The Omen (2006)
The 1976 Omen scared the padiddle out of me. My best friend Portia and I would hole up in my room to watch it, and we were very young, maybe under 10, and scare ourselves silly with these movies. Maybe it was our age and our mutual propensity to wind each other up, maybe the movie was scary, I can’t reproduce the results. So I walked into this movie ready for some Constantine-level horror, i.e. images that are upsetting to Catholics and maybe some good booga-booga jump out of the closet stuff. However, I was a little too cavalier.
Written by David Seltzer, the guy who wrote the original 1976 version, this story of hellspawn Damien Thorn is naturally faithful to the original, but informed by the new world that we live in since the groovy bicentennial. The harbingers of the prophecy seem more urgent, the complicitness of the higher-ups in the Church to use the fear to their advantage - all these make the Omen timely again.
Director of photography Jonathan Sela takes a page from M. Night Shyalaman’s book and uses the color red to direct our eyes and our emotions. The mood and the feel of the film captures the dread that we jaded filmgoers have lost over the decades. A million movies have been made with supernatural terrors and demons battling the Catholic Church (why always them? Is is their filmic sense of style or their old-fashioned approach to Pure Evil?), but this one makes the concept seem, well, exciting again. I know, it sounds heretical, but the whole concept is actually so hackneyed that to make a movie like this scary again is quite a feat. The music by horror master Marco Beltrami and Jerry Goldsmith is really effective and slick. Jerry Goldsmith in recent years has been slumming in feel-gooderies and the Oscars, but he also wrote the music for the original Omen. Director John Moore wasn’t screwing around when he assembled his team.
As for the cast, well, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick (the anti-Macaulay) is a terrific choice for Damien. He speaks 15 words in the whole movie; everything else is in his spooky eyes. Will he, like original Damien Harvey Stephens (cameoed in this film), disappear into film lore, or will he be able to be someone’s precocious tyke in some future quirky comedy? Only time will tell. But here, he is all kinds of spooky. He is aided and abetted brilliantly by Rosemary’s Baby’s mama herself, Mia Farrow, a perfect casting choice and menacingly sweet. Liev Schrieber and Julia Stiles are the cursed Thorns, and Schrieber is giving us his method all in bringing Robert Thorn to life. His political aspirations and his rational denial are great counterpoints to what we already know going in - this kid is evil! Maybe the movie does rely a little bit too much on us already knowing the kid is super evil, but it’s still so effectively creepy that it borders on the hysterical.
Even knowing what will happen in a scene (”oh god she’s right there she’s gonna jump out right now!”) my companion and I were still gripped with tension. Leaving my body for the moment, I could pause and be impressed that my seasoned nerves could still be set a-twanging by an anti-christ movie. There are deaths, and they are really blunt and vivid, so if you tend to revisit imagery in your head much, I recommend the hand-filter that my companion was using. Forget about the preview, which gives away far too much, and just enjoy the ride. And look out for that black dog in the yard.
MPAA Rating R - disturbing violent content, graphic images, some language
Release date 6/6/06, of course
Time in minutes 105
Director John Moore
Studio 20th Century Fox
