Happy All-Hallow’s Month! In anticipation of Halloween — which, let’s face it, we’ve been anticipating since last Halloween — Daily Grindhouse will again be offering daily celebrations of horror movies here on our site. This October’s theme is horror sequels — the good, the bad, the really bad, and the unfairly unappreciated. We’re calling it SCREAMQUELS!
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When we last saw Damien Thorn, he was a cherubic five year-old, not so much a fan of churches but a whirlwind on a tricycle. Orphaned at the end of THE OMEN (and looking terribly put out about it), he’s moved to the good ol’ U.S. of A and about to hit puberty in Don Taylor’s 1978 follow-up, DAMIEN: OMEN II. At least as much about blind faith as it is the Devil, it’s leaner and meaner than its predecessor, with some truly grisly kills and an even bleaker ending.
Damien, now played by Jonathan Scott-Taylor, is in the custody of his aunt and uncle (Lee Grant and William Holden) and attending military school with his cousin and closest friend, Mark (Lucas Donat). Despite the strange and shocking circumstances behind how he became orphaned, Damien seems to be living a mostly normal life, not yet aware of his unholy lineage.
Though he doesn’t know his own true nature, there are some who find Damien sinister, such as elderly Aunt Marion (Sylvia Sidney), who is promptly taken out by a raven for her trouble. While in THE OMEN the Devil only removes the people who are a direct threat to Damien, here he’s just a real asshole, brutally dispatching even those who merely see something about him they don’t like. Feel free to go get a snack whenever there’s a scene of someone talking about how Thorn Industries should move into agriculture, but hurry back for the absolutely horrific (certainly by ’70s standards) deaths that Damien’s enemies meet. Try riding in an elevator in peace ever again after watching Meshach Taylor, playing a doctor who uncovers curious test results about Damien, get sliced in half (on screen!) by a falling cable.
The deaths in DAMIEN: OMEN II aren’t just gruesome, they’re cruel, as illustrated in a real nightmare of a scene when the elderly Lew Ayres falls through ice and then is pulled by the current further underneath it. Later, in a moment that’s not just cruel but tragic, when Damien has learned who (or rather, what) he really is, and is renounced by his cousin and friend Mark, he strikes Mark down with a brain aneurysm. Damien’s wail at his cousin’s death is both one of grief and trading in his last bit of humanity: Mark, perhaps the only person he truly cared about, is gone, so there’s no point in not giving himself over to what’s been meant to happen all along.
While DAMIEN: OMEN II is deliriously campy at times (watch reporter Joan Hart’s death, which involves some great use of an obvious dummy), it’s also even creepier than its predecessor. In THE OMEN, the only on-screen force that seemed to be working directly in service of Satan was Damien’s nanny. Here, it’s very nearly half the cast, including a colleague of Damien’s uncle, and even, as it’s revealed during the climax, his aunt. Though not quite as much as THE FINAL CONFLICT, the third movie in the series (which is even more gruesome), DAMIEN leans hard into the cult aspects of the rise of the Antichrist. Everybody, even those who are doomed to die, have quietly accepted their fate, and are merely waiting for Damien to figure out what’s going on.
Though it regrettably doesn’t spend as much time on it as it could have, the film also does a little classic horror movie “main character struggling with his dark side” drama. At first, Damien wants desperately to be a regular kid, despite the fact that he’s not even human. When he pleads with Mark to accept what he is and remain at his side while he rises to power, it’s not just because he considers Mark to be like a brother, but because Mark is his primary connection to the human world. Killing Mark is a punishment not just for rejecting Damien, but for being what Damien now knows he will never be: a good and normal boy.
I’m not trying to sell you on this 43-year-old movie as some sort of hidden gem. As mentioned, many of the kills are so over the top that they end up being funny instead of horrifying. There’s a sense that, with a director and screenwriter on board, everything needed to be bigger than the relative subtlety of the earlier film (and, in turn, THE FINAL CONFLICT would go bigger than that, with an extended sequence of Satanic cult members killing infants because one of them might grow up to be the Son of God reborn). It often overshadows the more interesting aspects of the film, such as Damien learning to accept, with no small amount of reluctance at first, where he comes from, and what he’s meant to do. Some kids are meant to go to law school, others to become brain surgeons, and, every now and then, one might be destined to become the Antichrist. Either way, you can’t fight fate.
Tags: Allan Arbus, Bill Butler, David Seltzer, Don Taylor, Elizabeth Shephard, Gilbert Taylor, Harvey Bernhard, Horror, Jerry Goldsmith, Joan Hart, Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Lance Henriksen, Lee Grant, Lew Ayres, Lucas Donat, Meshach Taylor, Mike Hodges, Nicholas Pryor, Robert Foxworth, scream factory, Sequels, Stanley Mann, Sylvia Sidney, The 1970s, The Antichrist, The Devil, William Holden
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