What’s yet more sophisticated is how the film clearly understands that ostensibly beneficent patriarchal control as a portal toward more overt, brutal, and even lethal forms of domestic violence. In the next scene, we see Robert speeding home from Kathy’s psychiatrist’s office in his sporty convertible, which then cuts to Damien-imitating a raging car vrooming along a highway as his father is currently doing-riding in circles on a tricycle in the family home upstairs.
The sound of a spooky Latin choir starts bleeding into the scene as Kathy stands by the upstairs balcony, tending to her flowers. If you listen very closely, you can make out the sopranos singing “Ave Satani!’ or “Hail Satan!”
Kathy pushes an unsteady table under a hanging plant and climbs up, perched terrifyingly close to the banister that separates her from a twenty-foot drop to the wooden floor below.
Damien, maniacally peddling around his room in circles, is sent out by Mrs. Baylock and goes peeling down the hallway toward Kathy.
The Satanic choir stops; all we hear is the squeaking of Damien’s pedals. He deliberately rams into the table Kathy is perched on at full speed; she goes careening off the balcony, though she catches two balustrade posts and dangles there for a moment, panicking. She fights for her life, holding on tightly and swinging her left leg up to the balcony, hoping to hoist herself back up.
Damien crouches down to look at her through the posts of the banister while she pleads for his help. Inevitably, she slowly loses her grip, and, screaming, “No, no, no, no, no!” she plunges to the floor, landing belly first. Damien doesn’t flinch or try to help her. Instead, he peers down at her from between the posts, calm and collected, while drops of blood flow from her mouth.
The film uses all its cinematic resources to dial us right in on the horror that has befallen beautiful, young, innocent, deceived Kathy.
We, the viewers, see Kathy’s face in an extreme close-up, so that her unconscious—and possibly dead, we don’t know yet—face takes up almost the entire screen. We are invited by the film to wonder if she’s survived, to try to detect her breathing, even just a hint of life in her, as the blood drips onto the floor.
Damien’s face, as he stares down at her, is devoid of pity, devoid of concern. When the camera flashes back from Damien to Kathy, this time at a distance of perhaps ten feet, we can tell by the positioning of her body on the floor that at least one of her arms is broken. The image is arresting and horrifying. This is a woman who has become the victim of domestic violence in her own home but at the hands of a small child—a small child who, let’s never forget, is not her own child but one her ostensibly loving husband foisted on her against her wishes and without her knowledge.
So who, the film asks, is ultimately to blame for Kathy’s fall? Is it Damien, or is it Robert?
Miraculously, Kathy survives the fall. From Robert’s point of view, we enter the hospital, where we see a crowd of reporters waiting to get his comment on his wife’s status. Pulling away from them, Robert joins Kathy’s doctor, who reveals that Kathy has suffered a concussion, a broken arm, and “internal bleeding.”
In horror, Robert reveals Kathy’s pregnancy to the doctor, who makes clear that he already knew that, and that Kathy lost the baby as a result of the fall.
What Damien accomplished when he rammed her off the balcony was an at-home, nonmedical abortion.
And, as has been the case far, far too often in American history, that at-home, nonmedical abortion nearly killed the woman who endured it.
As a well-meaning priest named Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton) had warned Robert earlier in the film, Damien wouldn’t tolerate a competitor for his status as sole child. He needed to be the lone heir to the Thorn family’s wealth and power. The fetus had to go. Father Brennan also had to go, for having had the temerity to interfere with Damien’s plan to be Thorn’s sole heir: While trying to take shelter at a church from a sudden diabolical windstorm, Brennan is summarily impaled by a falling pole knocked off the church roof.
It turns out that Kathy has to go, too, eventually.
Despite his inability to believe Brennan’s warnings, Robert Thorn gradually gets wise to the true situation with Damien – that he has some kind of unnatural imprimatur on him.
He begins standing up to Mrs. Baylock, yelling at her when she fails to do as he asks around the house, insisting she get rid of the demonic mastiff she had brought into the house ostensibly to protect the family.
Despite his attempts, however, it’s clear that the Thorn household is under her thumb entirely and that she is colluding with Damien to bring about Kathy’s death.
While Kathy is still recuperating in the hospital, Robert goes on a quest to figure out Damien’s origins. What he learns panics him: His own son hadn’t died in childbirth but had been brutally murdered by the priest-doctors in the Roman hospital. Damien hadn’t been born to normal, mortal human parents but to a woman and some kind of jackal. Once he learns this, Robert realizes the danger Kathy is in, and he calls her to urge her to flee the hospital for her own safety. But it’s too late: Mrs. Baylock is on the way to the hospital to finish what Damien had started.
In that scene, Kathy is again clad entirely in blue. She is trying to change clothes, preparing to flee the hospital, but it’s hard for her because her arm is in a cast. She pulls her thin, vapory, blue robe backward over her head, so that it covers her face like a veil – more Marian imagery – and through the veil, she sees the sardonic, smiling face of Mrs. Baylock approaching her. Suddenly, the scene fills with loud, dramatic (and grammatically inaccurate) Latin chanting. It is meant to sound like some kind of Black Mass: “Sanguis bibimus, corpus edimus; sanguis bibimus, corpus edimus. Tolle corpus Satani! Ave, ave versus Christus! Ave Satani!’ (“We drink the blood, we eat the body; we drink the blood, we eat the body. Lift up the body of Satan! Hail, hail, against-Christ! Hail Satan!”)
