The Exorcist vs. The Omen: Morality and Show, Don't Tell

Because religion doesn't play a huge part in my life, it's easy to think the entire concept of religious horror would flop for me and I'd never want to spend time on it. But that's not the case. The genre can miss for me...but only if it uses religious alignment as a shorthand for morality.

Religious horror doesn't so much interest me on the grounds of the religious conflict itself, but if it can tell a truly effective story of good and evil in that framework, then I'm totally game and I can love the film. A "trust me bro" approach simply labeling entities as good and evil without solid backup...that's not going to work for me. I liked The Exorcist. I didn't care for The Omen. The primary point of contrast? The way one film illustrated its morals properly, and the other leaned too heavily on stating alignment as a stand-in for those characters' traits.

[Content warning for this post: discussions of violence against children, bodily violation, stillbirth/miscarriage and questionable takes on pregnancy rights, discussing connotations of essentialist bigotry]

The Exorcist was infamous as one of the most vile, disturbing, upsetting movies ever made, and I think it earns that reputation to this day. It really goes there in some scenes that still feel unfilmable in their shocking profanity and discomfort, and it's overall a hard-to-watch descent into horror as the demon, identified by later films as Pazuzu, takes over the body of the innocent 12-year-old Regan MacNeil. The story climaxes as a battle of good and evil in the exorcism at the end...but the film never feels like it treats religion as a black-and-white structure that everyone already understands. Throughout the film, it is never just a tale of good and evil. Good and evil are fully illustrated and explored. Pazuzu isn't a monster just because he's from Hell--he's a monster because he thoroughly violates the body and behaviors of a young girl, with violent, profane, disgusting, and disturbing behaviors. Throughout the film, the demon is made despicable as an antagonist through conscious, gleeful acts of malice and agitation. He hurts the innocent and clearly, deliberately torments the heroes and challenges them. The heroes are Christian, but they are illustrated as heroic because they overcome struggle and undertake great sacrifice, with both exorcists losing their lives in the battle to successfully defeat the demon. The people of the church are fully understood to be flawed and their structure and operatives don't jump to exorcise. They feel like real complex people with a faith system validated by the narrative, not arbiters of morals who have it all figured out. I like The Exorcist and find it to work as a story without the religious factor being an appeal to me, because the film still tells a good story and its heroes and antagonist are clearly defined and effective in their roles.

The Omen was made to capitalize on The Exorcist's smash success, and it tells the story of Robert Thorn, a diplomat who adopts a child from shady hospital clergy after his wife has a stillbirth, and doesn't tell his wife the child was not the one she was pregnant with. As young Damien Thorn grows up, supernatural things start to occur and Robert becomes convinced his child is the pure-evil Antichrist who must be killed to prevent apocalypse. The film seems to play on the question of whether Robert is delusional, but it ultimately lands on yes the kid is hellspawn and the goal to kill him was right. 

And is it just me who can't truly believe Damien is as bad as all that?

I might have been predisposed to sympathizing with the kid, because the story really jumps the gun on declaring him unholy and aberrant and he's condemned before he ever demonstrates malintent. Can you blame me for getting extremely bad vibes from a Christian movie telling me to hate somebody on the basis of their birth? The idea that someone can be born evil really feels like the pretext for many bigotries that follow on that concept, and it's impossible for the film to escape that for me. Guilty until proven innocent isn't the right way to go about judging somebody and I'm sorry, but I just cannot see the Christians in The Omen as righteous in their judgments, no matter how correct they are in the narrative.

Even as the film shows stuff happening around Damien, it's hard for me to believe the kid is actively malicious and evil. He never feels truly hateful or manipulative, and the only horrific damage done which is indisputably caused by his action (running his mother over a railing and causing her to miscarry) is awful, but the way it's filmed still doesn't make Damien feel all that conscious of the act or malicious to me. When he rams his mother, he's been implicitly directed to do so by his Satanic nanny Mrs. Baylock, who lets him out on his tricycle into the landing where his mother is, and he's just going in a straight line out the door opened for him, not explicitly aiming for her. Even as she topples over the banister and clings onto the railing...Damien only watches before she falls, with no camera emphasis on his emotion or action. He doesn't even seem to have plucked her fingers off to force her to fall. He looks, she falls, and and come on, what was a child going to be able to do to help, anyway? The film just isn't giving us the visuals to cement him as morally evil. I've seen genuinely terrifying malicious children in film. Damien doesn't feel like them onscreen. He's a pawn, if anything, but the film seems to not care. And if he's meant to be existentially evil but not a bad person...isn't that even worse to condemn?

