Carroll said that the fear is a trade off. That the audience trades the repulsion of the monster for the curiosity of the revelation and knowledge. The audience is repulsed by the monster but wants to know more. The most interesting part of The Omen is that the monster is actually something very familiar. The monster is a little child switched for a baby boy at birth. By all accounts he seems like a normal happy child. But slowly strange things happen around him.
Part of the appeal of a monster is that they cannot exist in our world. Something that sets apart horror from other genres based in curiosity like drama is the impossible nature of the monster. The part of The Omen that is so compelling to me is the fact that the monster is this mysterious child. It makes it more ambiguous.
The monster is not only familiar, but elicits sympathy from the audience. He is a very happy, lively child. The monstrous nature of the evil is only manifested through secondary things, like tragedies happening around him, being fearful of churches, and strange people guarding him. So while the viewer learns about the evil it is put against this image of an innocent child.
The child seems to never be deliberate in causing harm. It is either people around him that worship him or the environment itself that does evil in his name. So the child may not even be aware of the monster within him. That is what makes it effective. When the protagonist goes to fight the monster, he is attacking a small toddler. This tension between the innocence of the evil as victim and the guilt of the evil as a destructive influence is what makes The Omen such a dramatic and efficacious piece of film.
Another interesting aspect is that there is no monster in the traditional sense. The monster of the story is the force or forces that surround the child and cause tragedy. In this way there is no physical object that is the monster, just the influence it exerts on things around it. This parallels the Blair Witch Project where there is no monster seen, only strange influences. I found the movie to be scarier than most and it may be due to the lack of a physical monster to fight.
I didn't find this film all to frightening, simply because it's rather difficult to relate to this diplomatic family and because the viewer is made aware of what the threat is fairly early on. What I did find incredibly effective is that, similar to what you've posted, we can't other the villain of this film. Since the antagonist is a human child, we do not have the security of knowing that our threat is entirely unreal or supernatural.
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