| Damien: Omen II | |
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| Directed by | Don Taylor |
| Produced by | Harvey Bernhard Richard Donner (executive producer) |
| Written by | Harvey Bernhard Stanley Mann Michael Hodges |
| Music by | Jerry Goldsmith |
| Cinematography | Bill Butler |
| Editing by | Robert Brown |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Running time | 107 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | US$4 million |
| Preceded by | The Omen |
| Followed by | Omen III: The Final Conflict |
Damien: Omen II, is a 1978 horror film directed by Don Taylor, starring William Holden, Lee Grant and Jonathan Scott-Taylor. The film was the second installment in The Omen series, set seven years after the first film, and was followed by a third installment, Omen III: The Final Conflict, in 1981.
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A week after the burial of Robert Thorn and his wife, archeologist Carl Bugenhagen (Leo McKern) asks his friend Michael Morgan (Ian Hendry) to deliver a box to the guardian of Thorn's young son, Damien. He reveals that Damien is the Antichrist and that the box contains a warning and the means to kill Damien. As Morgan is unconvinced, Bugenhagen takes him to the ruin of Yigael's wall, showing him an ancient depiction of the Antichhrist with Damien's face. Morgen is convinced but the two are buried alive as a tunnel collapses.
Seven years later, the twelve-year old Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor) is living with his uncle, industrialist Richard Thorn (William Holden) and his wife Ann (Lee Grant). He gets along well with his cousin Mark (Lucas Donat), Richard's son, with whom he is enrolled in a military academy. However, he is despised by aunt Marion (Sylvia Sidney), who favours Mark, thinks Damien a bad influence on him and even threatens to cut Richard out of her will should the two boys not be separated. The same night, the appearance of a crow wakes her up and causes a fatal heart attack.
Through a friend, Richard is introduced to journalist Joan Hart (Elizabeth Shephard), who tries to warn Richard about grave danger but he throws her out. She then goes to meet Damien at his school but when she sees his face she drives off in panic. On the road, she is attacked by a crow, which pecks her eyes out, causing her to be run over by a passing truck.
At Thorn Industries, manager Paul Buher (Robert Foxworth) suggests to expand the company's operations into agriculture but the project is shelved by senior manager Bill Atherton (Lew Ayres), who calls Buher's intention of buying up land in the process immoral. At Mark's birthday celebration, Buher introduces himself to Damien, invites him to see the plant and also speaks of his approaching initiation. Buher seemingly makes up with Atherton but the next day, during an ice hockey game, Atherton falls in and drowns. A shocked Richard leaves on vacation. As Richard agreed to the agriculture project in principle and left him in charge of the company, Buher then initiates his plans on his own.
Meanwhile, at the academy, Damien's new commander, Sergeant Neff (Lance Henriksen), takes the boy under his wing and warns him not to draw any attention on himself until the right moment. He also points him to Revelation, chapter 13, in which Damien reads about the beast. Finding its number 666 scarred onto his scalp, he flees the Academy grounds in a terrified panic.
Another Thorn employee, David Pasarian (Allan Arbus), alerts Buher that some people were murdered after having refused to sell their land. The next day, a chemical machinery explodes and releases toxic fumes, killing Pasarian and injuring Damien's class, who were visiting the plant. Damien alone did not suffer damage. The hospital doctor, who found out that Damien's blood cell structure resembles that of a jackal, is killed by a malfunctioning elevator.
Meanwhile, Bugenhagen's box has been found in the ruins. When opened by Richard's friend, Dr. Charles Warren (Nicholas Pryor), it contains the Seven Daggers of Meggido, the only weapons able to kill Damien, and the letter explaining that Damien is the Antichrist. Charles rushes to inform Richard, who however angrily refuses and throws him out. The next day, Richard confronts Anne with the letter, but she convinces him not to believe it.
Mark, who overheard Richard's altercation with Charles, confronts Damien, who first reluctantly and then proudly admits to being the Devil's son. Damien tries to convince Mark that he truly cares for him as his brother and asks Mark to join him, but as Mark refuses, Damien kills Mark with an intense stare.
Shaken by his son's death, Richard follows Charles's invitation to New York. A half-crazy Warren takes him to Yigael's Wall, stored in a cargo carrier, on which Richard sees Damien's image. Immediately afterwards, a train car hits the car, killing Charles and destroying the wall.
