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In its opening scenes, The Omen shows a man named Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) rushing to a Catholic-run hospital at night in Rome and then coming to grips with the news that his newborn son has died at birth. We see Robert, who looks to be about fifty-five or sixty years old, from a very steep camera angle, talking conspiratorially with a priest, who is also the head of the hospital.

Grief-stricken, Robert wonders aloud what he will say to his wife, who had been unconscious during the birth. The priest mentions that another baby boy was born right when Robert’s own child died and encourages Robert to deceive his wife into believing that this other child – whose mother died in childbirth—is her child. Robert hesitates, stating that he knows that Kathy wanted her children to be biologically her own. The priest pushes hard, animated by a little too much personal investment in the Thorn family’s woes.

Addled by grief and worry for his wife’s mental health, Robert capitulates.

In the next scene, he brings the baby boy to her bedside. We see that Kathy (Lee Remick) looks to be in her thirties, substantially younger than her husband. The energy in the room is happy, peaceful, contented. Smiling at his wife, Robert allows her to believe this is the child she gave birth to. In their interactions in this scene, it’s evident that he loves her. He treats her with great affection and care and smiles adoringly at her when he hands her the baby. We are encouraged even by the soundtrack to approve of the new family unit: The score is upbeat, written in a major key, and very soothing. The camera dwells on Kathy’s beatific and joyful face. Watching this new, happy family and hearing the mellifluous soundtrack, we begin to think that Robert has made a reasonable decision in his lie. Look how happy Kathy appears when her newborn son is put in her arms! The scene reads like the opening to a happy family film, centering on a besotted older husband and his beautiful young wife, bringing their child into the world.

Except, of course, we know this husband has lied to his wife about the identity of the baby. This should be a bone-chilling scene, but the movie encourages us to sympathize with Robert and to support his decision.

In Rosemary’s Baby, we knew all along that something was wrong with Guy. We knew he facilitated his wife’s being Satanically raped. We knew he treated Rosemary badly in general. We knew he had been loath to start a family with her and only changed his mind when leaned on by the Castevets. Guy was, beyond question, a bad husband. The Omen‘s presentation of Robert, by sharp contrast, encourages us to see him as a kind, doting husband, focused on his wife’s feelings. With Robert’s lie, and the film’s insistence that we should like him anyway, the film becomes political— very subtly.

This seemingly adoring man deceived his beloved wife about the fate of their own child and in the process, denied her some very basic human rights: the right to grieve her dead child, the right to choose whether to adopt this orphaned child, the right to know her own reality, the right to manage her own reproductive life. All this despite the fact Robert knew that Kathy had not wanted to adopt: “She wanted her own,” he had told the priest. Yet he chose, ostensibly on her behalf yet knowingly against her wishes, to foist this child upon her secretly.

However doting Robert may seem, and however beneficent his conscious intentions, he has taken on a role that is acutely and troublingly patriarchal, deciding to control the reproductive life of his wife without her consent and without her knowledge.

Not just troublingly patriarchal but also troublingly Catholic. Remember that Robert has taken his stance on Kathy’s reproductive life only through the intercession of and pressure from a Catholic priest, in a Catholic-run hospital—in Rome, no less.

The film was released three years after Roe v. Wade, in the heat of the Catholic Church’s sustained efforts to reverse the Roe decision.

The film, then, is asking the viewer to consider the importance of women’s agency over their reproductive lives and forcing American audiences to recognize how the Catholic Church in the ’70s lined up to impede that agency.

In its first few scenes, The Omen isn’t yet asking—although it will ask explicitly later -whether women should be allowed to terminate pregnancies.

In its opening, it’s asking whether anyone other than a woman should be able to force her to have a child she does not want. In particular, it’s asking us to consider the extent to which a husband or the Church should be able to force a woman to have or raise a child she doesn’t want.

The boy, whom Robert and Kathy name Damien (an obvious nod to Father Damien Karras from The Exorcist; this Damien is played by Harvey Stephens) grows up normally at first. When he is about four, the family relocates to England so that Robert can become the US ambassador to the UK.