It is confirmed: Damien is the son of Satan, Mrs. Baylock is a Satanist sent to keep Damien safe and guarantee his access to Robert Thorn’s political capital, and Kathy must go. She has made her dislike of Damien evident and, as far as Damien and Mrs. Baylock know, she may still be pregnant.
Mrs. Baylock attacks Kathy, aiming to push her out a high window. As she is pushed, clad in diaphanous blue, we hear the chant “Ave Satani,” which, of course, is a direct substitution for the traditional “Ave Maria.” This scene instructs us that, in this unholy, inverted family, the mother has to be sacrificed for the son to be saved. This, of course, reverses the traditional logic of Christianity: Jesus’s self-sacrifice on the cross brings salvation to all humanity-including his mother, the Virgin Mary. With her blue robes fluttering angelically around her, Kathy falls all the way down through the roof of an ambulance. The door to the ambulance swings open, and we see Kathy, dead and bloody, lying on a hospital gurney.
This moment—about three-quarters into the film—is the most explicitly political scene so far, providing a visual of how women had sacrificed their medical safety for years as a result of laws protecting unborn fetuses. The image of a woman, bloody and dead, lying on a gurney outside the hospital was one the American public had had occasion to imagine all too often, well into the 1970s. Women who had terminated pregnancies in basements, in dry cleaning stores, or in private offices and had died in the process—-they, too, were rushed to hospitals, too late to save their lives. Like thousands and thousands of pregnant American women before her, Kathy has been sacrificed by a patriarchy that wanted to keep her pregnant more than it wanted to keep her alive.
Remember, Damien kills her through Mrs. Baylock, both believing that she may still be pregnant with Robert’s unborn true heir.
Mrs. Baylock’s hands may be the bloodiest, but it’s Robert’s prohibition against abortion that caused Mrs. Baylock to push Kathy out the window. Kathy dies because Robert wouldn’t let her terminate her pregnancy.
When Robert finds out that Kathy has died, he is still in Italy, preparing to return home and reveal everything to Kathy. Suddenly, the phone rings, and he picks up the receiver. We watch his face register shock, worry, and grief in quick succession. He hangs up the phone and buries his face in the bedspread at his hotel, clutching the edge of the bed in agony. His agony, of course, is both that Kathy has died and that he knows he is the one whose pattern of lying brought about her death. If he hadn’t lied to her about Damien and denied her an abortion, she’d still be alive. He knows it; we know it.
In the wake of the revelation that Kathy has died, Robert finally accepts that Damien is evil, and that it’s up to him to right the system that he threw out of whack with his coercion years before, when he forced Kathy to raise an adopted child against her will.
In the heat of his grief and remorse, Robert resolves to slaughter Damien.
Robert and a photographer named Keith Jennings (David Warner), who had been present at Damien’s calamitous fifth birthday party and is now entangled in the Satanic mystery, travel to the city of Jezreel to meet an archaeologist named Carl Bugenhagen (Leo McKern), who studies ancient religious arcana. The three of them descend into ill-lit subterranean passages in which Bugenhagen apparently does his research on ancient religions. In a massive cavern of archaeological tools and artifacts, Bugenhagen reveals that Robert must kill Damien using a set of special knives and on hallowed ground in a church. We see Robert hold a ritual knife downward, as if imagining stabbing it into Damien; the dim lights of the cavern glint on his gold wedding band, reminding viewers that this act of infanticide is revenge for Robert’s brutally murdered wife.
Bugenhagen urges Robert, “This is not a human child. Make no mistake… you must be devoid of pity.” Robert heads out of Bugenhagen’s archaeological site with the set of knives wrapped up in cloth. He will now return to England, ceremonial murder tools in hand, to destroy the son of Satan, who has been living under his roof, as his son, through his own coercive choices.
One of the most powerful and troubling aspects of this film’s representation of reproductive coercion and domestic violence, however, is that it situates its point of view not in Kathy but in her husband, Robert Thorn. We see a few scenes squarely from Kathy’s perspective-the scenes of violence in the car, at the balcony railing, and in the hospital. But for the rest of the film, we experience this story from Robert’s perspective. By situating our perspective largely with Robert, The Omen urges us to feel sympathy for him. The viewer’s alignment with Robert would seem to say that, sure, he lied to Kathy for years, in a way that resulted in her being brutally assaulted by her son and eventually killed by their nanny, but he’s not a bad guy.
It’s no accident that the filmmakers cast in this role Gregory Peck, who by 1976 was familiar to and beloved by Americans as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Here, viewers of this film would have a hard time concluding Robert was the villain not only because the film is shot from his POV but also because Atticus Finch is pretty much the anti-villain of mid-twentieth-century film.
