The Omen

The Omen is a film about an institution, and the institution is a family with a staff.

Donner's decision — and it is the one that separates this from the decade's other occult films — was to shoot it as a prestige drama. Gregory Peck plays Robert Thorn with the gravity of a man in an adaptation of a serious novel, the locations are embassies and country houses and Pyrford church, Gilbert Taylor's photography is cold and formal, and nothing in the staging winks. The horror arrives inside that register: the nanny stopping in the middle of a children's party to look up at a window, say "look at me, Damien, it's all for you", and step off a roof with a noose on.

That is the film's method throughout. The deaths are enormous, elaborate and delivered deadpan — a lightning rod through a priest in a churchyard, a sheet of plate glass sliding off a lorry and decapitating a photographer, a mother tipped over a landing by a child on a tricycle and later put through a hospital window. Each one is staged as a set piece and played as an inquest.

Jerry Goldsmith's score is the film

"Ave Satani" — a Latin black mass sung by a choir over a driving orchestral figure — is the only Academy Award Goldsmith ever won and it does something no other horror score of the period does: it tells you, from the first frame, what the film will spend two hours proving. Without it this is a well-made thriller about a worried diplomat.

Harvey Stephens is not doing much and that is correct

Damien has very few lines and almost no behaviour. He rides a tricycle, he screams at a church, he smiles at the end. The film understands that an articulate evil child is a different and lesser proposition, and keeps him as an object the adults are frightened of rather than a performer.

Where it is weak

Billie Whitelaw's Mrs Baylock is wonderful and the Rottweilers are not, and the dog attack in the cemetery is the one sequence where the film's seams show. The Megiddo exposition is a lump. And David Warner's Jennings, who is the best company in the film, exists to be killed by a plate of glass.

For the possession film it is in direct commercial conversation with, The Exorcist; for the conspiracy-against-a-mother version of the same idea, Rosemary's Baby; for the modern studio franchise built on this template, The Nun.

The short answer: Thorn confirms everything — the jackal skeleton in the Cerveteri cemetery, his own murdered infant beside it with a crushed skull, and the birthmark under Damien's hair. He kills Mrs Baylock, drags Damien out of the house and into a church to kill him on consecrated ground with the daggers of Megiddo, as Bugenhagen instructed. He has the boy on the altar and the first dagger raised when armed police, called after the struggle, shoot him dead. The final scene is a state funeral for Robert and Katherine Thorn, attended by the President of the United States, who with the First Lady has become Damien's guardian. Damien, holding the First Lady's hand, turns and looks into the camera and smiles.

Is Damien the Antichrist in The Omen?

Yes, and the film establishes it as fact rather than suspicion. The evidence stacks in order: a jackal's skeleton in the grave recorded as his mother's, the Thorns' own murdered newborn buried beside it, Father Brennan's account of the birth, Bugenhagen's reading of the Book of Revelation, and finally the 666 birthmark. Nothing in the film offers a rational alternative, which is a very different structure from The Exorcist and from Rosemary's Baby.

Where is the 666 birthmark?

On Damien's scalp, under his hair. Brennan tells Thorn to look for the mark of the beast on the boy's body; Bugenhagen says it may be beneath the hair if it is nowhere else. Thorn finds it by cutting Damien's hair while he sleeps, which is the most frightening scene in the film precisely because it is a father with scissors over a sleeping child, and the child wakes.

What are the daggers of Megiddo?

Seven ceremonial daggers given to Thorn by Carl Bugenhagen, an archaeologist excavating at Megiddo, with instructions for killing the Antichrist: it must be done on consecrated ground, and the first blade must go into the heart, the remaining six forming a cross. Bugenhagen also tells him the child's blood must be spilled on holy ground — which is why the film's climax is in a church rather than in the house.

How do Katherine and Robert Thorn die?

Katherine is first pushed over an upstairs landing by Damien riding his tricycle into her stepladder, falling two floors and losing the pregnancy; she survives in hospital and is then thrown through the window of her room by Mrs Baylock. Robert is shot by police inside the church, with the dagger raised over Damien, in the last seconds of the film. Both get a state funeral and neither is believed.

Who is Father Brennan?

The priest who was present at Damien's birth and who tries to warn Thorn in a park and then in his office, speaking in Revelation and asking to be allowed to confess. He is dying, his body is marked, and he is killed in a churchyard during a storm by a lightning rod driven off a spire through his back. His rented room is papered with pages of scripture and he leaves behind the poem that tells Thorn where to go.

Is The Omen connected to The Exorcist?

Only commercially. It has no shared characters or continuity; it was written by David Seltzer and made by Twentieth Century Fox in the wake of The Exorcist's success, and it takes the opposite approach — an institutional thriller with an unambiguous supernatural cause, rather than an ambiguous assault on one household.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 006 is at the supernatural floor — 104 works score higher. The cause is biblical prophecy, the agents are a priest, a nanny and a dog, and the film permits no mundane reading.

Tone 008 is bleak — 11 works score lower. Every sympathetic character in the film dies and the Antichrist is adopted by the President of the United States.

Viscera 062 is above the median — 77 works score lower. A decapitation shown in full, an impalement, a hanging, two falls from height and a dog attack.

Era bias 010 is deep analog — only 17 works score lower. 1976 Panavision, in-camera effects, practical stunts and a choral score recorded live.

Pace 044 sits just on the dread side — 61 works are slower. It is paced like a procedural and the set pieces are widely spaced.

Reality anchor 026 is grounded — 14 works score lower. Embassies, hospitals, a churchyard, a cemetery in Italy. No sequence bends.

On jump scares: two, and the film's effects are built on dread and on the score instead.