Rather than discussing this promotion with Kathy, Robert presents it to her as a fait accompli, deepening our sense that, however affectionate Robert is, he doesn’t really see Kathy as an equal partner, but more of a ward, who can and must accept his decisions as law.

When Robert tells Kathy about the promotion and relocation, she is happy, wrapping her arms around him and squealing girlishly over his success.

After the move to England, we see numerous brief scenes and still shots, a carousel of slides of the family’s day-to-day life in England showing the three of them laughing together, holding hands, smiling brightly for the camera.

Kathy pulls Damien’s little toy dog on a leash across a lawn while Robert carries Damien in his arms; Kathy and Robert stroll at sunset, arm in arm; the family feeds ducks at a pond; they ride in canoes together; they grin at one another while taking taxis around town. They are clearly a loving, close, happy family, and the film encourages us to approve of them, to like them, to admire them.

Until, ominously, the still photographs start to show Damien at his fifth birthday party, and the soundtrack shifts to a creepily tinkling rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” The stills stop, and the camera rolls again just as Damien blows out the candle on his cake, leaning happily into the arms of his pretty young nanny. Soon, when the nanny is alone at the party, she makes eye contact with a fierce looking mastiff that’s unaccountably appeared at the edge of the party. The soundtrack shifts to an eerie, discordant, amelodic, pulsating piece of music as we zoom in close on the nanny’s eyes, intercut with the eyes of the dog. Something happens to the nanny. She looks bewitched. A few seconds later, we hear the nanny shout, “Damien! Look at me! Over here! Damien, I love you!” We don’t know where she is at first, but the camera finds her, standing toward the top of the Thorn mansion, in a windowsill.

Zooming in close, we can see that she has a noose around her neck. She shouts down at the partygoers, “Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you.” Everyone watches her as she leaps from a window ledge and hangs herself.

Kathy and Robert are appropriately horrified at her death, as are all the screaming children. Damien, however, cradled over his mother’s shoulder, seems unfazed or maybe even mildly pleased. Soon, his eyes, too, lock with the mastiff hellhound’s; a flicker of recognition passes over Damien’s face, and hewaves at the dog, while the chilling amelodic song pipes back up. Looks like the good times for the happy little family may be coming to an abrupt close.

Soon after, a replacement nanny arrives, a strange woman named Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). As soon as the new nanny is alone with Damien, she calms him and says, “I’m here to protect thee,” switching to the now-defunct second-person singular pronoun (thou/thee/thy), which tells the audience that there is something sinister and archaic about her and about her relation to Damien. She clearly knows something about who this child really is, even if we as viewers don’t yet.

The sinister vibe escalates and gains anti-Christian specificity when, on approach to a church for a wedding, Damien flies into a rage in the car, tearing Kathy’s blue turban off, ripping out her hair, and hitting her in the face. The family is forced to return home. m

Later, we see Kathy and Robert in their room, with Kathy carefully treating her facial bruising. It looks very much like a scene of a woman treating herself after an incident of domestic violence, but of course, here it’s her own child, and not her husband, who beats her.

Again, echoes of The Exorcist: A child beats a mother through the malign agency of a demonic force that lies within the child. But the context here is importantly different, because we also have Robert – the supposedly kind, loving, doting man—who has contributed to or even caused Kathy’s lack of safety. Robert, who loves Kathy very much, talks about his love constantly, and would never directly hurt her himself, has nevertheless put her in harm’s way by denying her reproductive agency and inviting in chaos. Robert flung her into Satan’s clutches, even if he’s not yet aware of it and never meant to do so.

Let’s pause on the scene in the car and think about how that scene speaks to the film’s larger concerns and, in particular, to its critique of Catholic stances on abortion.