Part of the feminism of The Omen lies precisely in the fact that it shows how a well-meaning and likable husband can still be a perpetrator of domestic violence, however unintentionally.
In Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Stepford Wives, the male malefactors were deliberate and malicious toward the women they tormented. They were strategically manipulative, verbally assaultive, physically cruel, and sexually abusive. They consciously sought to do something they knew was bad, hurtful, controlling, and dehumanizing.
Robert, by contrast, is uxorious, lying to Kathy because he genuinely believes it will be best for her. By extension, the film warns that any man, thinking he is doing right for his wife, may do violence to her simply by denying her agency, knowledge, and choice.
Part of the horror hangover in this film is that one feels gross at the end.
Viewers know they are supposed to feel compassion for Robert, but they are troubled by him. He sacrificed his wife, though unintentionally, and he raised the Antichrist, all through his conviction that he should be in charge of Kathy’s reproductive life. It’s very disquieting, this idea that a kind, loving, well-meaning husband might be complicit in Kathy’s horrific suffering and death. And it stays with you all the way home. Why didn’t Robert just tell her?
The final feminist critique made by this film, in my view, is of what we now call benign patriarchalism.
Robert keeps Kathy in the dark not because he hates her but because he loves her. He tricks her not in order to get something for himself but in an attempt to spare her from pain. Her body is broken, battered, and ultimately destroyed not through intentional malice but through Robert’s overconfidence in his own decision-making abilities. It starts with the presumption that Kathy cannot cope with the reality of their son’s having died at birth. By deciding to spare her from that reality, Robert puts Kathy into a place of fundamental vulnerability and unreality.
At his core, Robert’s trouble is that, as a benign patriarch, he doesn’t trust Kathy to be able to tolerate the truth. He doesn’t entrust her with reality or with the right to knowledge and autonomy.
This is something contemporary domestic violence therapists, lawyers, activists, survivors, and scholars talk about all the time. Abusers create fictions around their victims so as to keep victims in a state of unreality, so that they cannot extricate themselves or make choices that benefit themselves.
Although Robert isn’t a deliberate, malevolent abuser, he nevertheless forces Kathy to live in unreality. Fundamentally, that enforced sequestration in unreality is what puts her most at risk from Damien.
That element reveals the film to be years ahead of its time in how it theorizes reproductive violence and even femicide in relation to ostensibly well-meaning patriarchalism.
The Omen did not win the same kinds of contemporaneous accolades that laureled Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist. Quite the contrary: many contemporary viewers who had loved those two prior films—like Roger Ebert-gently panned The Omen, seeing it as little more than a knockoff of Rosemary’s Baby, and a far less bewitching one at that. Richard Eder, the reviewer for The New York Times, claimed the film as being directly in lineage with The Exorcist, but noted that there was precious little to recommend The Omen, which he saw as both “dreadfully silly” and “terribly solemn,” rather than exhilarating or terrifying like its predecessors.
Despite the critics’ generally negative response, the film was a huge commercial success, grossing more than $60 million in its initial release, making it one of the highest-grossing films of 1976—a year that also saw massive moneymakers like Rocky in theaters.
The Omen may have missed the mark for reviewers, but evidently it hit a nerve with the American public.
In the final scene of the film, after Robert has died, Damien is shown being raised by the seated president of the United States, who was a close friend of Thorn’s during his life. The notion of a dangerous, demonic figure close to the Oval Office resonated with an American public that was still reeling from the Watergate revelations, only a few years earlier, and the correlative idea that the highest offices in the land were corrupt and broken.
But part of the reason for the film’s popularity, both then and now, was Lee Remick. Roger Ebert acknowledged her as one of the best things about the film, for her “realization-of-dawning-horror” scenes. When she’s stuck in the car with Damien, we feel her panic; when Damien assaults her in the car, we feel her shock; when Damien lets her dangle and fall from the balustrade, we feel her horror. It is through her embodied experience of pain, fear, and confusion that the horror of The Omen ultimately lands. As she falls to the floor or falls from the hospital window, screaming both times, we want to scream with her.
I haven’t found reviews like Kathleen Carroll’s review of Rosemary’s Baby, clearly linking female entrapment to the soul of the horrific in the film. But the critique of the benign patriarch as the motivating force behind a woman’s suffering and death was right there to see, right out in the open. And, of course, Gregory Peck conveys it through the profound guilt and vengefulness that Robert Thorn feels when he finds out Kathy has died. He knows this debacle was his own doing and through him, we know it, too. In the end, The
Omen advances a theory of domestic horror that is much more capacious and, in some ways, more frightening than what we saw in Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist. There, the bedeviled women are facing obviously malign forces. For Kathy, the domestic danger originated not in Damien, but in her loving husband, Robert Thorn. Watching a woman suffer reproductive coercion, reproductive disempowerment, physical battery, and death indirectly but
incontestably at the hands of a man who loved her very much added a new layer to the feminist critiques of the 1970s. Even if your heart is “in the right place,” anytime you deny a woman agency, knowledge, or autonomy, you put her life in danger, and you make her life a horror.
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