The rise of the antichrist movie
The son of the devil is coming into a political family. And one of them analyzed the eternal sea, as being this sea of revolution, of turmoil and revolution. I was working with all these interpretive texts.
There was a passage in Revelation that said, “The beast will rise from the eternal sea.” The eternal sea, as a matter of fact, was what grabbed me when I was looking for some way to do a story about the devil, the unholy. I mean all of the prophesizing was real, and true, and accurate, and taken from the Bible. I got in trouble with a lot of people for that. It also had me looking feverishly through the Book of Revelation for that damn poem, until I found out that you made it up yourself. Coupled with political and racial unrest, calamities like Watergate and the Vietnam War, and books like Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, it’s no wonder that the idea of the devil sending his only begotten son to trigger the apocalypse resonated with audiences around the world. But Thorn and his psychologically fragile wife (Lee Remick), who doesn’t know about the switch, are soon beset by unexplained “accidental” deaths, while Thorn is haunted by tormented figures who claim that little Damien is the Antichrist - the son of the devil, born into the world to bring about its end.Īrriving after the success of both Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist(1973), The Omen tapped into the same fears of parents of counterculture kids who no longer recognized their own children. Written by David Seltzer, The Omen featured Peck as Robert Thorn, a rising politician who is manipulated into adopting an orphaned baby after his own son dies in childbirth. Backed by a vivid marketing campaign (“You are one day closer to the end of the world”), starring Hollywood legend Gregory Peck and shot by a little-known director named Richard Donner ( Superman: The Movie), the relatively low-budget ($2 million) thriller became one of the biggest and most-talked about hits of that year. In June 1976, 20 th Century Fox released a horror film called The Omen.