Editorials
[Interview] ‘Straw Dogs’ Director Rod Lurie
Director Rod Lurie (The Contender, Nothing But The Truth) has had a long three years of dodging and absorbing criticism ever since it was announced that he would be taking the reigns on a remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 classic, Straw Dogs. Loosely basing his film on the book “The Siege At Trencher’s Farm” by Gordon Williams, Peckinpah fashioned a unique statement about the politics of masculinity in his story about American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his wife Amy (Susan George) who visit her hometown in England only to find fissures in their marital dynamic. The cracks in their relationship are tested by the differing cultural environment and the local populace (including Amy’s ex-boyfriend Charlie) and by the end of the film, well… things get a little out of hand.
When the wildly controversial original film was released in 1971 it was met with public outcry, forced edits by the US studio, and an `X’ rating in the United Kingdom (in fact, 13 years after the film’s release in the UK the uncut version was banned, which remained in effect until 2002). Many critics felt the film’s exploration of violence and was both fascist and misogynistic. Whatever Peckinpah’s true moral and sociological intentions may have been, the film is a masterpiece.
All of this obviously adds to the stakes of tackling a remake. Taking on one of the hallmark films of a legendary director, a film that touches on issues that are very much still culturally sensitive, well it’s certainly a risk.
I had the chance to touch base with Rod Lurie this week to discuss his version of Straw Dogs which stars James Marsden and Kate Bosworth as David and Amy Sumner as well as Alexander Skarsgard as Amy’s ex-boyfriend Charlie. Rounding out the cast are James Woods, Rhys Coiro, Walton Goggins, Willa Holland and Dominic Purcell.
Speaking by phone from his hotel in New York, Lurie discussed the film’s location shift to Mississippi, how his view of humanity differs from Sam Peckinpah’s, and how James Marsden approached his character from a different place than Dustin Hoffman.
Note: Towards the end of the interview I asked Lurie about a central scene, in both the original film and the remake, and he declined to comment on it. I have omitted both my question and his response. Lurie did, however, offer to speak with me in a followup interview. If that falls into place I’ll be glad to share some more in-depth discussion down the line.
Bloody-Disgusting: I actually haven’t had a chance to see the new one yet. I was supposed to come out to New York and see it a few weeks ago and talk to the cast but –
Rod Lurie: Hurricane Irene cancelled all that, yeah.
BD: Well I’m a fan of the first one and thought it had an interesting take on the notion of masculinity, especially in the 70`s. So I wanted to talk with you while I had the chance. What attracted you to this project in the first place?
RL: What attracted me in the first place was, first of all the opportunity to make it, that’s the first one. And my producing partner Martin Freeman was able to obtain the rights, and he asked me if I thought I wanted to direct it. And, like everyone else, I said “oh they’re really going to come after me. I’m going to have a bullseye on my back”. And that is exactly what happened as soon as I announced I was going to do it. But it was Dustin Hoffman who talked me into it actually, and he basically told me, you know Straw Dogs is a western after all and as a result what you can do is put your own spin on it. Peckinpah had his own point of view of humankind and you can put your own point of view on it. And we do have different points of view. Peckinpah is much more from that school of violence being biologically embedded in us and and I’m from the point of view that violence is conditioned into us. So we told the same story but from different points of view.
BD: Did you go back to the [book] “Siege Of Trencher’s Farm” and extrapolate anything new out of it?
RL: No. No I didn’t. I went entirely from the film. A little bit like Peckinpah, he didn’t use the book really at all. In fact I went almost entirely off the Peckinpah film, that’s what really interested me. That’s the experiment that interested me.
BD: What were some of the benefits of transporting the story to Mississippi?
RL: Well the primary interest for me was to find a community, and it didn’t necessarily have to be Mississippi, it could be many many towns in the United States but I wanted to have a town where sort of violence was a part of the town. For example a town where football is king, a town where hunting is king, a town where the preacher is talking about God smiting people from the earth. A town that where violence is so much a part of it that when it is perpetrated, barely an eyebrow is raised.
BD: Earlier you mentioned having a target on you when this was announced, which I think was in 2008 right?
RL: Right.
BD: And when I heard about James Marsden being cast I certainly remember thinking that he’s such a kind of strapping and handsome person that he’d certainly be less nebbish than Hoffman’s character in the original.
RL: That was very much on purpose because, you know, I could have hired one of those actors who are very Hoffman-like but, I decided not to do that because I decided it would be an impossible burden for that particular actor to carry. I went for a very different kind of David, someone who was not really a character actor at all, someone who was more of a movie star, someone more in the Redford or Paul Newman mode. I thought that would be less of a burden and create another contrast.
