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CHAPTER 4

Benign Patriarchy Turns Malignant: The Omen

Of all the 1970s horror films in this book, The Omen is the least obviously engaged with women’s rights.

Widely received in its own time as a slightly campy reboot of Rosemary’s Baby, the film centers on the Thorn family, who move to the UK so that its patriarch, Robert Thorn, can be the US ambassador to Britain. Once there, however, strange things start to happen around their young son, Damien. It eventually comes out that Damien is the son of Satan and has come to wreak havoc on the world as the Antichrist.

This is a fair summary of the film, but it leaves behind The Omen’s powerful commentaries on the women’s rights movements. Because, en route to his wreaking havoc on the world – which we actually never see in this film— what we’re actually watching all throughout is Damien, unwittingly abetted by his father, wreaking havoc on his mother.

To highlight how this film is domestic horror, we’ll spend some time thinking through the opening scene of the film, in which Mrs. Robert Thorn-Kathy—is made to raise a child that is not her own.

But before we do that, I want to set the stage by laying out how reproductive rights in the United States had evolved by the middle of the 1970s.

In the years following the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, American women’s reproductive rights faced tremendous opposition.

That opposition came primarily from two corners: the Catholic Church and a grassroots antiabortion movement of American citizens. The Catholic Church came charging out first, with the Vatican condemning the Supreme Court ruling just two days after Roe was decided. Then Catho-lic leaders announced that anyone who participated in abortion would be excommunicated.

A few months later, Cardinal Terence Cooke, archbishop of New York, stated that any Catholic who had any involvement of any kind with abortion would be excommunicated.

Meanwhile, the grassroots antiabortion movement gained momentum that summer.

In June 1973, antiabortionists rallied in Detroit, calling for a revision to the Constitution that would make abortion illegal. Ten thousand people in Providence gathered for the March for Life event on October 7, 1973. One year after the Roe v. Wade decision, in January 1974, six thousand antiabortion representatives converged on Washington to press their case.

Across the country in 1974, pro-life constituencies sought to prohibit abortion on any grounds other than when the life of the mother was at grave risk.

In 1975 and 1976, federal and state government officials started feeling the pressure. Many states reinstated the mandate on spousal consent for abortions (or parental consent for abortions if a woman was under eighteen).

On February 3, 1976, President Gerald Ford announced that he felt the Supreme Court had gone too far with Roe, and that he supported a scenario in which federal law only protected abortion when a woman’s life was in danger or she had been raped, and that any other abortion rules should be made at the state level.

Then the Hyde Amendment passed, which forbade the use of Medicaid funding for abortions unless the life of the mother was in danger or she was the victim of rape or incest.

Bear in mind, of course, that since rape was not illegal in marriage in the 1970s, a woman couldn’t claim the right to an abortion if her pregnancy resulted from rape by her husband.

By 1976, access to abortion was not anywhere near as secure or protected as Roe’s proponents wanted it to be nor as many American women had assumed it would be.

At the same time that reproductive rights in the United States came under heavy fire, public awareness of and outrage at domestic violence was skyrocketing. Even mainstream, traditional women’s magazines started running pieces on wife battery regularly. An article in Ladies’ Home Journal, published in June 1974, described in detail the pattern of violence in the life of a fifty-year-old, educated, white woman, who had ultimately tried to divorce her husband shortly before he killed himself with a rifle.

The article pointed out that, contrary to then-current stereotypes about wife beaters as drunk, poor, and undereducated, wife battery was a problem afflicting all women, of all socioeconomic classes, and was not necessarily even tied to alcohol consumption. The battery of wives, the article implies, could be happening close at hand, behind a neighbor’s door-even behind the door of a neighbor who seemed smart, nice, sober, and responsible as a husband and provider.

Batterers, these writings emphasized, wouldn’t necessarily look like the kind of man who might beat a woman. Batterers could look like nice guys. They could be educated. They could be rich. They could appear to be doting and devoted.

The Omen (1976) picks up on this agitation around women’s rights and goes somewhere radical, to say things that no one was saying – not researchers on wife battery and not women’s magazines. First, The Omen draws a line connecting reproductive coercion to the frank physical battery of women.

Second, The Omen makes clear that abusers do not always look like abusers even in their own minds. That is, some of the doting, devoted married men out there, who would never think of themselves as abusers and might not ever raise a hand to hit their wives, might nevertheless be capable of life-threatening or even fatal conduct toward them. Just as some abusers look like nice guys, so some forms of abuse look like relatively benign conduct when viewed from a distance.

The Omen braids together these issues—the connection between reproductive coercion and physical battery and the debunking of the idea that only obviously cruel men who hit women are abusers-with a scorching feminist critique of Catholic dogma. As a package, The Omen offers one of the most subtle but trenchant takes on domestic horror in the 1970s.