Damien - Omen II

Damien – Omen II is a 1978 supernatural horror film directed by Don Taylor. It is the sequel to The Omen, and the second installment of The Omen series. It stars William Holden and Lee Grant, with Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Robert Foxworth, Lew Ayres, Sylvia Sidney, Lance Henriksen, Ian Hendry, and Leo McKern. Set seven years after the first film, it follows a now-pubescent Damien Thorn (Scott-Taylor) as he begins to realize his destiny as the Antichrist.

Franchise producer Harvey Bernhard wrote the screen story, with a screenplay by Stanley Mann and Mike Hodges. Hodges was the original director, but was replaced by Don Taylor early in production. Unlike the first film, which was shot in England and Italy, filming of the sequel took place primarily in the United States, in locations around Chicago, Illinois and Wisconsin. The opening scene was shot in Israel.

It was released by 20th Century Fox on June 9, 1978, and received mixed reviews from critics. A sequel, Omen III: The Final Conflict, was released in 1981.

Plot
One week after the events of the first film, archaeologist Carl Bugenhagen learns that Damien Thorn is still alive. Bugenhagen asks his friend Michael Morgan to deliver a box to Damien's new guardian, explaining that Damien is the Antichrist and that the box contains the Seven Daggers of Megiddo needed to kill him. When Morgan expresses scepticism, Bugenhagen takes him to a local ruin to see the mural of Yigael's Wall, which was said to have been drawn by a monk who had visions of the Antichrist as he would appear from birth to adulthood. Morgan believes him upon seeing Damien's face painted on the mural, but both he and Bugenhagen are buried alive after the ruins abruptly collapse.

Seven years later, the 12-year-old Damien is living in Chicago with his aunt and uncle, Ann and Richard Thorn. Damien gets along well with his cousin Mark, with whom Damien is enrolled in a military academy, but is despised by Richard's aunt Marion, who sees him as a bad influence on Mark and threatens to cut Richard out of her will if he does not separate the two boys. Late one night, Marion suffers a fatal heart attack after being scared by a raven that appears in her room.

Over the following days, a number of other bizarre incidents surrounding the Thorn family occur: a photojournalist who tried to interview Richard after seeing Yigael's Wall (and Damien in person) is run over by a truck after being blinded by a raven attack, a senior manager of Thorn Industries (a corporation owned by the family) drowns in a frozen lake, and two other employees are suffocated by toxic fumes following an unexpected gas leak at a factory plant. The latter incident also sickens Damien's class, who were visiting the plant at the time. At the hospital, Damien is the only student found to be unaffected by the fumes, but a doctor suggests keeping him in the hospital as a precaution. The doctor later discovers that Damien's marrow cells resemble those of a jackal, but is killed by a falling elevator cable before he can report his findings.

Meanwhile, Bugenhagen's box has been found during an excavation of the ruins and delivered to the Thorn Museum. Dr. Warren, the museum's curator and Richard's friend, opens it and finds the sacred daggers, along with a letter by Bugenhagen explaining that Damien is the Antichrist. Warren rushes to inform Richard. Mark overhears their conversation and confronts Damien, who admits to being the Devil's son. Damien pleads with Mark to join him on his rise to power, but Mark's steadfast refusal "forces" Damien to kill Mark by causing an aneurysm in his cousin's brain.

Shaken by his son's death, Richard goes to New York City to see a half-crazed Warren before being taken to the train station, where Yigael's Wall is being stored in a cargo carrier. As he sees Damien's image, Warren is killed in a freak locomotive accident, convincing Richard beyond doubt that Damien is the Antichrist. Upon his return, Richard has Damien picked up from his graduation at the academy while taking Ann to the museum in order for them to retrieve the daggers. After finding them, however, Ann uses them to kill Richard, revealing herself to be a Satanist and proclaiming that she's "always belonged to him". As she screams Damien's name, Damien, having overheard the altercation, wills a nearby boiler room to explode, setting fire to the building and killing Ann. Damien leaves the burning museum and is picked up by the family driver as the fire department arrives.

