Editorials
Sweets to the Sweet – ‘Candyman’ Celebrates 25 Years
This month marks the 25th anniversary of Bernard Rose’s Candyman – a beautiful and haunting film that is just as effective, relevant and terrifying today as it was upon its release. Based on a short story by Clive Barker, Candyman gives us a horror boogeyman who lives within his own legend, killing to spread rumors of his deeds and then feeding on belief.
In Candyman, graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) is studying the history and effects of urban legends. Her research takes her to the Chicago housing project, Cabrini-Green. Long known for crime and gang-perpetrated violence, it is also home to the legend of Candyman – a vicious figure with a hook in place of his hand who will appear should you dare whisper his name five times while staring into a mirror.
Like all good ghost stories, Candyman’s legend is rooted in fact. He was born the son of an affluent freed slave. His father had achieved a great amount of wealth after the Civil War and Candyman was raised as a part of Chicago society. That is, until he made the mistake of falling in love with the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Candyman was hunted down and viciously murdered by an angry mob in the location where Cabrini-Green would eventually come to be built, and his spirit and legend are a very present part of the complex. Kept alive and fed through stories of horrific violence, his presence is more than a scary story told in the dark, as he hold sway over the residents of the projects. As Helen’s research brings her closer to his story, she finds herself becoming more entwined in his influence, becoming a part of his legend herself.
The film is singular in the way it portrays its boogeyman. The Candyman relies on the legend surrounding him to flourish, keeping the people of Cabrini-Green whispering and glancing fearfully into the shadows for some sign of his presence. He feeds on the anxiety and fear generated from his story. Rose skillfully builds on the way ghost stories are spread to tell the tale of Candyman, using the idea of how legends evolve and last to give its titular character life and power. Candyman was created through an act of violence, but he continues to exist because his legend has become larger than life itself.
A particularly fascinating component of this film is the setting of the story. We rarely see ghost stories told in such a distinctly urban environment. Small towns, suburbs, old houses and isolated locales are plentiful, but we don’t often see a ghost story set among the concrete spires of a city. Ghosts, at their core, represent something old and antiquated. Something of the past. Cities represent the present. The now. The two rarely come together in supernatural storytelling, but Candyman demonstrates that even the most modern of settings can have a dark backstory that haunts it to its core.
This setting is further solidified by giving the Candyman character distinctly American roots. Barker’s original story, set in Liverpool, examined class as an underlying theme, and didn’t really give the Candyman a backstory. By setting it in the United States and making Candyman a Black man, Rose added another layer of complexity to the film. This incorporation of race ties the film more distinctly to America’s history and links it to inequalities that are still a part of our society today. Candyman was killed by a racist mob, and his spirit now resides and roots its legend in the walls of a housing complex – a place where the new elite have pushed the poorer people of color. He is a spirit that was very of his time when he was killed, and is still of our time in the modern setting of the story – a link between past and present.
The story is brought to life by an incredible cast. Genre legend Tony Todd inhabits the role of Candyman beautifully. Coming on the heels of Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead remake in 1990, Candyman cemented Todd as a horror centerpiece. His portrayal of the tragic boogeyman is both alluring and terrifying. Like Helen, we are inexplicably drawn to Candyman whenever he’s onscreen, yet fearful of him at the same time. His deep voice softly imploring her, “Be my victim” is beautifully hypnotic. As entrancing as he is, he is also brutal. The film doesn’t skimp on the gore, and Candyman is not afraid to rip his victims to pieces as he sees fit. It is this brutality that makes his allure all the more dangerous.
Virginia Madsen provides an excellent counterpart in Helen. She is intelligent and insightful and refuses to be deterred as she searches for the truth behind the events terrorizing Cabrini-Green. Her ambition is ultimately her undoing when it leads her headlong into Candyman’s grasp, but it is also what keeps her fighting. Kasi Lemmons and Xander Berkeley round out the cast in vital supporting roles.
As vital as the story and cast is in bringing this classic to life, so too is the phenomenal score by Philip Glass. Beautiful and haunting, it perfectly sets the tone of the film. It captures the elegance of the world that Candyman came from while also creating an air of unease and mystery.
Candyman is a unique and fascinating film that captured our minds and nightmares twenty-five years ago and still has them in its grip today. This is a film that is socially relevant and amazingly effective. It is a tale for the ages that will draw you in and leave you whispering Candyman’s name in the dead of night…just be sure you don’t get to number five.
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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