The Omen

Halloween’s later this month and I’m in the mood for a good fright. I miss old-fashioned horror movies, those movies that would get inside your head, make you nervous about rounding corners in your own house at night. It’s fun when you can’t decide whether you’re more afraid of what might be around the corner or just embarrassed that a part of you is actually entertaining the notion that the boogeyman might really exist.

 

When you’re little these movies can seriously freak you out, have you scared to look under your own bed until you’re old enough to buy alcohol. But at age 28 and trying to make comedy your life, enjoying music and being a little scared are often the only vacations the brain gets from the guilt of feeling like it should be trying to think of something funny and new at all times (easily one of the most obnoxious things about being a new comic or hanging out with new comics).

 

Just watched “The Omen” on OnDemand this weekend, forgot how cool this movie was. What I love about the older horror flicks is how much life in the movie seems reminiscent of the way real life functions or at least a serious drama. The pace of the action, the conversations, the problems characters are in the middle of facing when all hell starts breaking loose, it all seems relatively believable within the context, makes everything that much scarier.

 

All that stuff has gone to hell in most modern horror movies, too many of them start out looking like a lost episode of Dawson’s Creek or 7^th Heaven that degenerates in a brainless gore-fest. Feels like a 90 minute game show question “How many friends does a teenybopper have to lose before she realizes she’s in danger, that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to get drunk and play ‘hide and go get it’ in an abandoned amusement park, that no one just gets stabbed 12 times on an empty bumper car track?” The answer? All but one friend, who invariably survives just long enough to sacrifice himself and buy her dumb undeserving ass a little more time just before she gets saved or figures out how to kill the monster at the end. For me, good horror can make even the predictable unpredictable, good horror is all in the details and the characters.

 

Take Gregory Peck. That is one super-dignified white guy. I think he came out of the womb with a blazer on his back and half the lines from “To Kill a Mockingbird” already memorized. Gregory Peck doesn’t look like he’d believe that he missed his flight, much less that his son might the child of Satan, not without cause anyway.

 

He uses his intellect to fight that suspicion for pretty much the whole movie and you the viewer can identify with his sense of reason and belief in normalcy. The fact that all these loved ones and religious characters keep having these horrific “accidents” must be a matter of circumstance, right? No reason to get your security binkie out just yet. But then when he realizes this isn’t all just coincidence, that something larger or darker may be at work, that this child must be at the low end of the mental bell curve or just plain evil to be smiling at a time like this, in your mind you go “Oh sh*t, Gregory Peck thinks this is for real? Quick, someone get me a bedpan and lock the damn door!”

 

The credits roll and you think you’re cool at first. Three hours later, “…Hello, Mama? Oh nothing, I just wanted to say how much I love you… of course I’m fine, why, do I sound nervous? …Hey, keep an eye on that Barack fellow, you know he’s risen to the top pretty fast, almost unnaturally… What do we know about his dad again? …No, no, I’m just wondering just how much ‘help’ he’s had… and from ‘whom’… no, I’m not talking about Bill Ayers, good night Mom… hey, do you think it'd be alright if I drove down and slept with you and Dad?”