Top 5 Awesome “Accidents” From The Omen Franchise

When you talk about a horror franchises that utilise “creative killing” in their DNA, you have to have The Omen near the top of your list. While Freddy Krueger warps your own dreams against you and Death itself arranges endless convoluted ways to shorten your lifespan in Final Destination, the mysterious aura of sinister accidents and questionable suicides that enable the rise to power of Damien Thorn has been making audiences check over their shoulder since 1976 when Richard Donner’s bone chilling classic drifted into cinemas.
Well, two sequels, a forgotten TV movie and a bland remake later, we’re getting an honest to God prequel in the form of Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen which will be unleashed onto screens very soon. Will it match the original when it comes to pulse pounding dread and astonishingly visceral demises? Who can say – but it does give us the opportunity to celebrate the best of those celebrated kill sequences.
It’s all for you, Damien.

5) Go With The Flow (Damien: Omen II – 1978)

It’s no surprise that the lion’s share of entries in this list come from Damien: Omen II as the movie is a veritable smorgasbord of deaths  so exaggerated, they look like they could have come from a luridly insane, 80s, accident prevention video; however, while there’s plenty of instances of people getting splattered by trains and getting buried alive, it’s one of the more subtle demises that sticks in the memory.
During a game of hockey on a frozen lake, senior manager of Thorn Industries, Bill Atherton, gets a post-game dunking like no other when he falls through the ice and gets swept away by the current. Not only is the sight of the poor sap frantically banging on the ice as we peer at him from the surface, but the pitiful bastard almost escapes too, only to plunge back into his frigid doom.
Legitimately chilling on all counts

4) Peck Your Poison (Damien: Omen II – 1978)

Another moment from the second Omen sees a spectacular double whammy hit Joan Hart, a photojournalist who has stumbled across Damien’s disturbing lineage and as she tries to warn the devil child’s guardian and uncle, Richard Thorn, about the danger everyone is in, a terrible happenstance literally swoops in a takes her off the board.
After her car stalls, Hart is attacked by a raven sent to silence her and during the frenzied attack, the woman has the eyes pecked right out of her head. But this isn’t the end for the probing journalist, oh no. As the raven flits off, satisfied with its grisly task, its victim staggers about the road with her eyesockets emptier than a cinema screening Madame Web. Ultimately, she wanders into the path of a speeding truck that launches her through the air like a red coated javelin upon impact and silences her once and for all.
All of the Omen’s death sequences are renowned for being mean, but this one is memorable for dialing up the spite to truly grisly levels.
Quoth the raven: you’re fucked.

3) In Rod We Trust (The Omen – 1976)

Some of you may seen this list and openly question why it isn’t simply Jam packed with entries from Richard Donner’s original – and you’d have a point. After all, the film features banger and banger of disturbing death scenes that are as unsettling as they are tragic. However, while moments like Damien’s nanny enthusiastically hanging herself at a birthday party, or the bit when the trike riding tyke sends his mother over the edge of a balcony stick in the memory, I’ve always been affected more by the erasing of Patrick Troughton’s hapless Father Brennan, probably for the novelty of seeing Doctor Who get impaled.
After realising that the devil’s got his malevolent glare on him, Father Brennan tries to take sanctuary in a church to escape the unatural storm that’s suddenly risen around him. Absolutely crapping his pants as Jerry Goldsmith’s magnificent score send black mass chants through the speakers, the priest is finally put out of his misery when a stray bolt of lightning send a metal rod tumbling from the church’s roof to spear him through the body and pin him to the ground while still standing. It’s shocking, it’s utterly out of the blue and it’s the first real indicator that a fiendishly explainable accident can remove an obstacle for the anti-christ at any given moment.

2) The Express Elevator To Hell (Damien: Omen II – 1978)

While the Omen’s first sequel is noticably superior to virtually ever other entry that came later, it’s still just a fairly OK follow up to a legitimate horror classic. However, one thing it has going for it is that it really goes above and beyond to try and match those kills – and so I present to you the shocking death of Dr. Kayne.
After Damian is weirdly unaffected by chemical poisoning when all of his fellow students were, a blood test reveals that he has the cell structure of a jackal due to his rather unconventional parentage, but when the alarmed Dr. Kanye goes to report his findings, the devil decides to take him out in one of the most over the top, spectacular deaths in the franchise’s history. Unwisely taking an elevator (always take the stairs when screwing with Satan), Kanye experiences some technical difficulties when the car stalls between floors, but simply dropping the thing isn’t enough for this film. After a string of malfunctions that see a cable come lose, it shears through the elevator car like piano wire through cheese and slices the doomed doctor clean in half at the waist.
Is it subtle? Hell no, but it’s a resplendent moment that refuses to be forgotten.

1) A Pane In The Neck (The Omen – 1976)

There is probably no other moment in the original Omen that cemented itself more in the public conscienceness than the instance when David Warner’s doomed photographer, Keith Jenkins meets his end at the business end of a flying sheet of glass. The reasons for this are legion (direction, score and a judicious use of slow motion), but the main one is that the set up equals the breathtaking pay off. Every slipping brake, every trundling wheel, even the momentum of the runaway truck is all expertly laid out as it trundles toward its fateful appointment and to make matters even more excruciating is the fact that Gregory Peck’s Robert Thorn has all but given up after discovering the true scale of the satanic conspiracy that’s consumed his family. As Keith scrabbles on the ground for the discarded seven daggers needed to kill the angel-faced anti-christ, he’s in the absolutely perfect spot for a prime spot of decapitation when everything finally comes up Satan.
Decapitations come and decapitations go, but few are as perversely beautiful as this one as we watch Keith’s freshly liberated bonce bounce and roll along the pane of glass as it travels on its unencumbered path of destruction. Donner captures it from every conceivable angle and edits them all into a gruesome tableau that plays like a fucked up action replay gone mad. It’s gore as ballet, it’s spellbinding shock and it’s completely fucking awesome to watch as the premier example of cinematic creative killing you’re ever likely to see.

Honorable Mention: Having A Blast (The Final Conflict – 1981)

By The Final Conflict, Damien Thorn has grown up to become a dashing, Sam Neill-shaped CEO who has eyes on eventually snagging the position of President Of The United States. However, despite bring a fully grown adult, he still needs little boosts of Satanic nepotism from his demonic dad every now and then to create openings for him to exploit.
This is proved in a genuinely unnerving sequence where the unnamed US Ambassador to the United Kingdom is hypnotised by Satan’s rottweiler (just go with it), he calmly returns to his office and immediately jerry rigs a set up that has him sitting complacently in front of the barrel of a shotgun whose trigger has been connected to a door knob. When his hapless secretary opens said door, the blast catches him under the nose, spraying his brains into a Jackson Pollock on the wall behind him in a spectacular display.
While the death could hardly be described as an “accident”, the weirdly little details of the killing prove to be insidiously memorable, such as his twitching foot tapping on the side of his desk.

The First Omen is in cinemas from April 5th