I’m going to be short and sweet. “The Curse of THE OMEN” is every bit as ridiculous as THE OMEN is terrifying. The most famous “cursed” films in horror are the POLTERGEIST films, with the deaths of many cast members, among other real-life horrors. OMEN fans can lay claim to their own curse, and join in the mystic hoogabala that fans like to buy into. But after watching this 49-minute documentary, I’m calling bogus. If the film’s own director Richard Donner doesn’t buy it, neither does Phil Fasso.
Director John McLaverty does his best to convince you that THE OMEN was cursed. He’s assembled a slew of people, including: Donner, producers Harvey Bernhard and Mace Neufeld, actress Billie Whitelaw, the film’s dog handler and two special effects supervisors, a self-proclaimed exorcist, a member of the Church of Satan, Gregory Peck’s biographer, a writer, and the man who conceptualized the film, Bob Munger. Combined, they tell tales of Peck’s son committing suicide, lightning striking two planes carrying Peck and Neufeld, animal attacks during filming, and IRA bombings of Donner’s hotel and Peck’s favored restaurant. McLaverty gets many of them to support his thesis, that Satan didn’t want this film to be made, and because it was, he’s now out to ruin all those involved with it. Along the way, many of them also relate stories that are more about the movie and its production than any curse. Surprising, given its lean running time and McLaverty’s mission to sell you.
Are you going to believe in the curse? That likely depends on how superstitious you are. Sure, it presents compelling evidence for its argument. But it also presents compelling evidence that a multitude of coincidences happened during the making of a movie. Donner has always argued that his view on THE OMEN is that there is no devil child, but a series of logical events that have nothing to do with Satan, yet convince the characters he exists. The same can be said about this doc. Every single horror that took place when Donner was making his film has a logical explanation. Munger and Bernhard buy in wholesale, as some of you might.
Dick Donner debunks
But Donner sums up the way I feel about this “curse” with one question: “What the Hell is the devil?” He no more believes his film was cursed than that actor Harvey Stephens was actually Satan. I’m right in line with him. Sure, this stuff might make for a fun back story, but if Satan does exist, I know he’s got better things to do than haunt a movie.
On the DVD for THE OMEN, Donner spends 6 minutes in a featurette “Curse or Coincidence” giving a quick rundown of these events, and debunking them. This doc spends 43 more minutes than he did, and is less effective than Donner was in his brief time. Even among OMEN completists, it’s only for the diehard who want to believe that evil can lurk on a movie set.
–Phil Fasso
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Hi Phil Fasso – I saw the doc about the Curse of the Omen and saw that Donner did not believe there was any significance with the multiple coincidences of bad luck surrounding the film. I will have to watch it again and see how he does actually debunk them, but I don’t really remember him doing that in any rigorous way.
You might think that he does not need to do it in a rigorous way, a superficial way would suffice for such a ridiculous claim anyway. I don’t believe in devils or religion by the way. And even if there were such things as demons, then why pick on hollywood movies – to get some kind of publicity?! Surely Hollywood would like that publicity anyway. But it seems that Donner and others have said that these events really did happen.
I wasn’t at all impressed by the coincidences of other films like Poltergeist, although the claims by Burstyn for the Exorcist seem to be quite bizarre; but we don’t know how true they are.
Some new agers might explain any significance to such events in terms of a collective consciousness thing. Not sure? But I’m here writing this message to you because the events as a whole for the film The Omen were truly bizarre in their nature and abundance. I really wish somebody could debunk each and every one of them like somebody did with the Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences, which in the end boiled down to just some weak coincidences.
The so called coincidences associated with the film The Omen, which is a pretty well made albeit not a great film, are far from weak however. They are down-right disturbing quite frankly and I’ve never come across anything like it where actual people of reasonable credibility were interviewed and seemingly telling the truth about such events.
The fact still remains though that Donner does not see any significance in the events, although he may have just been in denial, which happened to other crew too perhaps. I heard that he nearly died within the time the film was being made by a car nearly crushing him, but instead it just ripped the door off of his car.
The thing is with the events that were mentioned like the pilot and his passengers dying in the crash and the same plane also killing the pilot’s family who were driving in a car at the time, is that other necessary details are not known like how far away the crash was from the film set. Yes, I know the aircraft that crashed was the one that the film crew were going to use. Then there’s the crash that the special effects man had with his girlfriend near Ommen, Netherlands. He said the first thing he saw was the upside down view of the number 999. He seemed very serious about, after all his partner at the time was decapitated. I didn’t attach any significance to this event at first because it was just outside the time of making of the Omen film; it was just after completion of it. But all these events taken as a whole seem to make one wonder what the heck is going on?
One could disregard minor events like the other accident. But it was a head on collision and the occupants (film crew) were very lucky. There are numerous other examples.
The lightning examples were not significant by themselves because that kind of thing can happen a lot [in the sky] anyway. But as a whole … ? Perhaps they were on the look out for all these things and if one did that with other films then perhaps they would find some pretty weird things too? Perhaps it’s as if they expect the worst to happen with such films. But then it did, ahaha.
You said that the producers ‘buy wholesale’. Is that a hint that the more devil films one makes the more chances that this shit will happen? Yes, it is true to some extent.
There’s also the problem of verification of what was said and alleged in the documentary. After all such coincidences would provide for a good marketing tool and in fact they engineered the release date of the film to coincide in a most apt way.
I might be a little superstitious but I’m still wondering about this one. It still bothers me, the events were weirder than anything i’ve heard. No doubt people will have some personal stories that they think have some really weird aspects to them as well.
I’m not sure that you would have been interested in reading this, but if you have then that is much appreciated. I’ll be really glad though to see somebody properly research this one and debunk it in a rigorous way because it makes all other movie curses look like nothing at all.
Thanks, Karl.