50 Fun Facts About The Omen

Which breed is the black dog that Mrs. Baylock keeps as Damien's watchdog in The Omen?

A Rottweiler turns up at the Thorn house just before the first death. A whole pack later chases Robert Thorn out of a cemetery, where he gashes his arm on a spiked fence.

What is young Damien riding when he knocks Katherine Thorn off an upstairs landing in The Omen?

A tricycle, which he rides into the table she has climbed on to prune a plant. The actor who played Damien later took one along to horror conventions.

Who is Damien standing with in the final shot of The Omen, as he turns and smiles at the camera?

The US President and First Lady lead Damien away from his adoptive parents' funeral. South African censors cut the ending, removing Thorn's death and Damien's survival.

Why did the 2006 remake of The Omen open in cinemas on a Tuesday instead of the usual Friday?

The date was 6/6/06, a nod to the number of the beast. The studio even admitted nudging its first-day takings so that the reported figure ended in 666.

Which sitcom star turned down Robert Thorn in The Omen over its gore, a choice he later called stupid?

Dick Van Dyke passed because of the violence. Charlton Heston also refused the part, unwilling to spend a whole winter alone in Europe.

How did four-year-old Harvey Stephens win the part of Damien at his group audition for The Omen?

He attacked the director, who had urged the boys to come at him, clawing his face and kicking him in the groin. More than 500 boys were seen for the role.

Which future Jurassic Park star plays the adult Damien Thorn in Omen III: The Final Conflict?

Sam Neill plays Damien at 32, running the family conglomerate and plotting to stop the Second Coming. A journalist he becomes involved with finally kills him.

What animal's skeleton do Robert Thorn and Jennings dig up in the grave of Damien's mother in The Omen?

A jackal lies in the grave, just as Father Brennan had claimed. The plot beside it holds a baby with a smashed skull: the Thorns' own son, killed so Damien could take his place.

Which animals attack Katherine Thorn's car when she drives Damien through a safari park in The Omen?

Baboons swarmed the car only after a zoo official put the troop's alpha baboon on the back seat. The terror on the actress's face in the scene was reportedly real.

In The Omen, Robert Thorn is sent to Megiddo, the place that gives its name to which final battle?

Armageddon is a Greek rendering of the Hebrew for Mount Megiddo. In the film an old archaeologist there shows Thorn the only way the child can be killed.

Which screen hero plays Robert Thorn in The Omen, though the studio feared he'd be rejected as a child killer?

Gregory Peck liked the script as a psychological thriller rather than a horror film, and was relieved to find the finished death scenes restrained rather than exploitative.

In The Omen, Robert Thorn is the American ambassador to which country when the deaths around Damien begin?

The United Kingdom is his posting, so the Thorns settle in an English country manor. In the third film the grown-up Damien arranges to be given the very same job.

In which city is Damien born and swapped for the Thorns' dead baby at the start of The Omen?

Rome is where a hospital priest persuades Robert Thorn to take the orphan without telling his wife. Five years later the hospital has burned down, and its records with it.

In The Omen, what falls from a church roof during a sudden storm and impales Father Brennan?

A lightning rod, struck by a bolt, spears him outside a church whose doors are all barred. A photograph taken earlier had shown a spear-like flaw through his body.

What decapitates Keith Jennings in Israel, in one of the most famous death scenes in The Omen?

A sheet of glass slides off a runaway truck and takes his head off. Jennings had photographed himself with a flaw across his neck, just like the marks on the earlier victims.

Which composer, nominated for eighteen Oscars, won his only one for the choral score of The Omen?

Jerry Goldsmith struggled for ideas until, his wife recalled, he announced one evening that he could hear voices. He came back to score the next two films in the series.

Which director had his breakthrough with The Omen before making Superman and Lethal Weapon?

Richard Donner wanted viewers left unsure whether Damien was evil or the deaths were a string of accidents. The writer and the producer overruled him.

Which star of a 1968 devil-child classic plays the nanny Mrs. Baylock in the 2006 remake of The Omen?

Mia Farrow, the mother in Rosemary's Baby, was widely praised even where the remake was not. One reviewer called her nanny a rare case of the new film improving on the old.

Which fantasy author wrote Good Omens, a comic novel that borrows The Omen's Antichrist baby swap, with Neil Gaiman?

Terry Pratchett and Gaiman have a hospital mix-up send the infant Antichrist to the wrong family, so he grows up as an ordinary boy in an English village.

Which book of the Bible supplies the number that marks Damien as the Antichrist in The Omen?

Revelation gives 666 as the number of the beast. In the film it appears as a birthmark, and an old exorcist tells Robert Thorn exactly where on the boy to search for it.

What does the archaeologist Bugenhagen hand Robert Thorn as the only means of killing Damien in The Omen?

Seven daggers with crucifix handles, to be used on consecrated ground. Thorn throws them away in disgust, and Jennings is killed moments after running to fetch them.

Who shoots Robert Thorn dead on a church altar in the closing minutes of The Omen?

A police officer fires as Thorn hesitates over the pleading boy. The chase began minutes earlier, when Thorn's speeding car almost hit a policeman.

At which family occasion does Damien's young nanny die in front of the guests in The Omen?

His birthday party, for turning five, ends when she calls to him from the roof and jumps. A press photo taken minutes before shows a flaw shaped like a noose.

Where on Damien's body does Robert Thorn finally find the 666 birthmark in The Omen?

Under his hair is where Bugenhagen says to look, so Thorn cuts the sleeping boy's locks. Mrs. Baylock leaps on him the moment he sees the mark.

Which actress, a leading interpreter of Samuel Beckett's plays, is the sinister nanny Mrs. Baylock in The Omen?

