How I wrote The Omen – One of the scariest movies of all time

By David Seltzer

It is common knowledge that 666 is the sign of the Antichrist. The three sixes have been printed on T-shirts, tattooed on biceps, featured in song lyrics and scrawled on walls. Phone numbers and licence plates that are randomly assigned with 666 are sent back for revision. So potent is the fear of these numbers that Ronald Reagan, when he was President of the United States, had to change his triple-digit San Clemente address.

Forty years after writing The Omen, I wonder if I was selected by the forces of Evil, to make the world aware that The Beast is omnipresent in the land. I was 34 years old, new to writing what I called “fictional screenplays”. My screenwriting, to date, had been limited to narration for documentary films, on subjects ranging from elephant seals to politics. I had won some acclaim for a theatrical documentary about insects (The Hellstrom Chronicle) and a 90-minute television special on The Life of Robert F. Kennedy.

I want you to write one like that for me...

What I loved most about documentaries was that each time out, I learned something. Became an expert on something. Thus, when I announced to the world (okay, to my wife) that I was now going to be a “real screenwriter”, my vow was that I’d never take a job that I couldn’t learn something from. So, when a guy came to me wanting to know if I had seen The Exorcist, and I said I had, and he said “I want you write one like that for me,” I had to turn him down, explaining that I couldn’t learn much writing about the Devil. But here’s the rub. He wasn’t just a guy - he was a guy who’d loaned me money, and explained to me that if I turned him down, he’d be needing it back, pretty much right away.

And so I set my mind to figuring out what I could possibly learn in writing about Beelzebub. The Book of Revelation blew my mind – the mythology, the characters, the scope and, importantly, the stories, which were ridiculous flights of fancy, but told with such conviction that they seemed credible.

I maintain to this day that without Gregory Peck’s face to cut to, in The Omen, the story would have been preposterous. I could giggle all I wanted while writing it. So long as he kept a straight face, it would be real.

Let’s face it. Fish don’t eat boats. But people screamed when they saw it happen in Jaws. It gave me the liberty to write something equally off-the-wall, with complete conviction. And here’s how it all came together.

The Book of Revelation

David Seltzer

I was working with many versions of the Book of Revelation, and many interpretive texts written by theological scholars; and found, in one of those interpretive texts, that references to the “Eternal Sea,” which The Beast (Antichrist) would rise from, was a metaphor for “the world of revolution and turmoil”. Okay, the world of politics.

I would therefore place the Devil’s child in a high-level political family. Reflecting on my documentary about Robert Kennedy, whose father was the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom, I created an Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and called him Robert Thorn.

How to get the Devil’s child into that family? By deception – but not by the child or the Devil, but by Ambassador Thorn himself, who would lie to his wife that an orphaned foundling was their own newborn son. And in the telling of that whopper, he committed what I call the Original Sin, which would bring his life to ruin.

What clinched it all was discovering this verse in Revelation: “Let it be known that the number of The Beast is a human number. It is 666.”

What I saw in it was a birthmark (the original title was The Omen – Birthmark). And more important, a calendar date with three sixes in it, when, in my story, the “Unholy One” would be born – 6/6/76.

In 1974 I started writing. Two years later on June 6 1976, the movie opened.

Thus, The Omen, sweet little Damien, and 666, were born.