I’m almost certain that I hold the record on the horror blog Internet for writing the most pieces about HALLOWEEN 4– Dwight Little actually agrees with me– and it’s a crown I wear with pride as the Queen of Vincent Drug. To my surprise, however, I’ve never thrown in this little doozy of a retailer promo, which is another kryptonite of mine featuring THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS in all its glory.
In case you’re unfamiliar, a retailer promo is an early release of a VHS tape sent to video store owners that will ultimately either sway them to stock the shelves with said movie or give it a hard pass. In addition, some of these screeners would be sent to the media for review. Hard to imagine a time when critics would have to actually wait on the postman to deliver physical media as opposed to a screener email that can be obtained in under 60 seconds, eh?
Can we also appreciate this standee that was seen in Mom and Pop video shops? I covet thee so hard.
That being said, I don’t think HALLOWEEN 4 was ever going to be a hard sell to horror movie fans, but that, of course, never stops the PR machine from pimping the sequel for home video release like it was one of its top hookers on Broadway St. Hell, they were so confident in their success on the video rental market, they couldn’t even bother to spell Freddy’s Nightmares right when talking about television promo partnerships.
That’s a big dick move there, Mikey.
The street date for HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS landed on May 18th, 1989, just a few weeks after THEY LIVE and CHILD’S PLAY hit the shelves and five days before PUMPKINHEAD was added to the VHS horror movie rentals of ’89. 1988 was a HUGE year for horror movies-you can check my top 15here-so therefore the Summer months following were a banger for us at the video rental stores.
I mean, they never had to oversell me. I’m the proud mom of two copies, while three others over the past 30 years have been laid to rest from being played to death.
Anyway, enjoy something that brings me a lot of personal joy and fuzziness. Huge shout-out to Tripsy Trailers for uploading this treasure for the rest of us!
The 80s were a fantastic time to be a kid and a horror fan. If you were a product of this generation, chances are you were traumatized in one way or another by the dark delicacies of the media that gave absolutely ZERO fucks about not softening any blows when it came to life lessons in the form of movies and television. Whether it was watching Punky Brewster’s friend Cherie almost die in a fridge, or your grandma popping in a freshly rented VHS flick called WATERSHIP DOWN for the grandkids to watch because she thought it was a “lovely Easter movie”, we got hit with some messed up visuals that would never get past a writer’s discussion room in modern society. Which kind of pisses me off because I want my kids to experience something as cool and terrifying as a movie about the beloved Dorothy Gale getting sent to electric shock therapy and then facing off with a headless witch.
That’s some bullshit.
Anyway, one of the greatest culprits of truenightmare nostalgiafor our childhood era is the great Don Bluth. For anyone unfamiliar or for Gen Z’ers, Don Bluth was a former Disney animator who made his mark as early as 1959 with Walt Disney’s SLEEPING BEAUTY, with his last animationdirecting credit with THE FOX AND THE HOUND before he left to start his own company in 1979- DON BLUTH ENTERTAINMENT. During the 1980s and 90s, he made a slew of gorgeous animated films that also, in turn, traumatized the shit out of a generation of kids.
And one animation for a video arcade game that I WOULD DIE TO SEE as a full-length movie.
Don Bluth radically distanced himself from his Disney days with animation he felt was more “pure” to the craft by keeping the hand drawn cel the way to go with his continuing work. The result was always one of passion and masterful craftsmanship that really pushed home some of the dark, and gritty themes Bluth films went balls deep with. That’s how you’ll always know you’re watch a DB movie. It always feels like something sinister is lurking right around the corner with the unnerving way he animated these films and of course, a central character always dies or has some type of serious traumatic event happen that in turn, spills into our own emotions, successfully grounding us into a euphoric depression. And I think somehow, as kids while it may have traumatized us, those moments served also as lessons that we, as children, needed to both see and hear for our own exponential growth and how to grieve in our own way.
Don Bluth never shied away from dealing with the shadows that are the human journey. Dealing with themes of sadness, loss, anger, and death remains a staple in almost all of his films. There were even moments where I felt like he was fucking with us and our emotions even more: Like when Littlefoot sees the shadow of what looks like his recently deceased mother but turns out to be his own, and he just sinks even deeper into depression. I was literally seven and screamed “FUCK YOU” to the screen while shedding my own tears; like goddamn was that necessary? But you know, looking back, it absolutely was. These are stages of grief, and it’s seen from the perspective of a child who had his world shattered. It really showed us kids that life isn’t all sunshine and fairytale castles. Bluth said, “This is life, little people. It’s a wild ride of emotions, and we need to talk about the realities of it.- also, fuck your feelings very much.”
