THE OMEN (1976)
Released a few years after The Exorcist, The Omen was another massive horror hit which popularised the Book Of Revelation and the number 666, while forever associating the name Damien with absolute evil. But at the time, Richard Donner was just a veteran TV director with a couple of failed features under his belt. He approached The Omen not as a horror film but as a mystery-suspense thriller, and exorcised anything explicitly supernatural from the story, about US Ambassador to London Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) who comes to realise the young boy he’s secretly adopted as his own is, in fact, Satan’s son.
“What Dick brought was a sense of reality,” says screenwriter David Seltzer. “There was another director before him, and another star, Charles Bronson, and I was very unhappy with those people. Dick came in like a breath of fresh air. He said, ‘This is a documentary. This is a family drama about a catastrophe that turns out to have its roots in hell.’”
Having previously directed one of the most tense episodes of the original Twilight Zone, ‘Nightmare At 20,000 Feet’, Donner was able to extract every drop of terror from The Omen, orchestrating the murder set-pieces — a hanging, impaling, decapitation, and two falls — with brio and aplomb. “He brought so many things that were visually compelling,” says Seltzer. “The way the nanny died, crashing back through that window, was all his invention. For the beheading, I had a construction crane with a big pane of glass decapitating the Jennings character, guillotine-style. Dick’s mind saw what would happen if he put that on a horizontal plane. How that head could spin.”
Another Donner addition was having young Damien (Harvey Stephens) turn to the camera and smile at the end. “You won’t find that in the script,” notes Seltzer. “That was frigging brilliant. I am told he warned Harvey that if he smiled, he was going to be fired, and kept warning him as he talked to him. ‘Do not smile. This is not funny.’ Then told him something about the smell of a really bad fart. And you see the kid trying to hold the smile until the very end, where it’s, ‘Ha-ha, folks, the joke’s on you. I lived. They died.’ The movie would not be what it was without that.”