[COLUMN] The Omen Franchise Isn't Just About Religion, It's About Politics | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The default assumption when talking about The Omen is to compare it to The Exorcist. This makes a great deal of sense. These are both 1970s demonic horror movies that grapple with similar themes about parents confronting offspring that they no longer recognize as their own. Indeed, producer Harvey Bernhard approached writer David Seltzer prompted by the success of The Exorcist. It is no wonder that initial reviews described The Omen as “a member of the Exorcist family.”

As such, it is no surprise that Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, a prequel film delving into the antichrist’s origin, leans hard on The Exorcist as an inspiration. Stevenson has built a very conventional religious horror, set at a convent and featuring demonic nuns and sinister priests. Recalling The Exorcist, the opening scene of The First Omen involves an old priest and a young priest, Father Harris (Charles Dance) and Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), debating their damaged faith.

However, this is a narrow perspective on The Omen. It reduces a classic horror film (and its decidedly less-than-classic sequels) into something much more generic, blurring the distinction between The Omen and movies like The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Last Exorcist, The Conjuring, The Nun, The Pope’s Exorcist, and even Immaculate. It goes without saying that The Omen is fundamentally a religious horror movie. However, it’s also about something more. The Omen is about power.

To say that The Omen is about religious belief is to acknowledge only half of the picture. The Omen is also about politics, and the uncomfortable intersection between church and state in American life. The idea that these two institutions should be separate dates back to the country’s origins. The nation’s founding fathers established what Thomas Jefferson described as “a wall of separation” between church and state. However, that wall has proven uncomfortably porous.

It is worth briefly recapping the plot of The Omen. Elder statesman Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) is the American Ambassador to Rome. He rushes to hospital as his wife, Catherine (Lee Remick), gives birth. He is told that the baby died in birth, but the mysterious Father Spiletto (Martin Benson) appears with a proposal. The hospital has another baby that just lost his mother. With Robert’s consent, the church will swap the baby and the Thorns will raise the child as their own.

Rewatching The Omen, it is very clear that the Thorn family has been heavily modelled on the Kennedy dynasty. In particular, family patriarch Robert Thorn is very much framed as Joseph Kennedy. Thorn is firmly entangled within the American political system. He is “old college roommates” with the current President of the United States and boasts to Catherine that she is married to “the future President of the United States.”

Like Joseph Kennedy, Thorn is independently wealthy, with the sequels revealing the extent of the family business. He also serves as America’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James. As the franchise goes on, Robert Thorn’s ultimate legacy will be his descendants and the horrific supernatural tragedies that unfold around them. This is no accident. Seltzer acknowledges the influence of his research for a 90-minute documentary on Robert Kennedy on his script for The Omen.

The Omen is very much informed by the then-recent story of John F. Kennedy. In hindsight, it’s hard to understand just how controversial Kennedy’s Catholicism was during his election campaign. There was a palpable fear that “an Irish-Catholic president could not separate church and state.” In September 1960, Kennedy had to assure voters, “I do not speak for my church on public matters--and the church does not speak for me.”

The Protestant establishment was terrified of Kennedy’s ascent. In August 1960, Billy Graham arranged a meeting of 25 Protestant leaders, including Reverend Doctor Norman Vincent Peale, with a view to stopping Kennedy’s election. “They were unanimous in feeling that the Protestants in America must be aroused in some way, or the solid block Catholic voting, plus money, will take this election,” wrote Peale’s wife, Ruth Stafford Peele, of the gathering.

It seems that some voters held beliefs not too far removed from the premise of Seltzer’s script. As Thomas Carty noted, “Mass produced pamphlets, from extreme anti-Catholic organizations, recapitulated the centuries-old belief that the Roman Catholic pope ruled as a living antichrist.” Even the establishment within the Democratic party was concerned that Kennedy was “much too young and much too Catholic” to be electable to average Americans. This is the specific context for The Omen.

The Omen goes out of its way to tie its religious prophecies to postwar political developments, such as the founding of Israel and the signing of the Treaty of Rome. As with The Exorcist, this is a horror film that unfolds in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, it speaks to a wariness and cynicism deeply rooted in the American culture of the moment. While The Exorcist made its point subtly by setting itself in Washington, D.C., The Omen takes place in the corridors of power.

