The Omen, Left Behind, and Christian cultural terrorism in big media.

By Gabriel Mckee

The remake of The Omen, opening today (6/6/06), is the latest in an endless line of ‘70s horror remakes that have recently invaded theaters. Where new versions of brutal slasher films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes have sought to bring the nihilistic atmosphere of the originals to a new generation, The Omen is a Christian film: It draws its scares from the resurgence of apocalyptic spirituality driven by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkin’s Left Behind novels.

Apocalypticism was also in the air when the original film was released in 1976, largely because of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth — the best-selling non-fiction book of the ‘70s. Like Left Behind, The Late Great Planet Earth predicted an awful fate for those who haven’t been born again when the world ends, as Lindsay said it would, soon.

The bleak films of the underground horror genre can be seen as a reaction to this conservative faith, and The Omen — like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby before it — was an attempt to transcend the boundaries of the genre by replacing mundane villains with supernatural ones. The new Omen film plays much the same role in this cultural dichotomy as did the original, by bringing Revelation to the multiplex. It is simultaneously an attempt to cash in on the popularity of apocalyptic belief and a proselytizing tool that uses fear of evil to drive its viewers toward Christian belief. It is terror with a message — terrorism, literally if not physically.

The Omen is the story of Robert Thorn, the American ambassador to Britain, who comes to believe that his little boy, Damien, is the Beast of Revelation. Three sequels followed the original, telling the continuing story of the Antichrist: Damien: Omen II in 1978, Omen III: The Final Conflict in 1981, and the made-for-TV remake/sequel Omen IV: The Awakening in 1988. To this day, the film’s depiction of evil affects popular culture’s understanding of the Antichrist, the Mark of the Beast, and even the name Damien. Robert Munger, the evangelical who originally pitched the film and who is credited as a “religious advisor,” was pleased with the film, and particularly with the number of people who converted to Christianity after seeing it. Judging from the new film’s website, HeedTheOmen.com — which includes a FAQ (“Fearfully Asked Questions”) about the Antichrist and the coming tribulation — this religious message is even more clear in the remake.

But despite its spiritual themes, The Omen has a distinctly secular approach to religious ideas. Screenwriter David Seltzer has stated that he had never read the Bible before writing the screenplay, and it shows. The film repeatedly paraphrases Revelation, but never directly quotes it. Indeed, the infant Beast himself is the only element of John’s apocalypse that appears in the film. The Final Conflict eschews the canon altogether, inventing a book of the Bible — complete with faux-King James linguistic flourishes and an “it shall come to pass” — to contain its plot-driving prophecy. The Omen gives us an Antichrist with no doctrinal or scriptural strings attached, diffusing from the complexities of apocalyptic spirituality a single element, a sinister figure who is evil in the broadest sense.

Nowhere is this secular approach to Biblical prophecy more clear than in The Final Conflict. Damien, all-grown-up, is the head of Thorn Industries, a multinational corporation that has a stranglehold on the world’s economy and food supply. In the film’s climactic scene, Damien is betrayed and stabbed by a former lover, dying as the Second Coming occurs. The moment is somewhat anticlimactic, giving us a ghostly image of Jesus, a musical flourish, and a lighting cue — a far cry from the universal transformation in the closing chapters of Revelation. Jesus’ return occurs in secret, in the isolated ruins of a church, and we are left with the sense that not much has changed beyond the ouster of a sinister CEO. With the Antichrist out of the way, the world can get back to business as usual. The Omen’s Jesus brings not final judgment, but a return to the status quo.

The key Christian element missing from The Omen films is the presence of Christians. Aside from a handful of histrionic priests and scheming monks who become fodder for the films’ grand guignol death sequences, there’s nary a believer to be found. Early in the first film, Father Brennan, a priest who knows of Damien’s true origins, tells the boy’s father that he must “accept the Lord Jesus, drink His blood.” But Thorn ignores this advice, and doesn’t set foot inside a church until he attempts to kill Damien on consecrated ground in the film’s climax. As The Omen films would have it, all Christians are Catholics, all Catholics are clergy, and none of them can stop the Antichrist. The heroes, by contrast, are secularists, right up to the woman who finally kills Damien.

