20 Years Later, Why Has ‘The Omen’ (2006) Been Forgotten?
If you were alive in the summer of 2006, you probably remember The Omen. A remake of the 1976 classic, the film was released on June 6, 2006 and earned more than $12 million on opening day, setting a new record for the highest ever Tuesday gross at the time—$12,633,666 from 2,660 theaters, a figure that Bruce Snyder, the studio’s president of distribution, later admitted the studio “[had] a little fun” manipulating to include the number of the beast. It would go on to earn $120 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful entries in the strange (and mostly troubled) franchise.
Perhaps its success had something to do with the fact it had a brilliant marketing campaign–according to an article on The Guardian published just days before the film’s release, “more than twice the original film’s $2.8m budget has been spent on advertising and promotion.” Ominous billboards and posters were spotted across Los Angeles with messaging like “The Signs Are All Around You” and “You Have Been Warned,” featuring the date 6/6/06. Airplanes with similar banners flew above key spring break cities, terrifying so many beach goers that, in one instance, “a fighter jet was…dispatched to escort one of the planes down.”
Yet, despite being a box office success—it still ranks among the highest-grossing Tuesday openings in domestic box-office history—and boasting one of the most panic-inducing horror marketing campaigns of the 2000s, The Omen is rarely discussed today. Unlike contemporaneous remakes such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House of Wax, or Dawn of the Dead, John Moore‘s film has largely faded from memory. So, with its 20th anniversary approaching, I decided I’d revisit The Omen to figure out why—and determine if it’s worth a second look.
At times, The Omen feels dangerous. Moore barely changes anything about the source material (because the screenplay was so similar to the original, David Seltzer, who wrote the 1976 version, received the sole writing credit even though he wasn’t involved with the remake at all), but there’s one addition that he makes in particular that I found interesting.
The film opens with an emergency meeting at the Vatican. A distressed cardinal argues before the Pope that Armageddon is approaching, and he cites recent tragedies, natural disasters, and human rights violations as proof. Graphic images of the Challenger explosion, the September 11th attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami, and Abu Ghraib flash behind him. With the incorporation of real-life tragedies—many of them happening just a couple of years before the film’s release—any audience member in 2006 would have seen this and thought the end was near. It reminded me a lot of the opening credits montage of Dawn of the Dead. We’re living in chaotic times, and the film wants us to know that something beyond our comprehension might be relishing in our suffering.
From there, the film plays out the exact same way as the original. American diplomat Robert Thorne (Liev Schreiber) rushes to the hospital, where his wife Katherine (Julia Stiles) is recovering from a traumatic birth. Unbeknownst to her, the baby has died. Father Spiletto (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) informs Robert that another baby was born at the same time as his son. His mother died in childbirth, and he has no other family members. Robert agrees to take the baby and raise it as his own, keeping the truth from his wife, even as she becomes more and more sure that something is wrong with him as he gets older. A nanny hangs herself during his birthday party; The zoo animals are frightened of him; People die in freak accidents (David Thewlis’s decapitation scene is a highlight).
The Omen remains faithful to the original, down to the production design and costuming, which makes the film seem stuffy and dated. Things are modernized, sure—the characters have cell phones and use Apple laptops; Damien is seen playing video games in one scene—but nothing feels modern.
This is ultimately the film’s greatest problem. For all its attempts to situate the story in the very real anxieties of the mid-2000s that were referenced in the opening scene, The Omen rarely feels like a movie from that era, like 2005’s House of Wax, and it definitely doesn’t have anything to say like 2004’s Dawn of the Dead. It doesn’t even attempt to dial up the violence the way 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does.
Yet revisiting The Omen 20 years later, I found myself appreciating it more than I expected. Stiles isn’t given very much to do here, which is a shame, considering she brings so much intelligence and something that I can only describe as a certain kind of brightness to every role she’s in, but she’s convincing as a young mother struggling with her conflicting emotions towards her only child. Mia Farrow is delightful as a mallet-wielding Mrs. Baylock, determined to protect the son of Satan (in an interview from 2006, Farrow said that “it wasn’t in [her] mind” that the role would be a wink and a nod to her role in Rosemary’s Baby). And despite its stuffiness, The Omen has a cozy quality to it. As I was watching, I could imagine this playing with commercial breaks on TNT or FX.
Moore’s version of The Omen failed to impress fans of the original or do something new with the source material, instead opting to be a polished studio horror movie whose most memorable contribution to the genre was using its ominous release date to its advantage. But if you’re in the mood to see Farrow kick ass in a nanny’s uniform, then this might work for you.
You can rent The Omen on Prime Video.
Categorized:Editorials