In short: The Omen (1976)

When the baby of ultra-rich American ambassador Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife Katherine (Lee Remick) is stillborn, Robert all too quickly accepts the offer of a shady priest (Martin Benson) to secretly adopt a child born orphaned. Without even telling his wife, obviously.

As we all know, that turns out to have been a very bad idea, because little Damien is the Anti-Christ, as evidenced by various bizarre deaths that begin to occur around him once he’s a couple of years older (and played by Harvey Stephens), deaths which he seems to cause by very vigorous and loud playing (now that’s what I call true horror). Eventually, thanks to the efforts of a doomed priest (Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor himself) and an equally doomed but more long-lived photographer (David Warner), and because Satan’s really very unsubtle about his work, Thorn does find out what’s what, but alas, the forces of good in this one are just terrible at their jobs.

No, seriously, given how big a thing the Anti-Christ is, and how obvious the stuff going on in Richard Donner’s film, it’s pretty weird that there’s not a whole commando unit of exorcists sticking magic knives into the kid. But then, it’s also pretty weird that rich guy Thorn never bothers to acquire or simply hire some practical help when it comes to fighting off Satanists, evil doggies and so on. That’s really the film’s major problem: a script by David Seltzer that’s often painfully implausible even if a viewer is perfectly willing to accept its idiot version of pulp Christianity. Not that it’s terribly good at characterisation, either, for the Thorns, and even the gosh-darn anti-Christ stay half removed from the audience, or from much of what you’d want to interpret as believable impressions of actual human emotions. Don’t confuse this with the Italian approach to horror though, these people are deeply uninvolving and boring instead of strange and moody. While I’m bashing the script, it’s also sometimes dragging its heels painfully, coming in at twenty minutes or so longer than the material can carry.

However, there’s one saving grace to Seltzer’s script, namely the ability to come up with weird, often disquieting murder set pieces, which fits perfectly with director Donner’s ability to stage them. Indeed, it is Donner’s work at letting these weird elements come to life by using every camera trick, every skewed angle, every moody matte painting or creepy set he can come up with, throwing basically the whole visual history of horror cinema up to this point on screen that has turned this into a perennial classic. In fact, Donner’s so good at creating a mood of the Gothic in a contemporary guise, all the film’s weaknesses feel more like small problems than the critical failures they should be, so a film that should objectively be a bit of a polished turd feels rather a lot like a classic of its genre. I blame the Anti-Christ.