Cursed Horror Movies: The Omen and Nosferatu

Kaelyn Moore (0:00)

Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore. So people always ask me if I think any horror movies are actually cursed. And while sometimes I do think that they just say that for marketing purposes, there are actually a couple of horror movies that I think have some very strange and possibly evil energy associated with them. I want to tell you about two of them today. The Omen, a movie where producers were warned that the devil would try to shut down production, and the original Nosferatu, where the director died under very strange and supernatural circumstances. And also, if you want more spooky stories, we just covered haunted university stories over on Patreon. Here about a dorm fire that led to a haunting, an old medical building that's now a dorm where students feel their toes being tagged at night, as if they're corpses, and a fraternity hazing event that still haunts a school. That's over on our Patreon and also on Apple Podcast subscriptions, as well as many other bonus episodes that you can binge during the spooky season. All right, let's get into it.

The Omen started with a simple premise. What if the Antichrist, the son of the devil, had already come to Earth and was walking among us, but no one recognized him because he had taken the form of a child? Producer Harvey Bernhard was so struck by this thought that as soon as he heard the pitch, he stood up in the middle of the meeting, excused himself and immediately drove home to flesh out this idea. In the wake of blockbusters like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, Bernhard felt certain that he had a major hit on his hands, but he might have gotten more than he bargained for, a lot more. It's been said that the greatest trick the devil ever played was to make you think he doesn't exist. Bernhard's movie idea was a direct assault on that strategy, and several people warned him, the devil will try to stop this movie from ever being made.

They might have been right at first, but only in an ironic way. The script sat in development hell for a few years before it was picked up by 20th Century Fox and Turnaround, and there were more script revisions. The title changed a couple of times from The Antichrist to The Birthmark, and then finally, The Omen.

If you haven't seen the movie, I'll give you a quick summary. Spoiler warning, obviously. We meet Robert Thorne and his wife, Catherine, on what should be the happiest day of their life, the day that their son is born. Sadly, the doctor tells Robert that the baby died after only one breath, but they can still have a family because there's another baby in the hospital whose own mother died in childbirth, and they can adopt him. Robert agrees, but he keeps this truth from his wife, presenting the baby as their own, and they name him Damien. Everything seems okay at first, but as Damien grows up, unexplained things start happening in the Thorn household. The boy seems to have a strange effect on animals. They're terrified of him, except for this pack of Rottweilers that keep appearing outside of the Thorn's house. In the famous scene at Damien's fifth birthday party, his nanny hangs herself from a second story window in front of all the guests, proclaiming, it's all for you, Damien. There's another scene when the Thorns arrive at a cathedral to attend a family wedding, when Damien freaks out, attacking Catherine as soon as they're inside of the church. More bodies keep piling up around Damien. A priest who tries to warn Robert that Damien is actually the Antichrist is impaled by a falling steeple, a photographer who tries to help Robert investigate the mystery is beheaded by a pane of glass, and Catherine suffers a miscarriage after accidentally falling over the second floor railing, an accident that may or may not have been engineered by Damien. Robert learns that if Damien is the Antichrist, he'll bear the mark of the devil. One night, while he's asleep, Robert looks for any sign and he finds a birthmark on his scalp, hidden beneath his hair in the shape of 666

With this confirmation, he knows what he has to do, kill his own son.

Okay, so I'm not going to fully spoil it for you guys, so I'll stop there, especially because the real point of today's episode is what was happening behind those scenes. After sitting on the shelf for almost two years, once The Omen was picked up by 20th, their production rapidly fell into place. Gregory Peck signed on to play Robert Thorn, opposite Lee Remick as Katherine. Production was slated to start in London in the fall of 1975, if everyone made it there in one piece.