BD: Between Skarsgard and Marsden, Marsden is very much playing a different version of David from what I’ve seen [clips] at least and –
RL: I would say that and again that was very much done on purpose. The David that exists in the Peckinpah film is certainly a guy who is possessed of violence. That is what his very existence is. Within him there is a simmering violence. And I don’t think that’s true of my guy. My guy is a guy who is driven to violence, not a guy whose violence is released from him and therefore he is a different sort of character.
BD: You changed his profession to being a screenwriter, is there anything in your personal experience that informed that?
RL: In the original he’s a mathematician, meaning that he lives by rigid rules and, by the way, is very non-confrontational and not argumentative because mathematics is ‘2+2=4’. My David is a screenwriter so he lives in a world of greater ambiguity and in fact he’s writing a screenplay in the movie about Stalingrad.
BD: In the original it feels like Dustin Hoffman is baiting the violence a little bit.
RL: Well that’s exactly what it is. Peckinpah said in the film that David was the heavy of the movie. So I think you have that exactly right. So now let’s see whether or not mine resonates at all. I hope that it does.
Straw Dogs is in theaters September 16th.
Of the three films that make up the Diabolical Trinity of classic religious horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)—The Omen is the most purely entertaining.
While Rosemary’s Baby digs into the societal shifts of the 60s and The Exorcist explores spiritual tensions between faith and doubt in an ever-shifting world, The Omen seems most interested in just telling a thrilling story. It achieves this by blending two major trends of the 1970s, the devil movie and the paranoid thriller, into one crackling adventure yarn. In the process, The Omen has sparked fear and curiosity about what could happen in the “end times” if such events are to occur.
After seeing The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard contacted writer David Seltzer and said something along the lines of, “Hey, write me one of those.” Seltzer, having never read the Bible, thought it would be an interesting challenge, so, according to various interviews, he read the Bible and several commentaries in search of a story. Then he stumbled upon a passage in the book of Revelation, the image of a great Beast rising out of the sea, that sparked his imagination. In the commentaries, he found that the sea represented politics in some interpretations of the text, and he began building his story on that foundation.
Seltzer has told this story often, and I am inclined to believe him. However, from there, much of the theological-sounding lore of The Omen was created purely by Seltzer. Many of the ideas surrounding The Antichrist in the film appear to be drawn much more from the pop-eschatology sensation of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, than any Biblical source.
Lindsay’s book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s and re-popularized views of the “last days” that had been dying along with fundamentalism for decades, namely Dispensationalism, Millennialism, and the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. In dispensationalism, history is broken into several epochs of time (or dispensations) that culminate in the return of Christ and his thousand-year (millennial) reign.
Before this return, a seven-year Tribulation will occur in which the Antichrist comes to power and persecutes all who oppose him, culminating in a battle between the forces of good and evil at the valley of Megiddo, usually called Armageddon. Of course, in this worldview, the true believers in Jesus will be lifted out, or raptured, before all this takes place. Since the publication and popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth, this has been the prominent belief in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian circles, though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant denominations largely reject it.
Lindsay also did something unique that had not been the case even in dispensationalist circles before him—he posited that the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 started the countdown to Armageddon. Fans of the film will immediately realize where Seltzer ran with this idea in the first line of the poem created for the movie: “When the Jews return to Zion…”
Damien Thorn and the Creation of Horror’s “Innocent Villain”
Seltzer’s next inspiration focused on the idea of the Antichrist as a child, what he would call the film’s “innocent villain.” In watching The Omen, it is readily apparent that Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) does not really do anything evil beyond a bit of normal kid mischief. Even the moment in which Damien knocks Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) over a second-floor railing can be read as an accident orchestrated by Damien’s diabolically connected nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The film takes this idea of the innocent villain a step further by casting Gregory Peck, best known for playing arguably the greatest father in film history, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as Damien’s earthly father, an element that greatly satisfied Seltzer.
The New Testament itself says very little about the Antichrist and certainly nothing about his childhood. In fact, the word antichrist is used twice (1 John 2:18 and 2 John 7 for the curious) and refers to groups of people, not a particular person. There is also a passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 in which the writer (usually attributed to Paul) discusses “The Man of Lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God” and “proclaim himself to be God.”
Then there is the Beast of Revelation chapter 13 with “seven heads and ten horns” that Seltzer latched onto, which has been interpreted in a multitude of ways over the centuries. Powerful people throughout history, from Charlemagne, various Popes during the Protestant Reformation era, Napoleon and Hitler, to modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have all had the label placed on them by various circles. Even religious leaders like Billy Graham have not escaped being called the Antichrist.
