"The Omen" and Why I Like Horror Movies
Michael Roemer begins his book Telling Stories with a fascinating phrase: "Every story is over before it begins." By this he means the obvious but surprisingly confounding fact that by the time we see a movie (or read a novel, etc.) the story has already been completed – usually months or years ago – by its creator.
For Roemer, this is significant because it means that while the characters (and the audience observing those characters) believe that any number of different things might happen in the story, this is an illusion. Their path is absolutely fixed, their feeling of free will fictitious. The events of their lives – their "fates," so to speak – have already been determined, because the end of the story has already been written.
This struggle against the unchangeable is one of the ways that, for Roemer, stories connect to the world. Because they are determined from the outside, as it were (by their authors), they allow us as viewers to engage with one of the most difficult aspects of our own lives: the conflict between our internally-driven feeling of free will ("I will eat this spaghetti or sit in this chair or quit this job because I want to!") and the external forces around us, over which we have no control. Like the characters in movies, we throw ourselves in vain again and again against the absolutes of the universe, the most significant of which is the fact that, like it or not, we’re all going to die.
Let me say, first off, that none of what follows is meant to impinge on the fact that horror movies are fun (for me) because of their emotional and physiological force. I'm a sucker for what's sometimes called "pure cinema" – the power of movies to envelope us and make us feel things – and the baseline of my response to any film is the degree to which it moves me. My startle reflex is strong enough that I will often (if I can get away with it without embarrassing myself) plug my ears and blink my eyes rapidly in a theater when I know there's a jump scare coming, because of the voltage those moments send through me. I have also, more than once, as a fully grown adult, turned on lights and checked potential hiding places in my apartment after watching a horror film. I find this incredibly enjoyable: I crave stimulation.
At the same time, though, I believe the value of film extends - must extend - beyond the simple experience of watching it. To my way of thinking, the significance of a piece of art is directly tied to the degree to which it stirs something in us that lasts beyond the moments in which we engage with it.
So, Richard Donner's The Omen, from 1976. In lieu of a lengthy summary I'll go bare bones, at least at first: Gregory Peck plays Robert Thorn, an American diplomat (and ex-college roommate of the President of the U.S.) who learns that his infant son has died in childbirth. Thorn is approached by a priest who tells him there's an orphaned newborn at the hospital – why not save his wife Katherine (Lee Remick) the agony by giving her this other baby and pretending it's theirs? Thorn agrees, and for five years everything seems wonderful…
Then it turns out that the boy, Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) is actually the spawn of Satan. This cheeky little scamp proceeds to demolish all the good guys in the film, including his parents, and in the end is adopted by the President. The implication of this ending seems to be that Damien is going to grow up to take over the United States, and then the world, resulting in the apocalypse and the extinguishment of all goodness from the universe, and lots of other bad stuff, etc. (Even Paradise Lost isn't entirely clear on what happens if the most beautiful angel wins.)
When we're talking about movies – particularly horror movies, because they so often fall into seemingly symbolic or thematic material – we like to speculate about what they "mean." This is unavoidable, and important, but I tend to think that many discussions of what movies mean, or are "about," actually undersell the real complexity and force of the way they operate. This might be a rather pedantic point, but instead of talking about what horror movies mean, I find it helpful to use the language of what they open up for us – what becomes clear after we watch them that was not clear before.
So, for example, there are a number of general readings of what The Omen is about. A common one is that it's conservative (used here not as a synonym for Republican, but instead as being interested in defending a certain set of "traditional" values) and revolves about threats to the family. These interpretations rely on the fact things like wedlock, wealth, and the patriarchal family structure are presented by the film as goodly. For the first five years of Damien's existence, the Thorns are happily married (there's a montage of them doing family-type stuff with smiles on their faces), and eminently successful. Robert makes all the decisions, and this (the movie seems to imply) is right and just and has gained them power and a big house.
What happens to this paradise? Well, on Damien's fifth birthday a large black Rottweiler appears, which seems to share some kind of evil bond with the child. At the dog's appearance, Damien's nanny kills herself (in a deeply unsettling sequence), and soon after this a new nanny arrives. Willa Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), as she introduces herself, is pretty obviously a bad egg, aligned with Damien and the dog. Importantly for this reading, she's also single and insists that she has left all interest in boys behind long ago. So into the bucolic family life of the Thorns have been introduced several new elements: an intemperate child, an unruly beast, and a single woman with no interest in the kind of domestic arrangements (namely, heterosexual marriage) the Thorns enjoy. Not only do these nefarious elements end up killing the Thorns, they also end up putting at threat their home nation, which is the very entity that gives Robert Thorn, as an ambassador, his power.
I think there is real importance in this reading of the film. In 1976, the United States had just gone through some twenty years of deep unrest, including the Civil Rights movement, the gay and women's liberation movements (as they were known then), the drawn-out trauma of the Vietnam war, a burgeoning environmental movement, and a general and deeply-rooted period of youth in revolt. There was a substantive portion of the population (and perhaps the filmmaker himself) which might have taken the story as terrifying because it confirmed their fears: the traditional American conception of a family headed by a man and rocketing up the social ladder into comfort and power had come under assault by a younger generation, aided and abetted by un-domesticated women and even darker, animalistic forces.