That’s the best way I can describe a Bluth film, anyway. Narrowing it down to the top five movies that stayed with us through our childhood into adulthood from the DON of DARK ANIMATION was slightly challenging, but I think I got it right.
The legend of Anastasia comes to life in this late 90s Bluth entry about an orphaned Russian girl, the revolution surrounding her country, and the real-life villain of Rasputin (voiced by Christopher Lloyd). The animated reimagining of one of history’s darkest figures for a children’s film consists of the “wizard” in scenes where we see his eyes pop out, his jaws falling off as he lingers somewhere between life and death; much like the real Rasputin, who was infamously hard to kill, or so legend says. I mean, sure, what kid doesn’t love to see a decomposing evil wizard corpse do a full-on song and dance routine with his body parts popping off?
AN AMERICAN TAIL was a personal favorite of mine as a little kid. The story of mice immigrants coming to America on a ship from Russia with SURPRISE, one little mouse named Fievel getting thrown overboard and being separated from his family; leaving little Fievel Mouskawitz on his own to navigate America on his own while he searches for his loved ones who presume him dead. This movie is where I also started to notice that perhaps Bluth is a dog guy rather than a cat person. I swear every film he makes, cats are villainous, vile creatures! Except for Tiger, anyway. The hoards of cats are almost downright terrifying and they really label them as bad animals! I suppose this was done metaphorically as immigrants, once upon a time, came to America thinking there was no violence in the streets. No cats in America? LOL. Let’s just stick with he hates cats.
That being said, Sir Derp of Derp of Pazuzu would like a word, sir.
With that out of my system, from the wave monster arising from the Atlantic Ocean that beats the hell out of the ship, and the reason Fievel gets knocked out to sea, to the Giant Mouse of Minsk, those two scenes in particular were visually pretty damn horrifying in such a beautifully artistic way. As a four-year-old, it successfully gave me nightmares, so hats off to a giant wooden rat with 20-foot-long teeth and the fact I would never ride on a boat until my teens because I was pretty sure I was going to get pummeled by a 100-foot wave monster man.
Yeah, well, we all very much know where this one is headed. One of Bluth’s most tragic films here just exhumes sadness at almost every turn leaning into the age of the dinosaur and the background of historic events that plagued the Earth at this time. Let’s also throw in a heavy scene where a mother is fighting to protect her child from being eaten by a T Rex and getting killed in the process. Exit stage left to an elongated scene of utter turmoil, and the dying mother mutters some final words of wisdom to her little one that “she’ll always be with him”. Make sure you have that Pizza Hut tie-in toy ready to clutch- If you don’t cry at this scene, you just might be a sociopath.
An animal lover such as myself can find this movie extremely disturbing. Aside from all the beautifully dark imagery, the underlying tale of NIMH is sufficiently evil all on its own. Touching on the very real issues of cruel animal testing, rats and mice were taken to the NIMH labs and injected with needles full of fuck knows what.
One of these experiments led to their advanced intelligence and eventual escape, which brings us to another terrifying tale revolving around the struggles of love, betrayal, and ultimate power with the wife of one of the escaped NIMH mice, Mrs. Frisbey is on a journey to save her dying son.
Oh, and don’t forget again, the vicious terrible cat villain of the film!
Also, I can’t be the only one who thought that damn cave of bones-dwelling owl, was completely terrifying with those glowing eyes and no-nonsense demeanor. In fact, I know I wasn’t. So I’ll just leave Big Daddy Owl here for him to drum up some traumatic memories.
There are a few movies in my life that I make the conscious choice to never revisit, and ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN is one of them. It’s not because it’s a bad movie, it’s just that it’s way too sad. Again, being an animal lover, the last thing I wanted to face as a child was that my dog was, eventually, going to die. And while the sentiment of storytelling is that of the main title unless your dog is an absolute piece of shit I guess, is supposed to offer some comfort, all it did was make me cry- and a lot of other kids too. Hell, the story starts out of trauma hell already with street thug Charlie (voiced by Burt Reynolds), our main character mutt, being murdered and sent to Heaven where he of course can’t help himself and steals a pocket watch that allows him more time. Oh, but there’s punishment for that: when the watch stops ticking, he will be sent straight to Hell, where we get a nice sneak of it with dog skeletons and cat demons (because Bluth thinks kitties are the devil, right)!
He then befriends an orphaned little girl named Anne Marie who has been kidnapped and – you guessed it – coerced into forced labor by Carface, an evil dog who is also Charlie’s old partner and yep, murderer. Charlie forms a deep bond with the orphaned little girl, proving that his hardened heart can be softened but of course, dies at the end when she needs him most. However, the change in his attitude allows him to enter the pearly gates this time, for good.