At the end of the film, it's heart-wrenching to watch Damien cry out for his father not to attack him, but we're meant to view this as an echo of the binding of Isaac (itself a story that can be hard to agree with), and also the emotional manipulation of a monster...rather than holy crap this man is trying to murder a six-year-old. We get priests saying Damien is evil and supernatural Biblical imagery marking him as such. But it just failed to manifest strongly for me in Damien's behavior and performance, leaving me feeling like the film used flimsy surface labels of "good" and "evil" to get the audience to root for a man's descent into violence against his child...violence which doesn't seem properly justified by the actual actions of the characters. It feels really dangerous to me, using a religious story as a vehicle for righteous acts of violence against a child that upset their parents. It feels like validation for bigoted parental paranoia by depicting a scenario where the kid begging for mercy under physical abuse is truly a demonic liar who really has to be put down by the father. It feels like a paranoia of manipulation that blinds people to empathy and makes them dangerously assume bad faith behind honest upset reactions to their transgressions. That Robert fails to kill Damien is depicted as the film's bad ending, but I say, good! Let Damien figure himself out. Maybe he'll be okay in the end because the film certainly failed to make him feel all that rotten to me!

The Omen comes across as a very socially conservative, black-and-white film to me. The impressions it left me with were that it...

• framed the church as correct for condemning a child based on birth 
• framed adoption as unnatural and the adopted child as an outsider who could never be accepted by his father, and that's a correct takeaway--I don't live my day-to-day conscious of my status as an adoptee, and that might be why this annoyed me so badly, because I was always made to feel unquestionably loved and to feel like my parents' child
• Depicted a child as irredeemably evil without adequately illustrating malice in his performance, thus making his aberration more existential than moral in my read, and thus not acceptable to condemn him by
• showed a threatened pregnancy as the man's issue, not the woman's, by showing him determined not to let her abort the pregnancy out of pride, and while this results in the pregnancy being ended by Damien, the cost feels depicted as Robert's consequence first because he's the only parent alive at the climax of the film and the miscarriage influences his turn against his son who really looked like a pawn in the miscarriage

and

• framed the horrific treatment Damien undergoes at the climax as justifiable means to an end, with Damien's survival being a failure scenario.

Each of these factors alone is less, but they pile up together to make for a film I find to have a harmful ethos. Still, I think the story would have escaped some of these problems as long as the good and evil were firmly and richly portrayed. I just can't accept the "givens" of the film as correct, and the failures of the morality dynamic in the story seem to expose a lot of other concerning biases within the script.

I prefer Good Omens. This is a satirixal comedy book which works to parody both the Bible book of Revelation and The Omen, and the authors seemed to have come to the same conclusion about the film as I did. The story of Good Omens seems to criticize the logic of The Omen by depicting a story of the Antichrist shaped by nurture rather than nature. A significant portion of the multi-thread story interrogates the premise that the Antichrist must be evil, showing a scenario where the indisputable son of Satan can actually just grow up as a normal and even good kid and that where he comes from has nothing to do with who he decides to be. It's a humanist story that points out the flaw in the original's ethos by proposing a warmer, more empathetic take on the conflict. No child is being immediately vilified on the basis of their birth in Good Omens. Good Omens 2, the original sequel story released as the second season of the TV adaptation, spends significant time taking apart the human implications of the trials of Job, but honestly, I'd like to see a third season tackle Isaac too, because that's what's imitated in The Omen. Perhaps that would be redundant, though. The Omen probably exposes the horror in that scenario better than any intentional criticism of the Isaac tale ever could.

Maybe The Omen worked for a lot of people, but just saying something is good or evil doesn't cut it for me. The narrative truly has to back up the virtue and sin of its characters by their performances, demeanor, and actions for me to buy in and agree with the moral conflict of the tale. The Exorcist excels at making its demon abhorrent and its Christians heroic. The Omen expects us to agree with dynamics that feel very frightening and morally disgusting to me because the story fails to reinforce the assertions of the good and evil in the story properly. I don't like proselytizing and I don't think religious horror movies should necessarily be used to draw people toward a religion, but their themes should be accessible and relatable beyond doctrine or dogma. If you're writing a religious story, make sure your audience can see the good and evil clearly regardless of their beliefs.