The Omen (1976)

The Omen (1976) is Richard Donner’s film about an American diplomat who slowly accepts that his five-year-old son is the Antichrist. David Seltzer wrote the screenplay. Twentieth Century-Fox released the film in the United States on June 25, 1976, after a London opening earlier that month. Gregory Peck and Lee Remick star as the parents, David Warner as a photographer who sees omens in his own pictures, and Harvey Stephens as Damien. Jerry Goldsmith’s score won the Academy Award. The film turned a biblical what-if into a studio hit and a franchise.

At a glance

Release date	June 25, 1976 (United States); June 6, 1976 (United Kingdom)
Director	Richard Donner
Writer	David Seltzer
Starring	Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, Billie Whitelaw, Harvey Stephens
Runtime	111 minutes
Rating	R
Genre	Occult horror
Budget	About $2.8 million
Box office	About $60.9 million domestic

Plot summary

Robert Thorn, an American diplomat in Rome, is told his newborn son died. A priest offers him a substitute child, born at the same hour, and asks him never to tell his wife. Thorn agrees. Five years later he is ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, and the boy, Damien, is a quiet child with a nanny who talks about his future in the wrong register. At his birthday party the nanny hangs herself in view of the guests, smiling as she falls.

A new governess, Mrs. Baylock, arrives without being hired. A priest warns Thorn that Damien is not his son and that the child’s mother was a jackal. The priest is killed by a lightning rod in a way that looks like weather. A photographer, Jennings, finds marks in his pictures that predict the deaths. Kathy Thorn wants another child and starts to fear the one she has. The trail leads from London to a ruined cemetery in Italy and to the question of what a father is willing to do with a knife in a church.

Spoiler section: the ending

Thorn confirms the birth story and returns to London to kill the child, as an exorcist priest has instructed. Police shoot him on the altar steps before he can finish. The funeral that closes the film is a state occasion. Damien is alive, holding the hands of the president and the first lady.

Production and behind the scenes

Producer Harvey Bernhard had been trying to set an Antichrist story for years. Seltzer’s script made it a diplomatic household rather than a seminary, which let Fox sell it as a thriller with Gregory Peck. Donner, then known mainly for television and the 1968 film Salt and Pepper, treated the set pieces as accidents with witnesses. The nanny’s hanging, the pane of glass, and the photographer’s decapitation are staged so a skeptic in the room could still call them bad luck. That was the design. Damien does not breathe fire. The world arranges itself around him.

Peck took the role when other older stars passed. He plays Thorn as a practical man, which keeps the film from floating into sermon. Stephens was cast as Damien out of a large children’s call and given one instruction that stuck: do not smile unless told to. Whitelaw’s Mrs. Baylock is the film’s actual monster, a guardian who moves into the house and will not be dismissed. Goldsmith wrote a choral score built on a fake Latin rite, “Ave Satani,” and won the Oscar for it, the only competitive Academy Award a horror score had taken at that point.

The production picked up a run of bad luck stories, some real and some inflated for the press: a plane struck by lightning, a hotel bombing near a location, a near-miss with an animal trainer. Donner later said the curse talk was useful publicity and not a working theory. The film cost under $3 million and returned more than $60 million in the United States and Canada. Sequels followed in 1978 and 1981, a television attempt after that, and a 2006 remake that opened on the date 6/6/06.

Cast

Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn
Lee Remick as Katherine Thorn
David Warner as Keith Jennings
Billie Whitelaw as Mrs. Baylock
Harvey Stephens as Damien Thorn
Patrick Troughton as Father Brennan
Leo McKern as Carl Bugenhagen

Trivia

The 666 birthmark was added so the audience would have one piece of evidence Thorn could not explain away.
Goldsmith’s “Ave Satani” was nominated for best original song as well. The score won. The song did not.
Donner cut a more explicit jackal birth. He wanted the confirmation to sit in a file and a grave, not a monster shot.
Stephens reprised Damien decades later as a tabloid journalist in the television series Damien (2016).
The London zoo sequence uses a real troop of baboons. The glass incident that follows was a combination of a trained effect and a careful edit.
Seltzer wrote a novelization because Fox wanted a book tie-in. Readers sometimes assume the film came from the novel. The script was first.

Trailer

Go Behind the Screams

Check out these behind-the-scenes looks at how The Omen (1976) was made: