Movies - The Omen

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	Movies - The Omen

The Omen is a 1976 horror film directed by Richard Donner and starring Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, Harvey Stephens, Billie Whitelaw, Patrick Troughton, Martin Benson, and Leo McKern.

The premise of The Omen comes from the end times prophecies of fundamentalist Christianity. Unlike the Left Behind series, this movie had no obvious evangelistic intent and its reading of the prophecies is fairly superficial, using them only as a premise from which to build the larger plot. The story tells of the childhood of Damien Thorn, who was switched at birth with the murdered child of a wealthy American diplomat. Damien's family is unaware that he is actually the offspring of Satan and destined to become the Antichrist.

The movie followed at the tail end of a cycle of 'demonic child' films such as Rosemary's Baby
, I Don't Want To Live, To The Devil A Daughter, and most notably The Exorcist
, and was itself followed by sequels (see below) and a number of copycat films such as the Italian-made Kirk Douglas movie Holocaust 2000. As a rule of thumb, the children concerned get older as the cycle continues, from the newborn of 'Rosemary' to the teens of such films as Carrie
and The Fury
.

The Omen was characterized by the chillingly effective use of symbolism, such as the birthmark of the number 666 on Damien's scalp, the effective use of crucifixes and statuary for foreshadowing, and the wallpapering of a room with pages from a Bible to ward off evil spirits. Some critics contended that the movie's attempt to portray apocalyptic symbolism reflected the lack of a scholarly grounding in actual prophetic texts. The movie boasted one of the most disturbing scenes in cinema as a character whose face appeared joyful hanged herself at a birthday party attended by young children. It is also reputed to have Hollywood's first decapitation scene. "If there were a special Madame Defarge Humanitarian Award for best decapitation," wrote Kim Newman in Nightmare Movies (1988), "this lingering, slow-motion sequence would get my vote."

An original score for the film was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, for which he received the only Oscar of his long career. The score features a strong choral segment, with a foreboding Latin chant. The refrain to the chant is, "Sanguis bebimus, corpus edimus" (Latin, "We drink the blood, we eat the flesh"), interspersed with cries of "Ave Satani!" (Latin, "Hail, Satan!"). Aside from the choral work, the score includes lyrical themes portraying the pleasant home life of the Thorn family, which are contrasted with the more disturbing scenes of the family's confrontation with evil.

During the course of filming, the production was plagued with a series of "curses", which the crew suggested were perhaps supernatural forces trying to prevent the filming of the movie. Such "curses" included: the plane for scriptwriter David Seltzer was struck by lightning; Richard Donner's hotel was bombed by the Provisional IRA; Gregory Peck canceled a flight to Israel, only for the plane he'd chartered to crash, killing all on board; a warden at the safari park used in the "crazy baboon" scene being attacked and killed by a lion the day after the crew left, and, on the first day of shooting, the principal members of the crew survived a head-on car crash.

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The lightning rod that kills Father Brennan was originally supposed to impact through his head and out his backside, but the effect was impossible to achieve.

Jennings was originally meant to be killed by a pane of glass dangling from a crane above his head. When he bent down to pick up the knives, the glass would drop and decapitate him. Special effects supervisor John Richardson tried several times to achieve the effect, but each time the glass leaved and landed horizontally. Richardson suggested the glass could fly off the back of a truck instead. The original version of the scene appears in the novel.

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Movies - The Omen

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