Upon his return, Richard has Damien picked up from a ceremony at the academy and argues with Ann about Damien. As they find the daggers in Charles's museum, Ann uses them to kill Richard, proclaiming that she "always belonged to him". Immediately afterwards, she is engulfed by a fire, caused by Damien who overheard the altercation from outside. Damien exits the museum, as the fire department arrives, and, now heir to Thorn Industries, is picked up by a driver.
David Seltzer, who wrote the first film's screen-play, was asked by the producers to write the second. Seltzer refused as he had no interest in writing sequels. Years later, Seltzer commentated that had he written the story for the second Omen, he would have set it the day after the first movie, with Damien a child living in The White House. With Seltzer turning down Omen II, producer Harvey Bernhard duly outlined the story himself, and Stanley Mann was hired to write the screenplay.
After Bernhard had finished writing the story outline and was given the green light to start the production, the first person he contacted was Jerry Goldsmith because of the composer's busy schedule. Bernhard also felt that Goldsmith's music for The Omen was the highest point of that movie, and that without Goldsmith's music, the sequel would not be successful. Goldsmith's Omen II score uses similar motifs to his original Omen score, but for the most part, Goldsmith avoided re-using the same musical cues. In fact, the first movie's famous "Ave Satani" theme is used only partially, just before the closing credits begin. Goldsmith composed a largely different main title theme for Omen II, albeit one that utilises Latin phrases as "Ave Satani" had done. Goldsmith's Omen II score allows eerie choral effects and unusual electronic sound designs to take precedence over the piano and gothic chanting.
Richard Donner, director of the first Omen movie, was not available to direct the second, as he was busy working on Superman. British film director Mike Hodges was hired to helm the movie. During production, the producers believed that Hodges' methods were too slow, and so they fired him and replaced him with Don Taylor, who had a reputation for finishing films on time and under budget. However, the few scenes Hodges directed (some of the footage at the factory and at the military academy, all of the early archaeology scenes, and the dinner where Aunt Marion shows her concern about Damien) remained in the completed film, for which Hodges retains a story credit. In recent interviews, Hodges has commented sanguinely on his experiences working on Omen II.
William Holden was the original choice to star as Robert Thorn in the first Omen, but turned it down as he did not want to star in a picture about the devil. Gregory Peck was selected as his replacement. The Omen went on to become a huge hit and Holden made sure he did not turn down the part of Richard Thorn in the sequel. Lee Grant was a fan of the first Omen and accepted enthusiastically the role of Ann Thorn.
Ray Berwick (1914 - 1990) trained and handled the crows used for several scenes in the film. Live birds and a crow-puppet were used for the attack on photojournalist Joan Hart. Berwick also trained the avian actors in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).
The movie was mainly set in Chicago and was largely filmed in downtown Chicago. The "Thorn Industries" building was actually Chicago's city hall. Another scene took place at Graceland Cemetery. Scenes set at a New York City freight area were also shot in Chicago, with the CBOT Tower and the Willis Tower visible in the background.
Other locations included Lake Forest Academy's campus, which was used as the Thorn Mansion, the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy's Geneva Lake campus, which was used for the military academy, with real Geneva Lake students portraying most of the academy cadets, and Catfish Lake in Eagle River, Wisconsin for the skating scene, with local children playing the skaters.
The film received mixed reviews. In comparison to the serious tone of the original, there were moments during the acclaimed death scenes (including the famous sequence in which a woman's eyes are pecked out by a raven and she walks blind onto a road only to be hit by a truck) which were unintentionally comical. The music by Jerry Goldsmith was again praised for its spooky build-up of suspense.
Joseph Howard wrote the novelization of Damien: Omen II. The novel was a best-seller, as David Seltzer's novelization of the first movie had been.
The film was released as part of The Omen Quadrilogy set in the US and UK in 2000, and was not available separately until 2005. In 2006, to coincide with the DVD release of the remake of the original film, The Omen and its sequels were released individually and together in an ultimate Pentalogy boxset digitally remastered and with more bonus features.
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   | interview with Mike Hodges - Xan Brooks interviews Mike Hodges | Film | The Guardian |
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