In the car, Kathy is wearing a beautiful blue suit. She wears blue frequently in the film, but it’s conspicuous here because she’s clad entirely in blue, including the turban that covers her hair. Remember that she is a lovely younger woman married to a doting older man. They have a son who is not the biological child of the father and who is given to the mother without her physical participation in a sexual act that would create a baby.

Another family works in a hauntingly similar way: the Holy Family. Mary is young; Joseph is old; Jesus is not Joseph’s biological son, and Mary did not have sex to produce this baby. The Virgin Mary’s iconographic color is blue.

The Omen leverages the archetype Rosemary’s Baby deployed—we have a monstrous child raised by a mother who invokes the Virgin Mary. Like its demon-child predecessor, The Omen hinges on a dark reinvention of the Holy Family.

That dark reinvention dynamic carries through the film.

Kathy and Damien drive through a zoological park in which the prey animals run from Damien and the predators run toward him, to attack. The baboons, in particular, rage all over their car, roaring and biting. Kathy is petrified and drives off, deeply shaken and increasingly convinced that something may be wrong either with her or with Damien. Kathy may be in a position analogous to that of the Virgin Mary, but whereas Mary always knows that her child is the child of God, Kathy is clueless about the identity of her child as a child of Satan.

The birth of Christ emerged from a miraculous agreement between God and Mary—her joyful, fully informed accession to His will. The raising of Damien is built on an under-the-table baby-switch deal between a priest and Robert. Much less auspicious, both for the mother and for humanity.

In reimagining the Holy Family as an Unholy one, the film takes a step in its critique of Catholic pro-lifers and their position. People who oppose abortion, since the 1970s, have routinely used the argument against abortion that one could never know what a terminated pregnancy might have grown up into, had it been allowed to be born as a person. Opponents of reproductive freedom asserted that every pregnancy could end up being a miracle child of some kind. An aborted fetus could be the next Einstein, Marie Curie, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or Malala.

Underpinning this conviction is the belief in the Virgin Birth and the birth of Jesus as the ultimate miracle baby. Had Mary terminated her pregnancy, God could never have taken human form. Human salvation would have stopped. Christian belief is predicated on the idea that all humanity is saved by the birth of one special child-fully human, and fully divine. Of course, from the vantage point of a religion so tightly pinned to that idea, where terminating a pregnancy runs the risk of being catastrophic for humanity, the idea of allowing women to choose to terminate pregnancies of their own volition seems insane.

The film’s powerful move, from a theological standpoint, is to remind viewers that babies aren’t always good and virtuous, miraculous and salvific.

There’s no guarantee when a child is born that it won’t be a murderer or a sociopath. All parents roll the dice.

Now, I’ll freely and enthusiastically admit, as a committed adorer of babies and children, I think human children are delightful and wonderful. But the movie isn’t picking a fight with babies; instead, it’s picking a fight with the idea of salvific children, because it’s that idea that quietly motivates a lot of pro-life ideology and that tends toward the dehumanization of women as mere vessels for babies.

Kathy returns home from the wild animal park to Robert and confesses that she is preoccupied with anxiety about Damien. She says, “I need to see a psychiatrist. I have such fears.”

She’s afraid Robert will put her in an asylum, which he has the legal right to do at that time, as the paterfamilias. Instead, he affirms repeatedly that he loves her, to which she responds simply that she wants him to find her a doctor. This moment in the film reminds us that Kathy’s freedom and personhood are circumscribed by Robert, however tender and loving he may appear or even intend to be. She cannot even seek psychotherapy without his consent and facilitation. It also conveys to viewers that Kathy is having doubts about her child but that Robert feels no compulsion to reveal his misconduct.

Those doubts come into focus soon thereafter, where Kathy sits in the huge, wood-paneled parlor of their mansion while Damien makes noise in the background. She is holding her head in her hand, as if she has a migraine, but her facial expression reads much more as fear or anxiety than physical pain.

