The 1976 horror movie The Omen was one of the ten highest-grossing movies of its release year, the biggest movie of that summer, and the inspiration for three sequels, a remake, and a new prequel. Yet for a lot of people, the Omen series exists in a kind of post-Exorcist haze, far less iconic than that horror smash despite an instantly recognizable title and character. Well, sort of: As a classic Seinfeld side exchange shows, the nature of Damien, the antichrist child whose antics help fuel the movie’s sequels, is a little fuzzy, especially early on. He’s exactly a classic bad seed in the vein of, well, The Bad Seed, nor is he a child possessed by the devil as in The Exorcist. (He’s not even a “mischievous, rambunctious kid,” as Kramer refers to him.)
The universe’s timing that this scene just appeared in my latest SEINFELD rewatch. I always laugh that none of them know what Damien was. pic.twitter.com/JqaqpAVks8
No, Damien is more of a bad vibe incarnate: a little kid, then tween, then adult who will help bring about an apocalypse, but doesn’t get around to actually doing much about it until the third movie. Before then, unseen forces of evil appear to come together, smiting Damien’s potential enemies without quite implying that Damien himself is directly responsible. That’s part of what makes the first movie’s signature line – “It’s all for you, Damien!” his nanny cries before enthusiastically hanging herself in public – so disturbing. The devotion seems stronger and more supernatural than a more traditionally evil little boy could truly inspire.
This slippery quality also means that the Omen series isn’t locked into the same routines as, say, every exorcism movie that’s followed The Exorcist. Its mix of supernatural horror and slasher-style kills brings to mind the Final Destinationseries that would flourish a quarter-century later, while some of its casting weirdly harkens back to earlier days of Hollywood, giving the series a time-trippy quality. Though the sequels were not particularly popular or well-reviewed, and maintain the original’s tradition of eluding any truly powerful ideas or statements, they kept the series going long enough to cover the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s, and now the ’20s, imperfectly grasping at various anxieties of various decades. Here’s a walkthrough of how to go through the series in chronological order.
There are a few good reasons to watch the most recent Omen movie first, counterintuitive as that may seem. Most surprising, it’s arguably the best of the bunch – certainly the most formally accomplished of the series, and a totally fine choice if you want to limit yourself to sampling one movie from a mid-to-lower-tier horror franchise. Director Arkasha Stevenson, making her feature debut, isn’t working with especially surprising material; the story of Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), a young woman about to take her nun vows at a convent in Italy who detects something untoward going on around her, can also be seen right across the hall in any multiplexes also playing Immaculate. Yet Stevenson builds the standard sense of religious-tinted unease with careful, exacting attention to her imagery – much of which involves keeping her camera fixed on Free’s face for a few beats longer than antsier directors would. Free has an expressively Amy Adams-ish quality, and there’s something authentically touching about the moments where you can register, on her face, the moments where she starts to drift from piety – and there’s something striking about how Stevenson often repeatedly her with her dark hair splayed out behind her, as if reaching for wildness.
The way that The First Omen attempts to flip and complicate the good-versus-evil dynamic of the earlier movies isn’t particularly clever on its own, but in the context of a series that often goes out of its way to avoid centering women despite its focus on child-bearing, it hits significantly harder. (An unspoken creed of the bad guys: No exceptions granted for the life of the mother.) With several genuine shocks amidst the standard church-murk storytelling, this is easily the most visceral and emotionally affecting Omen. The movie’s major drawback also makes it a good choice to watch first: It is very much a prequel to the 1976 film, and the neatness with which it needs to slot into the series undermines its falling action; the characters are essentially stranded in a continuity void. But watching it as a genuine first installment turns that quality into a garden-variety sequel tease (or a perfectly acceptable place to quit entirely). Bonus points for being possibly the only Omen movie to not shrug its shoulders and throw out some growling dogs for auxiliary menace.
Is the original Omen good, or just lucky? It certainly must have benefited from the popularity of The Exorcist, and it’s nowhere near as shocking or effective, a decidedly squarer and more lumbering take on Catholic horror. Though director Richard Donner would go on to make Superman and Lethal Weapon, his first big hit has one foot in an earlier, stodgier era of horror. So rather than digging into the psychology of, say, a woman who has unknowingly lost her newborn baby and raises a replacement child who has been planted with her family to take advantage of their enormous privilege in order to better-position the antichrist for world domination, the movie instead features a lot of older white men discussing religious rituals their upper-class jobs. It’s an evil-child movie for half-checked-out, disengaged fathers.
Sometimes this lends the movie a fascinating ambiguity and even anticipates certain horror trends: Because Damien is never shown as clearly and maliciously responsible for any of the deaths that befall people who try to stop him, the movie creates some real unease about how conscious an under-five boy could possibly be about his evil origins, and how some greater evil power is interacting with this unknowable boy (even as you suspect that it may be waffling as much as evoking doubt). The deaths themselves are highlights of the movie – “cool kills,” in the parlance of horror fans, in an era where that wasn’t a yet a fully codified part of the horror experience. The biggest moments – “it’s all for you, Damien” and a particularly memorable decapitation – go pretty hard, perhaps especially because they’re mixed into a movie that doesn’t exactly pulse with danger. Similarly, the presence of an aging Gregory Peck in the leading role (at one point going on a decidedly differentRoman Holiday) is simultaneously an intentionally undermined comfort connecting the movie back to an older Hollywood (things couldn’t possibly go wrong with Gregory Peck at the helm, could they?) and an awkward throwback distraction (why is this sixtysomething having a baby? Why is he the main character at all?). That’s the movie all over: Dabbling in provocation, but ultimately concluding that adoption is scary, abortion is bad, traditional childbearing is best, and if an old movie star can’t save us, no one can.