Writing
David Seltzer, who wrote the first film's screenplay, was asked by the producers to write the second. Seltzer refused, for he had no interest in writing sequels. Years later he commented that if he had written the story for the second Omen, he would have set it the day after the first installment, with Damien a child living in the White House. With Seltzer turning down Omen II, producer Harvey Bernhard duly outlined the story himself, and Stanley Mann was hired to write the screenplay.

The earliest drafts presented Damien as a teenager and featured a female love interest. The love interest was deleted in the final film.

Casting
Academy Award-winning veteran actor William Holden was considered to star as Robert Thorn in the first Omen, but turned it down as he did not want to star in a picture about the devil. Gregory Peck was selected as his replacement. The Omen went on to become a huge hit, and Holden made sure he did not turn down the part of protagonist Richard Thorn in the sequel. Lee Grant, another Oscar-winner, was a fan of the first Omen, and accepted enthusiastically the role of Ann Thorn.

Ray Berwick (1914–1990) trained and handled the crows used for several scenes in the film. Live birds and a crow puppet were used for the attack on photojournalist Joan Hart. Berwick also trained the avian actors in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).

Leo McKern reprises his role as Carl Bugenhagen from the original film. McKern is the only cast member of the series to appear as the same character in more than one instalment, although actor Tommy Duggan appears in the first and third instalments of the series as different characters.

Damien – Omen II was the film debut of Meshach Taylor (Dr. Kayne).

Under Mike Hodges
Richard Donner, director of the first installment, was not available to direct the second; he was busy working on Superman. British director Mike Hodges was hired to helm the film. Four weeks into principal photography, however, Hodges left the film: "artistic differences" was the reason given to the media, but the producers were unhappy with Hodges' working methods which they claimed were too slow and placing the film behind schedule. Hodges nonetheless maintained a screenwriter's credit on the finished film.

Harvey Bernhard cited a demonstrative instance where Hodges spent half a day's filming setting up a single shot of Damien coming from the stone pillars at the far end of the garden on the Thorn Estate in order to place a bonfire in the foreground. In later interviews, Hodges gave his own account of his experiences working on Omen II. He claimed that Bernhard produced a gun during an argument about the design budget, also that he left of his own accord rather than being fired.

Under Don Taylor
Bernhard replaced Hodges with Don Taylor, who had a reputation for finishing films on time and under budget. Taylor reshot several of Hodges scenes, though several of the earlier director's takes remain in the final film, including:


 * The entire opening sequence in Jerusalem.
 * Some of the footage at the factory and at the military academy.
 * The dinner where Aunt Marion shows her concern about Damien

Lance Henriksen expressed frustration that Taylor cut most of his role and character development.

Taylor also added the twist ending of Ann Thorn being a secret disciple of Damien who kills Richard in the climax.

Filming locations
Unlike the first film, which was shot primarily in England, Damien was filmed primarily in the United States.

The film was mainly set in Chicago and was largely filmed in that city's downtown. The Thorn Industries building was actually Chicago City Hall. Another scene took place at Graceland Cemetery. Scenes that were supposedly at a New York City railroad freight yard, with the CBOT Tower and the Sears Tower clearly visible in the background, were actually filmed at the Rock Island Railroad's 12th Street intermodel yard in Chicago, Illinois.

Other locations included Lake Forest Academy's campus, which was used as the Thorn Mansion, the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy's Lake Geneva, Wisconsin campus, which was used for the military academy, with real Lake Geneva students portraying most of the academy cadets, and the Murphy Estate on Catfish Lake in Eagle River, Wisconsin for the skating scene, with local children playing the skaters. The Field Museum of Natural History, depicting the Thorn Museum, was also used in several scenes throughout the film, including some of its final minutes.

The opening scenes were filmed in Acre, Israel, as well as the ruins of the crusader city Akko.

The interiors were shot at 20th Century Fox soundstages in Los Angeles.

