The Omen: Rating: 1 star

You should check your child’s scalp regularly for head lice and the mark of the Devil.

The Omen (1976)
1976 · R · Horror

When an American ambassador’s newborn infant dies in an Italian hospital, he conspires with the staff to shield his wife from grief by replacing the dead child with an orphaned newborn. Of course, this badly-thought-out move comes back to bite him in the ass a few years later, when the kid turns out to be the Antichrist. That’ll teach him to lie to his wife. As the body count rises, the holy warnings mount, and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, the father must steel himself to do battle with evil and — gasp! — kill a five-year-old. (Yeah, like we haven’t all wanted to skewer one of those hyperactive little brats at one point or another…)

Judging from all the hype surrounding this classic film, I was expecting something on the level of The Exorcist: excellent effects, a well-plotted storyline, and vividly-drawn characters that actually did sensible things (as opposed to those horror movies where everyone runs around like headless chickens, blundering into danger and just begging to be picked off). In fact, it was more like Don’t Look Now: overlong, meandering, and full of characters who don’t even try to figure things out until it’s far too late. You know right away who’s going to die, and when; the only surprise is in the grisliness of the death scenes, which are actually quite inventive. Gore-hound that I am, I have to give points to a movie that decapitates people with plane-glass panels and impales them with lightning rods. (I would have given double points if Patrick Troughton had been impaled by his Doctor Who recorder, but… no such luck, I’m afraid.)

Gregory Peck’s performance as the father was surprisingly lackluster, and the kid’s performance was more childish than creepy. I never really got the feeling that this child was a pawn of Satan (any more than most children are, at any rate). The evil governess was the only person who conveyed any believable wickedness; even there, though, I was more intrigued by the concept than by the actual performance.

In fact, the concept of the story far outdoes the movie itself; the idea that pure evil can take the form of a small child is frightening, because it subverts all our philosophies and instincts. The implication that the evil must be killed — that the child must be murdered — is even more unsettling. I’m certainly not a maternally-inclined person, but even I squirm at the vision of a man about to brutally butcher the child he’s raised as his own for five years. But, in the end, the concept is too large for its own good; when it goes from the story of a family’s unravelling to the epic tale of good vs. evil, it loses a great deal of its emotional pull. God vs. Satan is a timeless tale, to be sure, but we’ve all heard it so often that it’s become rather dull and routine; black dogs and cemeteries are cliched and outdated, and have been for decades, if not centuries. What made The Exorcist so frightening was that it confined itself to a smaller scale; a girl tied to a bed in a barren little room is much more disturbing than a tale full of lofty churches, shadowed manors, and badly-rendered graveyard soundsets.

In all fairness, this movie does have some memorable elements and images; in general, though, I found it disappointingly average. As far as supernatural movies go, The Exorcist remains my favorite — although, who knows? When I have kids, I might find this the scarier film. Maybe I’ll just go make some wooden crosses for my future offspring’s nursery…