What kills me most I think is learning about the death of Judith Barsi who voiced both little Anne Marie and Ducky (The Land Before Time) in a tragic murder-suicide at the hands of her abusive father after the fact, which really seals the deal in just how sad this movie really is.
Yeah, perfect bedtime story material, folks.
Now excuse me while I go wipe my face from cutting all these onions and go hug my animals.
Religious horror hits a primal cord within us all. Even to unbelievers, there’s an unmistakable lure of curiosity that cannot be squelched by any amount of modern logic. Modernism, sincere as it may be, attempts to protect us from the arcane such as concepts locked away in frightful prophecies securely kept in musty and old esoteric libraries. Prophecies many today would prefer to leave hidden beneath a century of dust.
But can these mystifying forewarnings be sealed away forever and what dreadful truths may they reveal? The theological study of the End Times is known as eschatology and is a branch of research dedicated to deciphering the recorded warnings of cataclysmic events to come that’ll shatter reality and bring a final end to all we now know.
Denial, negligence, and good old tried-and-true blissful ignorance do precious little to expunge these dire foretellings that caused the ancients to quake upon their reading. Many people reduce them to nothing more than superstition and leave it at that. Thankfully for us all though religious horror takes such concepts and creates modern-day masterpieces to shock and sicken generations.
And so came a little movie called The Omen that rekindled the fires of Hell across the globe and audiences basked in its satanic glow. The film is subtle but brimming with evil intent as it focuses on the early beginnings of the scariest person found in New Testament literature – the Antichrist.
Christ’s satanic counterpart seemingly snuck into our world like a serpent beneath our noses and upset the establishment people were so comfortable with. Sure, Satan was no new concept in Hollywood. B-level films littered the Drive-In nearly every weekend and there’s nothing wrong with that. But people didn’t take such movies seriously. They were cheap popcorn thrillers. People watched them, screamed or jeered, and then went back home probably forgetting all about them. Satan slithered back into the shadows once the credits rolled and that was that.
The Omen on the other hand was a very different type of beast altogether. For one thing, as a project portraying the demonic, it was taken very seriously by the studio and placed into the hands of a competent filmmaker, Dick Donner, who decided to remove any overt satanic imagery. Donner’s approach was for the movie to look like a series of terrible tragedies. Imagine having the worst day of your life sort of deal.
As I stated earlier, it’s a subtle film but Darkness swells in every scene. From the moment the film opens and we follow Ambassador Thorn (brilliantly played by Gregory Peck) as he rushes to the hospital for the birth of his son to the final shot of the movie at a solemn graveside at the movie’s conclusion audiences were unexpectedly changed by something primal they had just watched.
One thing that made the movie work was the casting choices. Actors will either make or break a project and casting is vital. Originally, Charlton Heston, renowned for his portrayal of Moses in Ten Commandments and the titular role of Ben-Hur, Heston was a name that brought regality to a project. Donner wanted a serious actor for the lead role because he believed if audiences saw someone like Heston or Gregory Peck being scared on the screen it would unnerve them somehow. He was right.
Unlike many hundreds of movies featuring the Devil, The Omen struck a chord and audiences were fundamentally changed thanks to it. Suddenly people were exiting movie theaters with thoughts of the End of Days possessing their thoughts like black magic. A single movie managed to do what the clergy spend a lifetime hoping to achieve – get people’s asses back in church!
What if the Antichrist was alive today but was just a little kid?
That question ignited a nightmare that became one of the most influential horror movies of the century. To the terror of many, The Omen was more than fiction but acted more as an accurate account of prophecies they saw as being fulfilled daily.
The film was the apex rising out of a perfect storm of bizarre circumstances.
For starters, Satanism became a nationally recognized religion and was accepted for its darker practices of the occult to the shock and horror of many Bible-believing Christians. For many, it was a sign of darker things to come because, for the most part, many didn’t understand the actual belief system installed by its founder Anton Lavey. Following more paranoia than facts, many religious people saw the Church of Satan as a headquarters for an invasion of Satanic entities. A portal to things that could not be sealed once opened by willing mortal hands.
Not only had Satan been given his own institution but the ‘God is dead’ movement had swelled to alarming numbers and wasn’t hard for people to accept considering how few people still attended church on a weekly basis.
Strange cults like the Manson Family were also on the rise. Cults whose members broke into homes and cut the unborn baby from its mother’s womb disgusted the nation, leaving many to wonder how such a thing could happen in a God-fearing country. Murderous cultists were just another piece in the End of Days puzzle and everyday people found it easy to believe that maybe, just maybe, some left hand of Darkness was pulling the strings.
Added to this were political scandals which led people to lose faith in their governments, adding one more fallen establishment to the fro. Not to mention the Vietnam War nearly drove the whole country entirely insane.