Lindsay and modern dispensationalists are certain the Antichrist will be a 21st-century individual as they are equally certain that the Rapture, Tribulation, and return of Christ are imminent, likely within their lifetime. Many scholars and theologians, however, interpret these passages as symbolic representations of the Roman Empire and the first-century Caesars who persecuted, tortured, and murdered Christians and Jews who refused to submit to Imperial rule and worship them as gods. For example, that the Beast from the sea in Revelation has seven heads is symbolic of the famous seven mountains of Rome, with the 10 horns referring to rulers and magistrates of the Empire.
But this is all really of no matter to Seltzer and the story of The Omen. Instead of being concerned with any historical or theological accuracy, he instead built his own lore, which sends Robert Thorn and photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) on a globetrotting investigation into the nature of the Antichrist and how to stop him. Some of this lore includes the child being born of a jackal, the reaction of animals, the protective cult that arises around Damien, the daggers of Megiddo, and maybe most interesting of all, the peculiar flaws in Jennings’s photographs that presage the ways certain individuals will die.
All these aspects are where the paranoid thrillers come in, as films like Blow Up (1966), Z (1969), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), 3 Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) were all the rage at the time. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the idea of journalists (like Jennings) as ordinary heroes who could bring down the powerful, nefarious forces in the world was exactly what audiences craved. And what greater hidden evil force was there than the Devil? This is also why the device of the daggers of Megiddo is so important to a movie like this. If Damien is indeed the Antichrist, there must be a way to stop him, though in the Biblical text, the only power capable of destroying the Devil is God Himself.
The Mark of the Beast, 666, and the Film’s Most Famous Religious Symbolism
The piece of lore created for the movie with the most solid Biblical grounding is the Mark of the Beast. Revelation describes a mark on the forehead or hand of those who worship the Beast and his image. Again, this is symbolic language differentiating those who belong to the power of the Roman Empire and those who belong to Christ, who have the Mark of the Lamb. In Seltzer’s hands, the mark is very literal, a birthmark that is borne by not only the Antichrist but all his followers, meaning they are marked from before birth as belonging to Satan, and there is no escaping it. This is all rather distressing to the priest Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who betrays his mark by warning Thorn about Damien and pays the price by memorably being impaled by a spire that falls from a church steeple after being struck by lightning.
Why is the mark three sixes? Again, this is drawn from a passage in Revelation that states that the Beast can be identified by calculating his number. In Biblical scholarship, this is believed to be the sum of the name of a man transferred into Hebrew numerology, a practice in which each Hebrew letter also represents a number. Using this method, the number of the name Caesar Nero, which many believe to be the most logical choice, is six hundred sixty-six. In the film and elsewhere, this number is changed to three individual sixes. According to the film, this represents the Diabolical Trinity (a designation also unique to the film) made up of Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet. That Damien carries this unique birthmark under his hair convinces Robert that the child is the Antichrist, and it’s up to him to destroy him.
Part of what makes The Omen great is its ambiguity. Damien could be the Antichrist, or he could be at the center of a series of coincidences. Director Richard Donner stated in interviews that he believed Robert Thorn had gone insane by the end of the film, which, to Donner, is the only explanation for why Thorn would attempt to kill an innocent child. However, that enigmatic smile in the final shot suggests that Damien does embody a spirit of great evil. The sequels, however, all but erase this ambiguity.
In audiences, The Omen sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the Antichrist and the dispensationalist interpretation of the end times that continues to echo throughout the last five decades. Around the time of the film’s release, even Elvis Presley was photographed brandishing a paperback copy of Seltzer’s novelization. Dispensationalist authors like Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee have made millions publishing books and giving lectures about the Antichrist and the end of the world.
The Legacy of The Omen, 50 Years Later
Though A Thief in the Night (1972) preceded The Omen in initial release, it gained quite a resurgence (along with the ability to create three sequels) in the wake of the popularity of The Omen and went on to scar the psyches of Evangelical children for decades. Hal Lindsay was also able to release a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1978, complete with narration and a brief onscreen appearance from Orson Welles.
In the 1990s, the Left Behind series became a cultural phenomenon, spawning twelve books in the core series, a YA spinoff series, video games, and a movie series (2000-2005) starring Kirk Cameron. A bigger studio adaptation of the first book was released in 2014, starring Nicolas Cage. 20th Century Fox and The Omen got in on the renewed “end-of-the-world” vigor by releasing a remake of the original film on June 6, 2006. The franchise was revived once again in 2024 with The First Omen, which explores ideas of the Antichrist and the motivations of those in power in our current religious, social, and political context.
But despite all the sequels, spinoffs, rip-offs, remakes, and “end times” money grabs of the last 50 years, the original version of The Omen remains untouchable. Its greatest strength is that it seeks, first and foremost, to entertain. And it does so admirably.
After half a century, its influence can be felt in horror, the culture at large, and even in various faith circles. It is a testament to the power of story and film that, consciously or unconsciously, fans of The Omen and those who have never seen it alike are, to this very day, marked by the Beast.
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