Outer Limits
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Outer Limits Still diabolical, but less shocking, than the original. BY JOHN PODHORETZ The Omen, the 30-year-old horror movie that has just been remade more faithfully than almost any other film...
...No, Daddy, please don't," the boy sobs as Peck goes in for the kill...
...If you close your eyes, you might mistake the deep voice of its star, Liev Schreiber, for Peck's...
...And at the end of The Omen, what we see is a man trying to stab a child to death, and we are supposed to want him to do it...
...Both earlier movies were portraits of maternal anxiety—Rosemary's Baby a study of pregnancy paranoia that turns out to be all too justified, and The Exorcist a tale of a girl in the throes of adolescence who becomes a hypersexualized monster...
...And though the ending is exactly the same, it doesn't have the elemental power of the original...
...The Omen's satanic plotline followed in the footsteps of Rosemary's Baby, released in 1968, and The Exorcist, which came out in 1973...
...We've seen the boy try to murder his adoptive mother, and we've seen several other people die in supernaturally gruesome fashion (impaled on a stake, beheaded) for taking an interest in his true identity...
...Movies have long sought to make the audience complicit in killing—to cheer when the good guys off the bad guys, even to laugh triumphantly when the bad guys are done in...
...This form of narrative escalation reached its outer limit with The Omen...
...Neither film asks us to accept the sacred responsibility of a parent to slaughter his own child...
...Take everything to its logical limit, push the boundaries of what's been done, and you might have something...
...The kid who plays Damien seems to have been cast because of his resemblance to the original Damien...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ The Omen, the 30-year-old horror movie that has just been remade more faithfully than almost any other film in history, was both a landmark genre picture and a low point in American popular culture...
...But that's not what we see...
...The new Omen, which was released last week on 6/6/06, is a carbon copy in every sense of the term—it's everything the old movie was, but it has lost the original's crispness...
...The audience erupted in laughter...
...Now, it's true that Donner and Seltzer have left the audience in no doubt that Damien is the Antichrist, sired by Satan and a jackal...
...The audience sat in shocked silence in 1976...
...This time, someone shouted out, "He should wait to say the prayer after he kills him...
...child...
...As it happens, I saw the original film in a theater on the same block on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I saw the remake last week, with the same kind of urban, inner-city audience...
...Movies are very literal...
...It's also despicable...
...But open those eyes and it isn't Peck there but an unimposing young fellow who is not in the least believable as this country's ambassador to Great Britain...
...They show us two-dimensional images that aren't in the least ambiguous...
...But instilling an eagerness to witness the murder of a small child crossed a line into a kind of moral barbarism that no mainstream Hollywood movie I can think of has ever crossed since...
...The same is true of Julia Stiles, who seems like a petulant teenager and not the lush, motherly creature Lee Remick was...
...There are a few new scares here, but even they have been borrowed from a 1970s movie—nightmare visions that Moore lifted straight out of Ken Russell's sensational Altered States (1980...
...In both, the murdering father begins reciting the Lord's Prayer as he lays his son down...
...In one of the most disturbing moments in the history of cinema, Gregory Peck—the very image of stolid American decency—holds a ritual dagger above a 5-year-old's chest and aims it at the child's heart...
...Somber and brutally effective, The Omen gave Gregory Peck the role of his lifetime (yes, I am saying he was better in this than in To Kill a Mockingbird), scared the wits out of its audience, and spawned two sequels...
...Even Mia Farrow, who is creepily sweet as Damien's devilish nanny, can't hold a candle to Billie Whitelaw's portrayal 30 years ago...
...It's a remarkable trick...
...The scene that makes it truly distinctive is also the reason The Omen deserves to be consigned to the annals of Hollywood infamy...
...That's what happens when you try to put a nonentity like Liev Schreiber in Gregory Peck's shoes...
...But it was something different...
...The screenplay is once again credited to David Seltzer, though there is a new director, John Moore, who treats Donner's original direction as though he were an art restorer just bringing out the old colors for a contemporary audience...
...Peck is urged to kill his own child by two devout priests who explain that he is not a boy but the incarnation of the Devil...
...Director Richard Donner and screenwriter David Seltzer pull off a coup...
...They succeed in making their audience actually root for the murder of a John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic, and author of Can She Be Stopped...
...Screenwriters are taught that they always need to "raise the stakes" in their scripts, particularly scripts in genres like horror...
Vol. 11 • June 2006 • No. 38
