The Omen

Richard Donner's The Omen is the definitive Antichrist film and one of the great religious horror movies of the 1970s golden age. Gregory Peck brings gravitas and genuine pathos to the role of Robert Thorn, an American ambassador who gradually realizes his adopted son Damien may be the son of Satan. The film works because it takes its biblical premise with absolute seriousness — no winking, no camp, just the escalating horror of a father confronting the possibility that his child is evil incarnate. The death sequences — the nanny's hanging, the priest impaled by a lightning rod, the decapitation by sheet of glass — are among the most elaborate and shocking of the era. Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score, built on choral Latin chanting, remains one of the most effective horror soundtracks ever composed.