Editorials
Devil’s Advocate: Here’s Why We Should Give the ‘Child’s Play’ Remake a Chance
On November 9th, 1988, MGM released Child’s Play, a low-budget, high-concept horror film from a relatively unknown writer and a rising genre director. Nobody could have anticipated that this apparent B-Picture, and, more specifically, it’s pint-sized antagonist, would soon be plunged into the zeitgeist-remaining there for more than three decades.
Chucky, the aforementioned villain, is one of the rare characters that is legitimately more well-known than the movie that launched him. My fascination (read: obsession) with the character began when my age was in the single digits, and I distinctly remember owning(and having my parents confiscate) a Bride of Chucky doll while in elementary school. So, before I get into this, it’s worth noting that I’m more than just a passive fan-Child’s Play and Nightmare on Elm Street are my two favorite franchises, staples of my childhood. I’ve even cherished the memory of seeing Seed of Chucky at the Sunrise Multiplex, the only theater in Long Island irresponsible enough to let a 12-year-old see an R-rated slasher movie.
All this to emphasize, what I’m saying comes with immense respect for Don Mancini, David Kirschner, Tom Holland, Brad Dourif, and everyone who worked to make this series what it is.
A few weeks back, Orion announced they were rebooting the franchise, unfortunately without the input of the original creators, or their blessing. While I was bummed by the news that Mancini wouldn’t be involved, I was thrilled at the opportunity for a new theatrical addition to this beloved franchise. Now we’d maybe even have two franchises, a probably more straightforward horror one for broad audiences, and the edgier, more satirical installments Mancini has been making for Universal-seems like an obvious win-win for fans, right?
What ensued was an intense, angry cavalcade of attacks from fans, filmmakers, and journalists. I came of age at a time when awful remakes were a seemingly weekly occurrence, and I too expressed a fair share of frustration at the occasional CW-starring PG-13 slasher, but this bout of outrage struck me as deeply off the mark. Perhaps it also struck a cord personally, as I myself had recently experienced something somewhat similar, albeit on a smaller level.
In 2015, my partner and I announced that we had started production on a sequel to our 2013 hit Contracted, with a new writer & director. We had tried to make it work with the original filmmaker, but unfortunately couldn’t agree on a deal that would simultaneously please all parties and get the movie made properly. We agreed to separate on what I thought were good terms, mutually articulating that there were no hard feelings.
Then the first tweets arrived.
Allegations of us somehow acting corruptly by trying to continue a franchise we owned poured down on us, one notable journalist even called the movie a terrible idea-before even seeing a frame (as somewhat of a happy ending, he ended up removing the post, and giving the film a positive review upon release).
Now, I’m grateful every day that it’s my job to make the kinds of movies I grew up devouring, and I get that these may seem like first world problems-but getting attacked, shamed, and discredited publicly for doing your job is no cake walk. All the more so when you want to do it well. I think if nothing else, that sobering experience gave me the requisite empathy to make the following case:
Give the Child’s Play reboot a chance.
I know we all love Don Mancini and Brad Dourif, I also get that there’s an urge to join the echo chamber, to have fans and creators like our posts and rally together-but it’s not only unfair, it’s ultimately illogical. Let’s analyze each argument against the project, and see if holds up under scrutiny:
1. We don’t need a Child’s Play reboot, the original franchise is still going strong.
By any metric, this appears to be hyperbolic at best. Yes, Don Mancini and David Kirschner continue to make sequels (one of the highlights of premiering Contracted at FrightFest was getting to attend the Cult of Chucky premiere), but a series of straight-to-video installments is hardly going strong. For example, I don’t think any of us would make the same argument for the Wrong Turn franchise.
We may love these sequels, but most of the country has no idea they exist, nor can they see them the way movies should be seen in a crowded theater.
Each of these installments are pushed forward by a combination of passion from Mancini/Kirschner and apparent indifference by NBCUniversal, with budgets that will no doubt dip lower and lower as the bottom continues to fall out from DVD.
Besides, are we really upset that we’ll have two Chucky franchises? Of course, there is the argument that…
2. …if Child’s Play bombs, it will kill the Universal Chucky series.
The logic here doesn’t really make sense. Think about it, if the theatrical Child’s Play movie doesn’t perform, it will prove that there isn’t an appetite for these movies theatrically…
…which is something Universal clearly already knows, as they – wait for it…already send these movies straight to video.
Obviously they don’t have the confidence that these movies would play in wide release, otherwise, they would go for that option. All Child’s Play underperforming will do is reinforce that premise, but if the DVD/Streaming Licenses continue to be strong, why would they stop making them?
Let’s look at the flip side:
If Child’s Play is a hit, that could inspire Universal to take a shot at doing a theatrical Chucky of their own, with a proper budget for Mancini.
Imagine a world where we had two Chucky franchises playing theatrically, with opposing styles and tones, two bizarro slasher franchises. Not to mention that horror doing well theatrically is good for everybody.
Now, I know Mancini has been less than enthused about this reboot, which is the most difficult point to tear down…
3. Don Mancini & Co. DO NOT APPROVE
Don Mancini famously did not give his blessing for this movie, and that is a much trickier pill to swallow. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Don a bit, and I can’t begin to comment on what it feels like to watch your own character used without your consent, but-
It was going to happen eventually, and at least now it’s being done by people who seem to care.
Again, as someone who works in this business, Universal was inevitably going to at some point stop making Video sequels, and Orion was obviously going to exploit their property. Having said that, instead of hiring the nearest hack they could find for a lazy cash-grab, I’d argue they’ve tried to put together the best possible team for what is a tricky task by any measure.
The production company on this, KatzSmith, should be familiar to genre fans. It’s the team that helped bring you last year’s IT, another movie that had a tremendous amount working against it, and managed to surprise and thrive against the odds. The team at KatzSmith is made up of real fans who care, and it’s been reported that Mancini’s blessing was pursued, even if he ultimately wouldn’t give it. Despite that, the movie was still going to get made, and I have a fair amount of confidence that if anyone can make it work-it’s these guys.
Let’s even look at the cast they’ve put together-these aren’t hacky teen television actors, but respectable, interesting choices. Aubrey Plaza in a horror movie? That doesn’t sound like a cheap cash-in to me, that sounds like people trying to do something different and subversive, to really painstakingly resurrect the franchise, to do their own thing on familiar ground.
I get the impulse to ask well, why couldn’t they just wait until Mancini threw in the towel on his franchise-but that isn’t really how this business works. Things tend to be a perfect storm, Orion might not be able to make it in a few years, KatzSmith may not be available, etc-things all come together at a certain time, and you take opportunities as they come. I know some of the folks at Orion-they want to make a good movie too. Here’s another little secret about Hollywood:
Most people want to make good movies.
Most people aren’t soulless hacks, they came here because they love(or, in some cases-think they love) all the same stuff we do, Yes, sometimes people are incompetent or misguided-but I don’t think that’s the case here. I think this is a group of dedicated people trying to do the best job they can under less-than-ideal circumstances, trying to pay homage to a story and character they adore while half the film-web rails against them.
When Orion releases Child’s Play in 2019, I plan on watching it with an open mind. I hope you’ll consider doing the same thing.
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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