I was born/baptized/raised Catholic, and yet Christian-based horror has never done a fecking thing for me. The minute I hear “the Devil made me do it,” I say, “Just tell him no. Who does he think he is?”
Like other such mainstream horror-movie heavy-hitters as The Exorcist (1973), Halloween (1978) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the child-of-Satan Antichrist epic The Omen (1976) — a rare-at-the-time horror film by a major studio, 20th Century Fox, trying to keep up with what “the kids” wanted — has inspired a flock of followers. That’s because, I think, that these films all were outliers — movies that, when they opened, were unlike anything audiences had seen before. And make no mistake, every one of them profoundly affected the horror cinema that followed.
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