While none of the subsequent films are anywhere near as good as the original, they do generally follow these central themes and arcs. In Damien: Omen II, the audience gets a broader sense of the power and influence of the Thorn family. Following Robert’s death, his adopted son Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor) moves in with Robert’s brother, Richard (William Holden). Damien is sent to a prestigious military academy and learns the true reach of the family’s corporate holdings.

Damien is a transitional movie. It feels situated between the 1970s and the 1980s. The image of young boys studying in military college under the tutorship of Sergeant Daniel Neff (Lance Henriksen) evokes both the tendency of such exclusive institutions to produce a political class and the specter of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, it seems that Thorn Industries holds true power in a globalized world, exerting influence through international enterprise.

“Our profitable future, aside from energy, lies also in famine,” boasts executive Paul Buher (Robert Foxworth), evoking one of the four horsemen as he reveals a plan to leverage food supply into political power, turning foreign powers into mere “tenants.” He points to the oil crisis earlier in the decade. “The oil countries didn't hesitate to put their fingers on our jugular vein,” he states. “What's so different about food? If you've got a knife at your belly, you'll keep your hands at your sides.”

In the Omen films, particularly the first two, there is a palpable concern that power is no longer concentrated within the political sphere itself. Instead, power is now less centralized in transparent democratic institutions, as they have been supplanted by veiled corporate or religious interests. There are no checks and balances that can contain these forces as they exert greater influence on the larger establishment. In Damien, the pincer movement seems to be the military and industrial complexes that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about.

The rest of the series goes back and forth on this, never entirely sure how hard it wants to commit to the central idea. In Omen III: The Final Conflict, Damien (now grown and played by Sam Neill) has assumed his father’s post as the American Ambassador to Great Britain, where he exerts considerable influence. He appears on television talking about getting younger people to engage with politics and even participates in a fox hunt with the country’s landed gentry.

In Omen IV: Awakening, Damien’s daughter Delia (Asia Vieira) is adopted by Virginia congressman Gene York (Michael Woods) and his wife Karen (Faye Grant). The film is saturated with American flags. It’s also a film that has no time for subtext. When it’s time for the obligatory exposition dump, Karen turns to Father Mattson (Duncan Fraser). As he lays it out, she asks, “So, it's about politics?” He replies with the franchise’s mission statement, “There's nothing that isn't politics, Mrs. York.”

After a string of disappointing sequels, the Omen franchise lay dormant for over a decade. It was eventually resurrected as part of the wave of remakes during the first decade of the new millennium. This might not have been the worst idea. John Moore’s The Omen released two years into the second term of President George W. Bush, a leader who had already claimed by that point that he ran for office and invaded Iraq because God directed him.

Moore’s take on The Omen is mostly a shot-by-shot and a line-by-line remake of Richard Donner’s classic. However, one of the film’s most interesting choices is casting Leiv Schreiber as Robert Thorn. Schreiber is much younger than Peck was when made The Omen, and it’s casting that only really makes sense as meta text, building on Schreiber’s work in Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate, in which he played a figurehead being manipulated to the Oval Office by sinister forces.

Watching the Omen series from beginning to end, it’s frustrating how the series consistently refuses to commit to its biggest idea. If the Thorns are the Kennedys, then Damien isn’t destined to be an Ambassador like his father. He is being groomed for the Presidency. The franchise knows this. Both the original and the remake end with Damian in the care of an anonymous American President. The poster for The Final Conflict even includes the Presidential Seal.

The Omen has spawned three sequels, a remake, and prequel, but none of them have followed the central premise to its logical conclusion. It’s such a slam-dunk horror movie sequel premise: the monster is the antichrist, who is now the President of the United States. The films following on from The Omen are all clearly aware of the underlying themes of the franchise, evoking it through dialogue or promotional imagery, but refuse to take that obvious next step.

It's a shame, because The First Omen is a dull and familiar rehash of well-worn horror tropes, often feeling more like a lesser imitation of Immaculate than a prequel to one of the best-loved horror movies ever made. Satan should be more ambitious.