Billie Whitelaw won the Evening Standard film award for best actress for the part. She later voiced the seer Aughra in The Dark Crystal.

Which Days of Wine and Roses star plays Katherine Thorn, Damien's adoptive mother, in The Omen?

Lee Remick earned an Oscar nomination for that 1962 drama. In The Omen her character begs her husband to find her a psychologist as her fear of the boy grows.

Which English actor, later seen in Tron and Titanic, plays the doomed Keith Jennings in The Omen?

David Warner plays the press man whose own pictures warn him that he is next. He looked back on the part for a BBC history of horror in 2010.

Which former star of Doctor Who plays Father Brennan, the priest who warns Robert Thorn, in The Omen?

Patrick Troughton had been the second Doctor from 1966 to 1969. In the 2024 prequel his character is played as a younger man by Ralph Ineson.

Which star turned down Robert Thorn in The Omen, then played Thorn's brother Richard in the sequel?

William Holden said he did not want to appear in a film about the devil. Once the original became a hit, he made sure not to refuse the lead in Damien: Omen II.

What is the title of the Latin choral theme from The Omen that earned a Best Original Song Oscar nomination?

"Ave Satani" was conceived as a kind of Black Mass, turning phrases from the Latin Mass upside down. The choirmaster who supplied the wording left several grammar errors in it.

Which studio backed The Omen after the script had languished for months at a rival company?

20th Century Fox took it up through executive Alan Ladd Jr., and the film's opening weekend went on to set a new record for the company.

Which space blockbuster did Gilbert Taylor shoot soon after serving as cinematographer on The Omen?

Star Wars came a year later. When Taylor and its director fell out, the studio he had served on The Omen stepped in to keep him on the picture.

Damien's ill-fated first nanny in The Omen is played by an actress whose father was which Hollywood tough guy?

Jack Palance later co-hosted Ripley's Believe It or Not! with her. Holly Palance also read Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in his Superman screen test.

Harvey Stephens, the original Damien, returns for a cameo as what in the 2006 remake of The Omen?

A tabloid reporter is his bit part, thirty years on. It was only his third screen credit, after a small role in a 1980 television film about the painter Gauguin.

In Damien: Omen II, what kind of school does the 12-year-old Damien attend with his cousin Mark?

A military academy, where his sergeant turns out to be a Satanist sent to watch over him. The scenes were shot at a real one in Wisconsin, with its cadets as extras.

Which bird appears before several of the deaths around the Thorn family in Damien: Omen II?

A raven frightens Aunt Marion into a fatal heart attack and blinds a journalist before a truck hits her. The trainer had also handled the flocks in Hitchcock's The Birds.

Which Oscar-winning actress plays Ann Thorn, unmasked as a secret Satanist, in Damien: Omen II?

Lee Grant, a fan of the first film, accepted eagerly. Her character's betrayal was a twist added by the replacement director, and it leaves Damien the sole Thorn heir.

How does the archaeologist Bugenhagen die in the opening minutes of Damien: Omen II?

Buried alive, along with a friend, when an ancient ruin collapses on them. He has just shown the friend a mural in which the Antichrist has Damien's face.

Which Ray Donovan star plays Robert Thorn in the 2006 remake of The Omen?

Liev Schreiber had won a Tony the year before for Glengarry Glen Ross. His co-star said the boy playing Damien was never told who his character really was.

Which Servant actress leads the 2024 prequel The First Omen as the American novice Margaret?

Nell Tiger Free had played Princess Myrcella in Game of Thrones as a teenager. The First Omen was her first lead role in a feature film.

Which Sydney Sweeney convent horror, released around the same time as The First Omen, was dubbed its twin film?

Immaculate also follows a young novice nun who uncovers terrifying secrets at a convent abroad. Reviewers read both films as stories about control over women's bodies.

In the TV film Omen IV: The Awakening, the adopted girl Delia proves to be which relation of Damien Thorn?

His daughter, placed with a congressman and his wife by Damien's followers. The final twist is that she has been guarding her unborn twin brother, the real heir.

Which screenwriter wrote The Omen and its novelization, which sold out in big-city bookstores within hours?

David Seltzer turned his script into a book because, unlike Jaws or The Exorcist, the film had no bestseller behind it. He said he wrote it for commercial reasons, not belief.

The Omen, a box-office hit, was listed in a 1978 book by Harry Medved among the fifty what of all time?

Worst films was the verdict of The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, in which it was the newest title chosen. The American Film Institute later ranked it 81st among the most thrilling American films.

Which actor plays Bugenhagen in both The Omen and its first sequel, uncredited each time?

Leo McKern, television's Rumpole of the Bailey, is the only actor in the series to play the same character in more than one of the films.

Which English cathedral, a brick building consecrated in 1961, was a filming location for The Omen?

Guildford Cathedral in Surrey was begun in 1936 and consecrated in 1961, partly funded by a campaign that invited the public to buy a brick. It has since appeared in The Witcher and The Sandman.

Which ruined Yorkshire abbey provides the setting for the finale of Omen III: The Final Conflict?

Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire stood in for the ruin where Damien is finally struck down. The director remembered the shoot there as very cold and very eerie.

Which director was replaced by Don Taylor four weeks into filming Damien: Omen II?

Mike Hodges left over what the press was told were artistic differences; the producers thought him too slow. Some of his footage survives, and he kept a writing credit.

Which Merlin actor played the grown-up Antichrist in Damien, the 2016 TV sequel to The Omen?

Bradley James played Damien as a 30-year-old war photographer who has forgotten his past. The series ignored the film sequels and lasted a single season.

Which film's love theme beat the choral anthem from The Omen to the Oscar for Best Original Song?

A Star Is Born took the prize, making Barbra Streisand the first woman to win that Oscar as a composer. The Rocky fanfare was beaten on the same night.