We return to Horror Madness and we return to the devil, as Richard Donner’s chilling antichrist tale The Omen battles John Carpenter’s queasy and apocalyptic Prince of Darkness. One of these films is overrated; one of them isn’t rated nearly high enough.
See the introduction and full slate here http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
There are few concepts I hate, as a horror fan, more than “elevated horror,” and you can credibly blame The Omen for the whole idea. The phrase came much later, of course - after Get Out (which we’ll be covering at a later date) became a cultural phenomenon and won Oscars, after A24 and others started producing horror films with big ideas and an indie aesthetic. But regardless of the origin of the term, the idea - that there’s a difference between regular horror and the horror that actually has depth - is an older one, and I think it started here.
Or rather, it started with The Exorcist, which is another film we’ll be covering later, but The Exorcist spawned a host of imitators of which The Omen is the most famous. The Exorcist was a beautifully filmed, brilliantly acted film that won awards and proved that horror could be about something - that it could reveal deep truths about the human condition, about the nature of the universe, about good and evil. It won awards and was a huge hit. The Omen, first and foremost, was an attempt to cash in on that success.
You can practically see the desperation onscreen, as if the movie is saying to you “wow, you like a horror movie about a demon? Well this one has the devil and the antichrist! You want a horror movie with some prestige actors? Well we don’t have Ellen Burstyn or Max von Sydow at the height of their powers but we’ve got a past his prime Gregory Peck and Samuel Beckett muse Billie Whitelaw! You liked those bits where they talk about the lore of possession? We’ve got fake bible passages! You like that Linda Blair acting all weird? Our kid is even weirder and we won’t bother to put in early scenes to make him likable either! You like this right? Downer endings mean a movie is serious, yeah? In this one the devil wins! Look at us! Serious horror about serious things!” Etc.
The Omen is just trying so hard. So goddamn hard. It wants, so badly, to be a great film and there are moments when you can see one. It’s got a handful of great, and scary, set-pieces that are justly remembered: the bike on the stairs, the churchyard decapitation, the hanging nanny. Those parts work. But there’s nothing underneath them. It’s like someone watched The Exorcist and thought it was scary because Satan is scary, and creepy kids doing things kids don’t do are scary. But what makes The Exorcist scary are all of the parts that aren’t supernatural; it’s a story about a little girl changing into something her mother can’t recognize. It’s about the realization that not only are their limits to how much we can protect our children but there are limits to how much we can know them; that every day they move further away from us and further into the adult world where we can neither control them nor ensure their safety.
There could be something similar in The Omen, but the film never digs deep enough to find it. Damien is creepy because he’s inherently evil, the antichrist, and his parents’ danger never feels real because their love for him never feels real, and you do need both in order to sell it. The Omen has all of the trappings of prestige but none of the substance.
I get the sense that John Carpenter would sneer at the phrase “elevated horror.” He’s a man who makes scary movies, whose primary purpose isn’t to inform or instruct or win awards but to scare the piss out of you. Prince of Darkness is similar in subject matter to The Omen: in both films Satan is real, and he’s coming to work his evil in the world. Prince of Darkness has plenty of pseudo-religious babble and lore. But at its core the film is doing something very simple, something Carpenter did in many other films. It’s a monster movie, above all. We meet a core group of characters, and we learn enough about them to like them a little bit. A monster starts killing them. They have to outwit the monster in order to save themselves and their loved ones. And that’s it - that’s what they do. The stakes are high, but the concerns are straightforward. Monster bad. People good. People fight monster.
It’s a tight film. Almost all of the action takes place in one location; using isolation intelligently was one of Carpenter’s gifts. There is slow suspense, but there are no boring stretches - no tedious exposition for the sake of padding out the lore. Much has to be inferred. Carpenter’s worlds are complex, intricate, but he only gives you as much information as you need. He’s a filmmaker who understands the difference between story and premise, and he knows that it doesn’t matter how scary the latter is if the former doesn’t hold up.
And the acting is good. The closest we’ve got to big names are Donald Pleasance and Alice Cooper (clearly having fun), but nobody sleepwalks through it for the paycheck. This movie was made only about ten years after The Omen, but it feels like another filmmaking world - The Omen is (perhaps deliberately) old-fashioned, and while the 80s styles of Prince of Darkness might be dated the film still feels vital and modern. Most importantly though, it’s scary. The deaths are scary, the monster is scary, the implications are scary. The classic Carpenter fake-out ending is scary. It doesn’t try to win awards or teach you anything. It’s just good horror.
The winner of this matchup is Prince of Darkness.