyhood—the adolescent demon seed finds mentors (who are Satanists), deals with family (who he kills), and comes to accept himself. The Rube Goldberg machines of engineering failures and dark entropy ramp up. Every obstacle in front of our teen Antichrist ends up drowned under a frozen lake or gassed to death in his adopted father’s factory. That’s before Damien himself embraces his nature and starts actively willing his haters to their deaths. In temperament, teen Damien goes from The Comsat Angels to death metal. Omen II’s true legacy isn’t its direct sequel; it’s in the entertaining Final Destination franchise from the 2000s, where chaotic shower curtains and tanning beds and roller coasters kill wave after wave of annoying teens and yuppie drips. That series has no church, only a secular death force that matched perfectly with a post-9/11 DHS-color-coded national paranoia.

1981’s Omen III: The Final Conflict, the last of the original series, is objectively the worst. Sam Neill plays Damien as a thirty-something ladder climbing Reagan-era diplomat. With his preppy swoop haircut and a Repp tie welded to his Oxford shirt, he resembles the LinkedIn profile pic from hell. You can imagine the resumé: boarding school, Duke, ritualistic animal sacrifice, McKinsey, assistant to Lee Atwater, Satan. The horror here is particularly grim: the mass murder of infant boys is a major plot point. But, as Roger Ebert pointed out, the supposed final battle between good and evil ends with Italian priests scampering around ruins as Sam Neill rants at the sky. Even in the microgenre of apocalyptic politicians, David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone would become the gold standard only two years later.

The 2006 remake of the original fell into the same trap as so many other 2000s horror remakes. Even the acceptable moments were ersatz. A thin attempt at a prestige TV show, 2016’s Damien, barely stirred. So why has this franchise endured? In some ways the premise of The Exorcist is easier to take. Possessed loved one? Get that demon removed like a bad mole. An innocent kid can be saved. It’s the same with haunted-house stories. Just leave. There’s never been a better time to hire a real estate agent.

Having an awful kid might be a parent’s most disquieting fear. It’s not the tragedy of a Manchester by the Sea or Gone Baby Gone. Instead, the original Omen offers We Need to Talk About Kevin plus the Book of Revelations. If your child is bullied and you know it, the sensation is a kind of torture. But being the parent of a bully or a ‘troubled kid’—assuming you give a damn and aren’t a prick yourself—paralyzes. There’s no sympathy for your family. If you are a parent or a caregiver, you’ve seen it on the playground: the tide of shame that runs across a parent’s body when they realize “Oh—it’s my kid who is making the others cry.” And if you’re that parent, you feel least partially responsible.

If you have the resources to deal with it and you don’t? You have been consumed by your deeply unnecessary email job and own fear and you have ignored your kid’s volatility and violence. You laughed it off when they whipped sticks at the heads of toddlers. Or you didn’t want to see it. You didn’t want to help your child live in the world. You wanted a mascot. It’s the parent in total denial, the one whose defensiveness feels like a religious creed, that truly terrifies. In an interview in 2001, Donner said he wanted Remick’s and Peck’s performances to deal with the idea that the film’s violent deaths could be circumstance. Maybe it’s a coincidence that all these people die around Damien. Maybe you—the parents—are just crazy and it’s all in your head.

Carol J. Clover’s canonical study of horror films Men, Women, and Chainsaws locates a crisis of psychology and masculinity in occult films. Clover writes: “in its fully secularized form the occult film [is] not a horror drama at all but a psychological one…the treatment not incantations but the talking cure.” The men in The Omen franchise coming to understand that little boy Damien and sullen teen Damien are evil drives the story. Like the therapy greenhorn, first they don’t know that they have problems, then they don’t want to see their problems, until finally it’s all they can see and then they wonder if it’s too late. When Clover writes about The Omen specifically, she reminds us that it is Damien’s adopted mother who sees him for what he is first. As Clover writes, “It is Mrs. Thorn, despite her ignorance of the adoption, who first begins to suspect the supernatural nature of the child they are rearing. Thus even the Omen and its manifest concern with males … locates its essential mystery with the mother.”

The legacy of Rosemary’s Baby remains inseparable from the film's 1968 release between Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973). I’d argue that The Omen franchise has always run parallel to the American post-WWII obsession with crafting the ‘perfect’ upper middle-class family. From the rise of wealthy white Americans and Europeans leveraging financial and political power in international adoptions to the real risks of over prescribing psychiatric drugs for adolescents, the desire is clear: I want a ‘perfect’ family and a ‘perfect’ child and I will do anything to get it. But—to adjust Clover’s point about the men in occult horror—it’s the parents who almost always have the problem and need the help. In the real world, the tradition of American teens who readied themselves to do horrible things as their parents looked willfully away needs no introduction.

From everything we’ve seen about The First Omen, in theaters today, this prequel appears to belong more to the text and subtext of Rosemary’s Baby: the ways in which women’s bodies are forever on the edge of being public property. We have no Damien yet, only the plan for him. Nell Tiger Free stars as a novice nun in Rome caught in the vice grip of the Catholic Church’s patriarchy and conspiracy. It’s a safe bet that young nuns are being winnowed down and tested to see who might become the mother to the Antichrist.

The political subtext of The First Omen could not be clearer. In its premise and plot—the trailer gives the game away—we should hear echoes of the far right’s entrenched war against reproductive rights, their demands that individuals and families be made only in their image. The ancient desire to turn women into chattel and incubators never really goes away. Halloween and The Exorcist may forever have the flowers as the cinematic peaks of what we call American horror, but it’s the shards of The Omen that make the most disquieting mirrors for whatever it is we call the middle-class American family.

Originally Appeared on GQ