Richard Donner, the director of the first Omen film, sheds some interesting light on this conundrum with his non-supernatural interpretation of the story. Damien, he says, is not evil, and the deaths around him are coincidental. But the misguided faith of priests like Father Brennan lead Thorn, otherwise a rational man, to believe that his son must die. The movie, in this light, becomes a warning about the dangers of religious mania. The absence of Christians in the film underscores this statement about the dangers that radical faith can pose for secular society.

The same absence of Christian characters that is a weakness in The Omen’s religious vision is also evident in a more recent popular interpretation of Revelation — Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind novels. But here, the dearth of Christians is by design — they have been taken up to heaven in the Rapture. This peculiar bit of end-times belief was a minority opinion in American Christianity, the Biblical descriptions of which are vague at best. But following the explosion of evangelical Christianity in the ‘70s and ‘80s– and with it the “literal” interpretation of Biblical prophecy put forth by the likes of Hal Lindsey — the idea was popular enough for LaHaye and Jenkins to spin it into a series of best-sellers. Left Behind is now a mini-industry in Christian publishing, with 12 books in the main series, plus multiple spin-off series and graphic novels, three movies, and a forthcoming video game, not to mention countless non-fiction volumes detailing the finer points of apocalyptic belief. (Interestingly, one of the most recent volumes in the series — last year’s The Rising — is an Omen-like story of the Antichrist’s childhood).

Following the Rapture in the opening pages of the first volume, it’s up to the “tribulation saints” — those who became believers after the Rapture — to stand against the Antichrist and prepare for the “glorious appearing” of Christ to signal the final judgment. The satanic villain of this story is Nicolae Carpathia, a member of the Romanian government who, with some supernatural guidance, becomes a world leader overnight. He is soon chosen as the head of the U.N., the leader of a new world church, and People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive (a title with which the authors have a bizarre preoccupation). From this position of power, Carpathia begins a reign of terror that makes Damien Thorn’s food-hoarding seem humanitarian. Outlawing Christianity, he kills those who refuse to acknowledge him as a god.

The Omen uses the Antichrist to create a generic sense of fear, the idea that the devil exists and wants to kill random people in gory set-pieces. But LaHaye and Jenkins use Carpathia to elucidate a very specific set of fears, foremost amongst them the fear of international cooperation and religious tolerance. The United Nations, they argue, is simply a precursor to an evil, Babylonian world government. Similarly, Carpathia’s world church is initially characterized as a generic faith, led by former liberal Christians, that makes few specific truth-claims. It’s a sort of derogatory Unitarianism, but it paves the way for a fanatical church that slaughters those who refuse to accept its founder. In the Left Behind stories, any idea presented by a non-Christian becomes its opposite: tolerance is persecution, peace is war. Social good is the tool with which the Antichrist consolidates his power. Where Damien’s evil rarely reaches beyond a general sense of spookiness, Carpathia is a bogeyman carefully constructed from evangelical Christianity’s most conservative conclusions.

Both The Omen and Left Behind seek to turn Revelation into a horror story through a selectively literal reading. In both, the Antichrist is essentially a straw man whose defeat has been foretold and approaches inevitably. For Left Behind, this defeat means final judgment and eternal salvation or damnation. For The Omen, it is a return to the peaceful, prosperous status quo following the economic upheaval created by Damien Thorn. But both stories base themselves on the same type of interpretation of the Bible’s most difficult book. They read Revelation as a story that is strictly about the future, about a linear series of events that will come to pass as God overthrows the established order.

But the key phrase of John’s Revelation has nothing to do with the number of saints who will survive the tribulation or the methods by which the Antichrist will persecute them. The key verse of Revelation is God’s warning to the church not to be tricked and caught up in the dealings of the Whore of Babylon: “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues.” (Rev. 18:4) Babylon, in the revolutionary reading of Revelation, is not some imagined future dictatorship, and the Beast is not a single world leader. Rather, both symbolize the entire sphere of worldly power, the world of buying and selling, the world of making war, the world of writing best-selling novels and making blockbuster films. Unlike many other Christian texts of its time that encouraged integration with Rome, Revelation orders all Christians to reject any authority other than God, no matter if that authority is the Roman Empire, a conservative president, or the Hollywood studio system.

Gabriel Mckee is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and the author of two books on religion and science fiction: the forthcoming The Gospel According to Science Fiction: Forging the Faith of the Future (forthcoming from Westminster John Knox) and Pink Beams of Light From the God in the Gutter: The Science-Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick.