The Antichrist in the House Next Door

 

I remember waking up without knowing if it was day or night. I would hear voices and walk in the dark down the hallway of the house until I reached the kitchen. There were my parents, talking. Sometimes it seemed like they were speaking in low voices, almost in secret, as if they didn’t want me to hear them.

In the late seventies and early eighties, we were all a little paranoid, or a lot. The end of the century was approaching, and in anyone’s mind there was room for the possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR. We lived near Texas, so a nuclear attack was not a distant threat.

And as if the nuclear threat weren’t enough, the devil was on the loose. It could be the elderly couple who lived in the house next door. It could be whoever inhabited that gloomy house on the corner, the one no one wanted to look at twice when passing by. It could be my own parents. It could be my teachers. At that age, evil had no fixed shape, it had anyone’s face.

In 1976, two years before directing Superman with Christopher Reeve, Richard Donner, one of Hollywood’s most profitable producers, directed The Omen. It seemed to me one of the most terrifying films I had ever seen. It arrived when the world was talking about the end of times. The state of Israel had been formed, a common market in Europe was being discussed, Vietnam had humiliated the United States and its president, Richard Nixon, was falling into disgrace before the entire country. Living through those years felt similar to inhabiting the universe of Watchmen, Alan Moore’s graphic novel where the whole world seems to be hanging by threads.

The Omen was a key piece in that paranoid machinery. The Antichrist walking among us, disguised as a child. They were dark times, times of real pessimism, not manufactured. It was no longer just the elderly who were suspected of serving the devil, as in Rosemary’s Baby. Now children carried that suspicion too, and that changed everything.

There is a scene in an abandoned cemetery on the outskirts of Rome that marked me for life. It is a place where I would never want to set foot. Donner was fascinated by the protagonist’s constant doubt, that question that wouldn’t let him sleep: whether his own son was or wasn’t the Antichrist. But the studio didn’t want ambiguities; it wanted the hard punch and the overwhelming success that The Exorcist had achieved a few years earlier.

And there was the question that haunted us all: how could we not live steeped in pessimism and on the edge of paranoia if the Antichrist could literally be the son of the President of the United States?

Gregory Peck gave his character a dramatic weight that went far beyond acting. One of his own sons had taken his own life a few months before filming, and that could be felt in every gesture, in every silence of his performance.

What marked me the most was the music. Jerry Goldsmith built a score with powerful, almost Wagnerian choirs, those that make your skin crawl and seat you, without asking permission, in the middle of a satanic mass. That music didn’t just accompany the story, it drove it straight into our minds.

With The Omen, a trilogy of the darkest films cinema has produced came to a close: Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. Too much, perhaps, for a childish mind that insisted on being precocious and enjoyed watching those movies well before the appropriate age.