The church had failed and the occult was rapidly rising. The government had failed and in need of some new power to take the reigns.
The Omen was released at the perfect time during a period of unsettling turmoil and managed to terrify audiences. The film’s creators expertly merged biblical prophecies with current events, resulting in an unsettlingly perfect connection.
This created a new kind of biblical cinema that shook society to its core.
The golden era of biblical epics such as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur was long gone. The King of Kings was now the whisper of a bygone age and motion pictures like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby started a new wave of supernatural excitement proving Satan’s day was at hand.
The Omen was part of this new wave of spiritual horror. Its infernal genius lies in its boldness to crack open the Holy Scriptures and bring to life the darkest aspects therein revealed. The book of Revelation was a genuine inspiration behind the material.
The result is a remarkable achievement that speaks for itself.
Adding to the dark nature of the movie’s tone is the (sin)sational score composed by Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith admits the inspiration came to him while at Mass. The song Ave Maria was being sung and as the words flowed across him a black idea blanketed his thoughts. “What would it sound like if they were worshipping Satan instead?” he wondered. Thus one of the most haunting film scores of all time was brought to life.
Goldsmith took the established concept of Mass, the sacraments, the holiest act of Mass, and offered it to Satan. Sanguis bibimus – ‘The blood we drink,’ Corpus edimus – ‘The body we eat.’ Any good Catholic will associate this with the Holy Act of Communion. But this is where the ritual goes dark, Tolle corpus Satani. Ave! ‘Raise the body of Satan. Hail!’ Brilliant and covert. The song becomes a litany of Satan worship and serves as the movie’s main theme securing Goldsmith the oscar that year.
It’s one of those things where you may not have known what was going on – or why you felt uncomfortable hearing it played – but your brain surely did.
Not to mention the infamous priest’s death (impaled upon a church spike) was based on an actual event that happened nearby where the screenwriter lived. That and many strange accidents happening to the cast and crew both on and off set while the movie was being filmed led many to speculate the production was in fact cursed by the powers of Hell that did not want their wiles and ways to be made public knowledge.
Overall The Omen is a mystery even to this day. I grew up in a very religious home where it was forbidden to watch which only intensified its awe and wonder in my mind. What could be so horrible about this movie that preachers so profusely condemned it from behind sweaty pulpits? The fundamentalists I grew up under acted as if a world of the Satanic would be torn open upon a single viewing.
Naturally, it was on my must-see list of movies along with The Last Temptation of Christ. The movie is respectful to the biblical source material it borrows from though and, well frankly, is just a very damn good movie to watch. It has a regal class seldom spoken of. People love to talk about elevated horror as if it’s a brand new thing but I’d argue it’s a sophisticated branch of the genre that’s been with us for years. Movies like this prove it.
The Omen proved to be a box office success and became one of the most influential horror movies of all time. Its financial success allowed Fox Studios to funnel in a little more money into a little-known science fiction project being made at the time called Star Wars. I love that by the way. Damien might’ve helped save Star Wars!
It also inspired one of the most groundbreaking heavy metal records of all time, Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast! Bruce Dickenson (lead singer) says he saw the movie and then had one of the most vivid nightmares of his life later that night. That’s pretty fucking metal.
Final Thoughts – The New Prequel
I’ll admit I mocked the idea of a prequel to The Omen. I felt it would be just another nostalgic cash grab that would suck like most others do. Then the rumors started settling in and people were praising this movie, The First Omen. Naturally curious I had to check it out for myself despite saying I’d never give it my attention. I think I said something like I’d rather tickle my dick with a cactus than go see it.
Well, I went to watch it.
You need to understand I’m not a big fan of any of The Omen sequels. So why the fuck would I care to see a prequel? Let alone sing its demonic praise unless it genuinely deserved it? So what did I think?
I unexpectedly enjoyed this movie, despite my initial skepticism.
The First Omen is a welcomed addition to the lore and adds a few new insights into the darker conspiracies behind the original movie. As far as prequels go I have to admit it’s one of the best I’ve seen. I mean I had to come home and immediately watch the original classic right away. The two line up masterfully.
So to all my friends who endured weeks of me bitching about this movie here I am humbly eating a big fat mouthful of crow. I was wrong, y’all.
So is this the start of a new franchise? Like with this movie’s success will they skip ahead and do a new retelling of Damien’s adult life as the Antichrist? I would say ‘Please God just stop!’ but I was proven wrong by a prequel so who knows? If done right and done well I’ll be in line to see it.
So if you like sophisticated horror and religious thrillers The Omen is a great watch. If you’ve not seen it yet there’s no better time than now. Make an event of it and go watch The First Omen before you do.
Nightmare Nostalgia 