As many commentators have noted, there's also a political angle to this kind of reading. Damien was born at a hospital in Italy (where Thorn was stationed before he was promoted to Ambassador to England), meaning that he's not American. Long before the frantic paranoia over Barack Obama, that is, here's a story about the deep threat to the American kingdom posed by a foreigner worming his way into control of the country. Satan, then, becomes a kind of stand-in for the general forces of chaos and darkness threatening the fabric of conservative American life; what the film opens up for us is either the degree to which, in 1976, this fabric was actually under assault, or the degree to which certain Americans were terrified that it was.
As I said, I think this is a valuable way to begin to read the film, but I also think it's incomplete. This is because The Omen, like many (perhaps most) good horror movies, is what we might call double-sided. This doubleness is exactly one of the things that makes horror movies scary; if The Omen were purely a conservative dream about threats to extant power, then it might actually be comforting to people of that bent – powerful white men, to name them in the parlance of our times – because it would confirm what they already believe. But good horror movies are not comforting. They do not simply make us feel validated in our ideological stances; they’re scary on a psychological and intellectual level precisely because they raise doubts in us, turn us against ourselves, make our beliefs and our worlds unstable.
To bring it back to Michael Roemer, horror films often front us with the question of our own agency in a world of terrible necessities, impaling us on the unanswerable: how can we possibly understand our struggle against this thing out there that cares not a whit for our flailings, is not affected in the slightest by our actions? For Roemer, the thing out there is fate. For most horror movies, it is the question of evil.
There is another reading of The Omen available, one based on the fact that Robert Thorn initiates the entire action of the film by deceiving his wife and accepting a changeling into his home. Which is to say that if Thorn had just gone to his wife at the beginning and told her their child had died, Satan's machinations would have been foiled. But Thorn didn't, and the reason is important: because he, as the head of the household, felt entitled to make unilateral decisions for everyone in that household, even if those decisions involved deceit: he would protect his 'lil lady by grabbing some weird stranger's baby and telling her it was theirs.
Thinking of the film in this way gives it a much different valence, allowing it to be seen as tale of terrible (maybe even divine) retribution. In punishment for his action, and perhaps for the pride of arrogating all decisions onto himself, Thorn loses everything.
Many aspects of the film support this kind of interpretation. For example, the priest who comes to Peck with the offer to switch the babies is almost transparently not a good dude. In his wheedling maliciousness, he's an archetypal rendering of an evil character masquerading as a good one. We see through his deception easily, but Thorn does not. Is this only because he's distraught? Or does it signal something deeper, perhaps an intentional avoidance of what is plain to the eye, an arrogance about his ability to make what is wrong right?
The structure of the plot also supports this reading. As the film progresses, different people come to Thorn and explain what they think is happening – first a doomed priest, then a doomed photographer. Eventually, they convince Thorn to attempt to discover what he really did when he allowed the baby to be switched. He journeys to the hospital in Italy and then to the desolate grave of Damien's real mother, which is occupied only by a set of bones that look similar to the evil Rottweilers that populate the film. Through these investigations, he comes to understand that he is entirely at fault for what has happened, and that the only solution is to try to kill Damien.
One can also push this into more psychological areas, of course, involving the fear of what one has wrought with one's own children, or the actual fear of one’s own children; part of the value of working through films in this way lies in discovering further layers of understanding. In any case, according to these kind of readings the horror of the story - for Thorn and perhaps for us as viewers to the extent that we identify with him - revolves around him realizing the true extent of his own sin, and facing the penance he must undertake.
These competing readings form what I mean by the "doubling" of horror films. Is the evil in The Omen brought on by alien elements injected into the good, strong, traditional family unit, and perhaps the good, strong, national family unit? Or is it brought on by the careless, domineering action of the man heading that unit, making it a cautionary tale about the end result of patriarchy?
To put this in Roemer's terms, the conflict here is between the fact that we are at the mercy of forces we will never be able to control or escape (the notion that the evil comes from somewhere outside of Thorn's domain, either from a cosmically evil Satan or from metaphorically invoked social forces), and the belief that we have free will, that our actions determine our lives (the notion that Thorn's initial decision is the source of evil in the film).
In the end, I think it's this doubling that stirs the deepest dread in horror films, because it prevents them from giving us comfort. For me, what is made clear by The Omen is not simply that in 1976 audience members (or the filmmaker – there are questions here, of course) were anxious about threats to what they took to be a good and natural way of life. What is also revealed is the concomitant fear that they themselves, or the structures they took as right and good, were to blame for this threat, because of some barely-understood or barely-investigated transgression. And the film is scary because it triggers this same anxiety in us.
The final, most inarticulable terror comes exactly from not being able to identify the why in evil. Self-righteous fear (We're under attack!) exists in equal measure with guilt (It's our own fault!) somewhere down in the dark subsurface. Roemer's paradox – we act, and yet are determined – cannot be avoided. And what's coming for us in the end is annihilation.
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