When Robert enters the room and asks if she’s all right, we see her flinch and try to twist her face into an expression of simple physical pain. When she complains that she can’t stand Damien’s noise anymore, Robert minimizes her concern, and he tries to lighten the mood by playing with Damien, but Kathy calls angrily for Mrs. Baylock and commands her to take Damien out of the room. Robert tries to soothe Kathy, but she shouts at Mrs. Baylock to get Damien out immediately. After her outburst, the camera reveals that Kathy’s facial expression has settled back into intense anxiety. This is no longer the sweet-tempered Kathy, the soft-voiced, dedicated mother. Realizing she has to account for her outburst, Kathy tells Robert, “Darling, I don’t know what’s the matter with me… I don’t seem to be able to… I don’t know.” She doesn’t say it outright, but the scene makes clear that what she doesn’t seem able to do is tolerate their son.

Robert reconfirms his love for Kathy but expresses skepticism about her psychotherapy, suggesting that “this is what the doctor’s doing” to her.

He offers to speak with her psychiatrist, which she encourages, saying the doctor has something to discuss with Robert.

With somber classical music playing as the two hold each other and stare out the window into an eerie night, Kathy haltingly informs Robert that she never wants any more children. Clearly taken aback, Robert haltingly consents to her wish. But then Kathy plangently begs him, “Then you’ll agree to an abortion? I’m pregnant, Robert, I just found out this morning.” This time, Robert doesn’t reply, thereby locking in the same ostensibly loving reproductive coercion with which the film opened.

Kathy’s reproductive agency and autonomy are contingent upon him, upon his approval.

However much he may love her, she cannot choose to have an abortion without his consent any more than she was allowed to choose whether to raise this child. This moment reflects a legal reality that many American women faced in the mid- to late ’70s: Even though federal law protected the right to abortion, in many states, women had to seek their husband’s consent before terminating a pregnancy.

Without consenting to the abortion Kathy desperately wants, Robert goes to speak with her psychiatrist, who tells Robert that Kathy has fantasies that Damien is evil and not her own child. Though Robert knows that these are not fantasies, but rather evidence that Kathy is picking up on his lie about Damien’s parentage, he looks away from the psychiatrist in shame and says nothing. The scene is understated but crushingly powerful: In this moment, Robert has the chance to exonerate Kathy of any serious mental disorders. He has the chance to tell the psychiatrist that Kathy is right, that the child is not hers. In so doing, Robert could release Kathy from her own fears about her mental health, as well. He chooses instead to protect his honor and integrity, keeping the baby switch back in Rome secret.

Even so, the psychiatrist perseveres in his advocacy for Kathy, urging Robert to agree to an abortion. For the first time in the film, Robert loses his cool, shouting brusquely at the doctor with one sharp “No!” The paterfamilias, however kindhearted he may seem, does not brook anyone else—not his wife, not her doctor-telling him how and whether he can bring more children into his family. That will be his call, and his alone. He will, once again, deny Kathy her reproductive agency, even though he now understands that something may be seriously wrong with Damien and that his deceit of Kathy has been psychologically harmful to her. Moreover, he will deny the truth to her psychiatrist, allowing him to continue to believe that Kathy lives in a “fantasy,” while knowing that Kathy’s seemingly delusional belief is actually the reality that he has constructed for her without her consent.

In doing this, The Omen, a film with no ostensible gender politics to it, a popular but second-tier film that is rarely read seriously even by film critics and scholars who focus on horror, takes a big step toward indicting patriarchy itself, through the seemingly well-meaning Robert Thorn.

Robert isn’t selfish or egomaniacal; he isn’t mean, cruel, or belittling to Kathy. He doesn’t physically abuse her; he certainly doesn’t bawd her out to Satan. Even so, he construes his status as the patriarch as a more than ample mandate for his deception of his wife about her own mental and reproductive reality-and he does so out of a belief that he is looking out for the best interests of his wife and family.

The Omen shows us an insidious form of abuse and control, insidious because it is not intended as abuse or control, but as beneficence and care— from the point of view of a man completely confident in his own absolute authority over his wife, her body, and her choices.