You and Me and The Devil Makes Three

In Alfred Hitchcock's films, he tried to get something that was quaint, nice, or benevolent to seem menacing. Which explains why motels or flocks of birds give us the creeps. But in Richard Donner's The Omen we don't just see something neutral being turned evil. Billions of people see churches, the Bible, and sacraments as welcoming, if not just nostalgic. So there is far more damage done when suddenly there is a horror film based on what you hold incredibly dear. This movie, if taken as fact, would immediately put intense suspicion upon your closely held beliefs and even your own children.

In Noel Carrol's Philosophy of Horror, he persists that to be a monster, it must be both threatening and impure. Threatening to life, limb, mind, and/or morality. It must be trying to destroy some part of the main character in order to bring forth revulsion. The boy in The Omen, along with his guardian maids and dogs, have this quality. On a  deeper level however, it must be what Carrol calls "impure". This is a combination "between two or more conflicting cultural categories," he says. One way to combine conflicting categories is fusion, a physical blending of entities into one spatially limited frame, like Swamp-Man, Frankenstein's monster, or zombies (blending living and dead). He says that possessed monsters are fusion because of their being a blend of personality and body, but each belonging to different persons. So the mind belongs to a demon but the body belongs to a girl.

Though not an exorcism story, The Omen takes advantage of opposed forces in the same way. The boy, usually innocent, pure, and harmless is born with the personality of the devil himself. The monster is not a fusion inside the movie narrative, but to the viewer, the contradiction is blatant. As mentioned before, there is the added element religion into the fusion. The little boy could have merely been an evil alien and the story only affect how one may see their child, but because the film's central themes are of religion and churches and scriptural text, the once familiar entities now have a dark shadow cast across them. How could these beliefs and this little child produce something so reviling? So there is actually a fusion of three, the boy, the church, and the devil, making, I presume on purpose, a sick, unholy trinity of heebie jeebies.