My rule for religious horror is that it needs to be scary to someone like me who doesn't take abstract take-our-word-for-it "good" and "evil" concepts for granted. That's why I liked The Exorcist, since it clearly demonstrated why the demon was detestable and why the Christians were the heroes far beyond them just being a demon and Christians. The Omen reaches for subtlety at times, but it often fails to be gripping.
Robert Thorn loses his newborn son and so he secretly accepts the offer to adopt a boy in the hospital born on the same day with no family. As young Damien grows, tragedy surrounds his family and Thorn gets apocalyptic warnings.
Perhaps my foremost issue with the film is Damien's lack of characterization. We're given evidence that he has an evil Satanic aura and he directly engages in harm, but his personality is generally left vague and he's often sweet, leaving it hard to fully believe he's a loathsome malicious kid just because we're told he is. Yes, this is demonic fantasy, but being told to hate anybody by nature of their birth really rubs me the wrong way. And other movies have made the evil kid more plainly evil. Here, it's easy to believe Damien doesn't fully know what he's doing—it creates the sort of question explored wonderfully and upliftingly by Good Omens: "the kid's obviously hellspawn, but what if he's not really evil?" The film overall seems to bank on using Christian concepts of good and evil as shorthand and I don't buy into abstract morality like that for storytelling.
The characters communicate very poorly and it makes the plot feel contrived. Nobody states their intentions in a productive manner and it drags things out and creates problems in a frustrating way. There's also a prophetic-photographs element that felt like clumsy foreshadowing.
The film has some weird discussions in it. There's a possible angle of the occult stuff being paranoia and madness, a story of a man turning against his son for nothing, but that's a conceit that should be the core of a film, not an afterthought. There's a weird moment where Thorn's wife wants to terminate a pregnancy but her husband refuses because he's heard the pregnancy was doomed by Damien and wants to defiantly prevent it. Seeing a husband take power over his wife's pregnancy is uncomfortable and the choice is just a stupid one in this scenario. The idea of Thorn's struggle to harm his son also doesn't land well for me because Damien's not defined enough.
Good points: There are disturbing scares. Demonic nanny Mrs. Baylock was an arresting and compelling performance...until the end where she loses all of her gravity by becoming a shrieking madwoman. I liked the parallels to the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Samson and Delilah. Those were clever.
This film doesn't feel super tightly written or deep and leaves moral questions for me that, like with Frankenstein, I found flipped in a more satisfying way through its parody.
A moral horror film with confusing, flat morals.
My rule for religious horror is that it needs to be scary to someone like me who doesn't take abstract take-our-word-for-it "good" and "evil" concepts for granted. That's why I liked The Exorcist, since it clearly demonstrated why the demon was detestable and why the Christians were the heroes far beyond them just being a demon and Christians. The Omen reaches for subtlety at times, but it often fails to be gripping.
Robert Thorn loses his newborn son and so he secretly accepts the offer to adopt a boy in the hospital born on the same day with no family. As young Damien grows, tragedy surrounds his family and Thorn gets apocalyptic warnings.
Perhaps my foremost issue with the film is Damien's lack of characterization. We're given evidence that he has an evil Satanic aura and he directly engages in harm, but his personality is generally left vague and he's often sweet, leaving it hard to fully believe he's a loathsome malicious kid just because we're told he is. Yes, this is demonic fantasy, but being told to hate anybody by nature of their birth really rubs me the wrong way. And other movies have made the evil kid more plainly evil. Here, it's easy to believe Damien doesn't fully know what he's doing—it creates the sort of question explored wonderfully and upliftingly by Good Omens: "the kid's obviously hellspawn, but what if he's not really evil?" The film overall seems to bank on using Christian concepts of good and evil as shorthand and I don't buy into abstract morality like that for storytelling.
The characters communicate very poorly and it makes the plot feel contrived. Nobody states their intentions in a productive manner and it drags things out and creates problems in a frustrating way. There's also a prophetic-photographs element that felt like clumsy foreshadowing.
The film has some weird discussions in it. There's a possible angle of the occult stuff being paranoia and madness, a story of a man turning against his son for nothing, but that's a conceit that should be the core of a film, not an afterthought. There's a weird moment where Thorn's wife wants to terminate a pregnancy but her husband refuses because he's heard the pregnancy was doomed by Damien and wants to defiantly prevent it. Seeing a husband take power over his wife's pregnancy is uncomfortable and the choice is just a stupid one in this scenario. The idea of Thorn's struggle to harm his son also doesn't land well for me because Damien's not defined enough.
Good points: There are disturbing scares. Demonic nanny Mrs. Baylock was an arresting and compelling performance...until the end where she loses all of her gravity by becoming a shrieking madwoman. I liked the parallels to the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Samson and Delilah. Those were clever.
This film doesn't feel super tightly written or deep and leaves moral questions for me that, like with Frankenstein, I found flipped in a more satisfying way through its parody.