So here’s where the standard creepy-kid bad-seed thriller kicks in, right? Not exactly. Though Damien, the direct sequel to The Omen, picks up with the antichrist kiddo approaching adolescence as the moneyed adopted son of Richard Thorn (William Holden), only part of its narrative actually follows little Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor) as he attends a prestigious military school. The movie also spends a lot of time with wealthy industrialist Richard, as if audiences wouldn’t accept an Omen movie without a Hollywood star of an earlier era guiding them through the proceedings. Holden isn’t bad in the movie, but he’s not as steadying a presence as predecessor Gregory Peck, and the narrative is further diffused by other story threads, mostly involving those racing to destroy Damien before he can unleash his full antichrist potential. These people tend to meet with gruesome accidents; even more than the original film, Omen II pre-visions the Final Destination series, where the villain isn’t a corporeal presence that can be seen and physically stopped. It’s not exactly Death who stalks Damien’s enemies and dispatches them with crows, trucks, poisonous gases, hypothermia, or combinations of the above, but it’s not strictly Damien, either – even when he seems more unambiguously aware of the latent power he carries. There are also notes of The Good Son in Damien’s relationship with his non-evil cousin; Omen II may not hold together particularly well, but it does keep the series lurching toward the future.
The Final Conflict – it wasn’t actually released with Omen III in the opening credits – jumps ahead to find Damien Thorn as an adult, following in the footsteps of both his late uncle (as a wealthy businessman) and his late father (as a newly appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom), now fully cognizant of his own nefariousness. Final Conflict has a bad reputation; it drops the creepy-kid angle that people vaguely remember from the second movie, and Sam Neill’s performance as the adult Damien is relatively subdued. (There’s also the fact that if Damien is now in his 30s, the movie should be taking place somewhere around the late ’90s, which doesn’t appear to be the case.) Granted, the movie does still suffer from weird narrative diffuseness that became a series trademark, wandering through different and not especially compelling points of view. But as it turns out, a horror movie about a businessman moving into the political realm and hoping to exploit fears and unrest over social change feels pretty prescient 40 years later. If Neill’s performance doesn’t match those present-day parallels, he’s also the perfect picture of apocalyptic evil as a slick manager type, outsourcing a ghastly, horrifying plan to various underlings, and later, able to summon a group of heretofore unseen mindless followers to hang on his every doomsaying word. (Again: Sound familiar?)
The fourth Omen movie, the only entry from the 1990s, is actually just a TV movie that aired on Fox (though it was theatrically inflicted upon some other countries). Just to be clear, this is not a gem hidden in the disreputable, largely forgotten art form of the made-for-network-TV-movie; it’s mostly as bad as it sounds, sometimes literally as the cartoony score portends less antichrist-assisted doom than zany Hocus Pocus-style antics. Though it does reveal itself as an actual sequel in its more agreeably ridiculous final stretch, this mostly functions as a drawn-out gender-swapped remake of the original, with some truly terrible acting. It’s also a great example of how vague cultural memories of The Omen are; this kid is pretty much portrayed as a classic deceptive bad seed (sucking up to her clueless #GirlDad while her mother grows increasingly suspicious), even when later story turns would make the original film’s relative ambiguity make way more sense.
A remake of The Omen would appear to make perfect sense; back in 2006, there hadn’t been a theatrically released Omen movie in a quarter-century, and the studio was able to secure a thirtieth-anniversary release date on, yes, 6/6/06. Yet the ’06 version is largely marketing sizzle and 2000s-era slickness, with so little deviation from the original that screenwriter David Seltzer received sole credit despite not actually working on the newer film. So what, if anything, does bring the movie into the new century beyond icy-blue filters and less soft-focus cinematography? It does foreground the mother’s somewhat experience more, with Julia Stiles allowed to reflect a greater ambivalence toward her child of the sort that was starting to become less taboo to express in the 2000s. (This comes to a head in horror with movies like The Babadook.) At the same time, the movie amps everything up enough to diminish some of those gains, which is to say little Damien’s glowering is more pronounced here (he’s aged up slightly, enough to malevolently make himself a late-night sandwich). Reflecting that guild ruling, most of the novelty here comes from casting: Stiles leaving behind her YA past, the noble scenery-chewing of Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis, and the metatextual element of casting Mia Farrow, star of Rosemary’s Baby, as a Satanist nanny. The weird politics of the original – where only natural childbirth is above suspicion – aren’t fully retained, but they aren’t really replaced with anything else, either. A pointless, proficient remake, though, is probably about right as the capper for this series, which has long been more of a fun brand-name curiosity than a horror essential.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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