Reception
The film received mixed reviews. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an approval rating of 48% based on 27 reviews, with an average rating of 5.1/10. The site's consensus states: "Damien dishes out ghoulish scares and a Biblical body count to generate some morbid fun, but this repetitious sequel lacks the sophistication of its predecessor."

Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "Perhaps my resistance has given out but Damien—Omen II, though it's as foolish as the first film, is rather more fun to watch and sometimes very stylish-looking." Variety wrote, "Damien is obviously wearing out his welcome, but presold interest and a couple of gruesome, ghastly death scenes should shore up business for the summer." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune found it inferior to the original because "there's nothing particularly surprising or horrifying about a teen-ager in league with the devil. Also, the commotion the kid inspires this time is not particularly frightening." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "Far from advancing the unsavory premise of the first film, this one doggedly retraces its steps. The result is an inferior copy rather than a narrative continuation." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "For all its slavish copying of the original, 'Damien — Omen II' plays differently. It's a hoot instead of a scream. Its deaths are frequent and exceedingly graphic, but you wait for them as for the acts on a variety bill. The connective tissue is frailer this time, and there is almost no accumulation of suspense." Richard Combs of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "The main trouble with the Evil One as a protagonist is that his opposition never looks very convincing—and like its predecessor, Omen II is based on a rather lame structure in which successive individuals discover something amiss about Damien and then meet an inexorably bloody end."

Box office
The film opened at number one at the US box office with a gross of $3,880,880 in its opening weekend from 524 theaters. It went on to gross $26.5 million in the United States and Canada, generating theatrical rentals of $12.1 million. Worldwide, it earned rentals of $20.6 million compared to $46.3 million for the original.

Soundtrack
After Harvey Bernhard had finished writing the story outline and was given the green light to start the production, the first person he contacted was Jerry Goldsmith because of the composer's busy schedule. Bernhard also felt that Goldsmith's music for The Omen was the highest point of that movie, and that without Goldsmith's music, the sequel would not be successful.

Goldsmith's Omen II score uses similar motifs to his original Omen score, but for the most part he avoided re-using the same musical cues. In fact, the first movie's famous "Ave Satani" theme is reprised only partially, just before the closing credits begin. Goldsmith composed a largely different main title theme for Omen II, albeit one that utilises Latin phrases as "Ave Satani" had done. Goldsmith's Omen II score allows eerie choral effects and unusual electronic sound designs to take precedence over the piano and Gothic chanting.

Unlike The Omen (and The Final Conflict), Jerry Goldsmith's score was recorded in the US, with the soundtrack album re-recorded in Britain for financial reasons. Lionel Newman conducted both the film and album versions; Varèse Sarabande later released an expanded CD including both, the liner notes of which explain the reasons behind the re-recording (a short-lived union rule meant that musicians had to be paid the full amount for the film and album use if the soundtrack was released on LP, doubling their fee. It was cheaper, therefore, to re-record in the UK than pay the orchestra double in the US). The liner notes also explain that some of the soundtrack's pieces have been rewritten slightly or even merged for the album re-recording. The audio quality of these UK-recorded album tracks also sounds noticeably more dynamic. Some sections of the film's soundtrack – the tapes of which were thought lost for many years – were discovered to have warped in storage and have noticeable and uncorrectable flaws. (The film soundtrack is listed from track 11 onwards).

Home media
The film was released on videocassette during the 1980s and 1990s. In 2000, it was part of The Omen Quadrilogy DVD set released in the US and UK, and was not available separately until 2005. In 2006, to coincide with the DVD release of the remake of the original film, The Omen and its sequels were released individually and together in an ultimate Pentalogy boxset digitally remastered and with more bonus features. In 2008, it was released on Blu-ray with its predecessor and 1981 sequel, Omen III: The Final Conflict. It is available as streaming video with a Cinemax subscription, alongside its predecessor, sequels and remake, all of which are downloadable through Amazon, Apple's iTunes and Vudu; it is also available alongside The Final Conflict for streaming on Disney+ via the international brand Star.