The Omen
HORROR-THON 2025 • BAD BLOOD
9/10
DIRECTOR: Richard Donner
STARRING: Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, Harvey Stephens
RELEASED: 1976
RUNTIME: 1 hr, 51 minutes
WATCH ON: Peacock, AMC, Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home
SCARE LEVEL: High
TRICYCLES INDOORS: …
A 5-year-old’s birthday party at a country estate. There are pony rides, a carousel, and a cake. Then the nanny climbs on the roof with a rope around her neck and announces it’s all for Damien. That’s the moment anyone who pays attention knows Damien is kind of a problem.
Robert Thorn, an American diplomat in Rome, is told his newborn son died during birth. A priest at the hospital offers him another baby, an orphan born at the same moment, and Robert takes it without telling his wife.
Years later, Robert is the U.S. ambassador to Britain, and Damien is 5. Strange things keep happening around the boy. A new nanny arrives with a large black dog. A priest begs Robert to listen. A photographer keeps finding marks in his pictures. Eventually, Robert has to accept what his son is and decide what to do about it.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
Watching Gregory Peck play this role is an experience. He’s Atticus Finch, trying to be reasonable while his household is overrun by the devil.
The deaths are wild. A priest and a lightning rod, a pane of glass, and the one everyone talks about. The movie is a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine of doom, and I mean that as a compliment.
Jerry Goldsmith’s score won an Oscar, and that chanting choir is pure dread. It sounds like church, but if church wanted you dead.
This one belongs with Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist from my 2023 lineup. I remember as a teenager watching The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby the same night and just deciding that together it’s a unique ‘70s brand horror that reminds you kids are creepy. Not just creepy but outright scary.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
The Omen followed the same marketing style campaign as Jaws: two weeks of sneak previews, a novelization, and the logo with ‘666’ inside the film’s title. Early screenings took place on June 6, 1976, where theater employees rushed to place 6’s everywhere for when patrons left the screening.