THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL
IN EARLY 1970S HOLLYWOOD, HORROR WASN’T CONSIDERED A DIRTY WORD.
ROMAN POLANSKI’S ROSEMARY’S BABY and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist were big-budget studio movies that had scared up both massive box office and the odd Oscar. Released in 1976, The Omen would be another blockbuster, helping popularise 666, aka “the number of the beast”, with Satanists and heavy metal types, as well as making The Book Of Revelation required reading. And yet its director, Richard Donner, says he never saw The Omen as a horror film, despite a storyline revolving around the birth and early years of the Antichrist.
To Donner, The Omen was, and remains, “a mystery-suspense thriller”; all the tragedy that befalls Gregory Peck’s Robert Thorn, his family and those in his orbit can be chalked up to “coincidence” rather than diabolical intervention. “Even the three sixes could have been a birthmark,” insists the now-90-year-old director, who had writer David Seltzer exorcise anything overtly supernatural or demonic from his screenplay before they began filming, opting for a more pragmatic approach. “Dick was very instrumental in shaping the script, keeping the tone down to reality,” says Seltzer. “Clovenhooved creatures could not be real. The credit goes to him for the movie being as brilliant as it was.” The key was keeping it real.
CINEMATIC LEGEND HAS it that the idea for was hatched over lunch by its producer, Harvey Bernhard, and Robert L. Munger, an advertising executive who would later be credited as the film’s religious advisor. Munger asked Bernhard if he’d
