The Omen - 1976
This review may contain spoilers.
The Omen is a conflation of opposites - a film that is at once significantly dated by today's standards, and aped and imitated the world over for decades. A picture that is sinister and even demonic, yet features relatively tame bloodletting. One obsessed with Christian symbology and demonology yet containing very little ghastly makeup wear and jump scares. It is a film that plays very long but is punctuated by 3-5 of the greatest horror sequences anywhere. In short, The Omen is a peculiar time capsule in the long and lauded history of horror cinema.
My immediate reaction upon rewatch of this film was that it had soured some from the halcyon days of my youth. I'll put it bluntly, The Omen is dated in more than a few respects. For starters, it's a story about the son of SATAN, of all things, yet is almost entirely devoid of practical effects, spooky production design, or sinister makeup. Blood appears very sparingly, and when it does, it looks more like thin syrup dye than the viscous pouring of slain victims.
Other criticisms could be raised as well. The film sort of lumbers along at less than a mid-tempo pace. It's long, particularly the middle portion, and I'm not sure that it really needed to be. The dialogue isn't what we are used to either. It lacks menacing punch in all but a few moments, as our protagonist tries to give the appearance of "business as usual" while the world SLOWLY falls down around him. For all these reasons, I could see why one would score this at 3.5 or even 3.0 stars. When we look at this in contrast to The Exorcist, for instance, which is three years older and somehow still seems as vibrant and cutting-edge nearly 50 years later, perhaps The Omen pales.
And YET, for me, this picture is still an all-time banger. For starters, Jerry Goldsmith's score is out of this world. He does all of the same loud/soft dynamics which have become the lingua franca of horror pics. But he goes further, allowing the score in key moments to just completely take over our senses. It's MASSIVE. It's operatic. The music nearly becomes a character in its own right, and Goldsmith forces us to contend with these tones even as we're watching terror unfold onscreen. The music IS the effects and makeup in this one.
Moreover, The Omen may not be gruesome or gratuitous, but it still NAILS its death scenes. The nanny noose drop, priest impalation, innocent mother's defenestration, and a decapitation to name a few. All of them are shocking, often come unannounced, and are pitch perfectly rendered. If the film drags in some places, it reaches the cocaine 80's in others in its sheer adrenaline rush. Films would borrow from its playbook again and again (i.e. it's also not dated much at all).
Finally, the third act features three grade A actors contending with this dark force of malevolence. You guessed it, more violence. An all-time graveyard sequence with hellhounds appearing long before Stranger Things was ever even a whispering in the minds of its creators (Hell, were they even born yet)? In it, we're granted a revelation into the mystery at the heart of this young man's strange lineage. Oh, and did I mention the use of developed photography as an excellent plot device portending ominous future happenings?
So, we return to the top. The Omen was made in 1976, and that will become obvious to you very shortly after you begin viewing it. But it lives on in its great scoring, in actors way too qualified for this giving their best to the diabolical material, and, most of all, in Donner's expert ability to film one hell of a kill scene. Maybe it isn't the absolute pantheon pic it once was for me, but its legacy remains tried and true.
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