Editorials
Larry Cohen’s ‘A Return to Salem’s Lot’ and Its Surprising Parallels to ‘Midsommar’ [Editorial]
Movies about know-it-all urbanites who travel to a strange place and get what’s (violently) coming to them are nothing new in the horror world. You can trace the roots at least as far back as Jonathan Harker’s naive journey into the mountains of Transylvania, where the locals all warned him away from the Borgo Pass – and especially Dracula’s Castle – only to see him wander off anyway, in search of wealth. He got what was coming to him.
The problem with stories like that, today, is that we live in a world where people have seen horror movies. So we have at least a passing awareness that if we go to a weird place full of cultists, we should be on the lookout for red flags. That’s why a film like Ari Aster’s Midsommar, about a group of Americans who wander into an ancient Swedish festival where death is foreshadowed everywhere you look, has to come up with a clever way to keep the heroes in harm’s way without making them look like total idiots.
The conceit writer/director Aster settled on was to make his most of his protagonists anthropology students, who are so fascinated by the strange and sometimes horrifying society in which they find themselves that they feel compelled to catalogue it instead of running away. Their need for knowledge overshadows their urge for self-preservation. They’re not exactly “wise,” but at least we understand what drives them to stay in this creepy town where everyone keeps disappearing under mysterious circumstances and the murals on every wall tell a scary story about what fate will befall our heroes.
Not to take anything away from Aster, who is as noteworthy a horror auteur as any filmmaker to come along in the last several years, but that right there is a storytelling device which will be very familiar to anyone who saw and respected Larry Cohen’s A Return to Salem’s Lot.
Which is, admittedly, not many people.
Cohen, the writer/director of horror classics like It’s Alive and Q The Winged Serpent, was enlisted to make a sequel to Salem’s Lot, Tobe Hooper’s successful mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s classic vampire novel, and that’s what he did… kind of. Cohen abandoned the plot and obvious sequel tease from the original in favor of an all-new story about a community of vampires living in secret in New England, having arrived just before the Mayflower, and having achieved in the centuries that followed a secretive, uneasy equilibrium with the rest of American society.
The story kicks off with anthropologist Joe Weber (Michael Moriarty) in the middle of the jungle, witnessing a human sacrifice and feeling absolutely nothing about it. His cameraman is shocked and horrified but Joe argues that if the situation were reversed, and this culture saw what Americans did to their own criminals, they would be equally repulsed. It’s the exact same argument Christian (Jack Reynor) makes to Dani (Florence Pugh) after they witness a ritualistic suicide in Midsommar. Who are we to judge, when morality itself is relative?
That’s a mentality that gets explored in both Midsommar and A Return to Salem’s Lot, but Cohen’s film is more confrontational about it. Joe returns to America to take care of his son, who has severe discipline problems, and takes him to a house he inherited up in Salem’s Lot. While there they notice that there’s hardly anyone around in the day, and the whole place lights up at night. Nothing suspicious here!
When a group of punks get pulled over by the cops and attacked by the local vampires, the survivor escapes to Joe’s house and the three of them visit Judge Axel (Andrew Duggan), who whisks her away to be killed, and sends Joe’s son Jeremy (Ricky Addison Reed) off to a local wedding along with a girl who is seemingly his age named Amanda (Tara Reid, in her motion picture debut).
Ordinarily a film about “normal” people finding their way into a cultlike, terrifying community would take its sweet time before revealing the horrible truth. Midsommar certainly does. But Larry Cohen isn’t interested in the inevitable reveal; he’s interested in the conversation that comes after all the secrets are out in the open. So at a very early point in A Return to Salem’s Lot the curtain gets raised. Joe finds out the town is full of vampires, that the woman he saved is being killed by little old lady vampires in the kitchen. Even Jeremy finds out the truth, when the wedding is revealed to be between two kids who, as vampires, are presumably much older than they look.
In Midsommar, the anthropology angle is largely an excuse to keep the protagonists in a scary place long after common sense would make them want to leave. (Ari Aster even said so.) But in A Return to Salem’s Lot, anthropology is the entire point of the story. The vampires in Salem’s Lot brought Joe here, specifically, to write about their culture and give it the objective respect they think it deserves after centuries of non-stop demonization. They don’t want to hurt Joe or his son, they want them to be happy here, to only see the best in them. They may be vampires, but they can’t be ALL bad… can they?
The vampires tempt both the Weber men with romantic attachments, and Joe – being morally compromised from the get-go and willing to forgive anything if he can rationalize it – quickly starts having an illicit, creepy affair with a teenage-looking vampire. That’s another parallel with Midsommar, where the looser morality of this new culture gives the morally ambiguous male lead, Christian, an excuse to engage in sexual activities that would be completely inexcusable in any other environment, and in which he only engages now because this new culture permits it.
This culture is bloody and disgusting and flies in the face of every moral stance in western culture, but who are we to judge, A Return to Salem’s Lot asks? Isn’t their culture as valid as any other? Do they not deserve to live and love and to be part of this world? It’s a disturbing question that Ari Aster raises and never really comes back around to, but which Cohen answers, extremely clearly, halfway through the film when acclaimed director Samuel Fuller shows up, chomping a cigar, and looking for Nazis.
That’s right, the director of classic, no-punches-pulled motion pictures like Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss plays a Nazi-hunting vigilante who, upon discovering that Salem’s Lot is full of vampires, proceeds to physically knock some sense into the whole Weber family. He slaps Jeremy around until he stops screaming his brainwashed rationalizations and convinces Joe they have to kill all the vampires, because there’s no damned academic excuse for killing anybody. You can argue the moral grey areas all you want but on some level, Cohen’s film argues that you have to draw the line and say “That’s not a culture, that’s just an excuse for mass murder.”
Actually, it’s an excuse for a lot more. Over the course of A Return to Salem’s Lot we learn more and more about vampire culture, including the fact that they employ “drones” (a term which, we learn, is considered racially-charged) to protect them during the day. This underclass is completely trapped by social subjugation and, often, physical abuse. It’s no coincidence that the vampires are revealed to be colonial Americans, and that many of them probably came over in those early days of western expansion. A Return to Salem’s Lot draws a clear connection between vampirism and the evils of manifest destiny and slavery, and directly accuses the rich and powerful, today, of profiting off of the abuse, dehumanization and murder of other human beings for centuries.
In other words, in A Return to Salem’s Lot, we are told to think of vampires as a legitimate, valid culture. Then we are told that they are not, that they are as bad as the Nazis, but that they also represent the founding fathers of America. That’s exceptionally heavy stuff for a low budget sequel to a TV mini-series that barely got released in theaters and which almost nobody remembers today. And it’s arguably more challenging – from anthropological and an ethical perspective – than Midsommar, at least as far as this subplot goes.
The problem with A Return to Salem’s Lot is that, no matter how intelligent its ideas are and no matter how fascinating its structure is, it’s not a very well made film. The cast is incredibly uneven, with Ricky Addison Reed shouting almost all of his lines and Michael Moriarty – a Larry Cohen regular, and normally an excellent actor – shouting all his own lines back, presumably to compensate for Reed’s strangely boisterous energy. The makeup effects are sometimes laughable, and the whole movie is too danged slow for its own good. There’s a reason most people have never heard of it. Midsommar is the superior visceral and emotional experience, that’s for sure, with more skillful cinematography, pacing and mood, and exceptional performances across the board.
But A Return to Salem’s Lot has something Midsommar doesn’t, and that’s a certain narrative daring. Midsommar falls into very familiar rhythms, evoking genre mainstays like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Wicker Man and sometimes practically to the letter. Cohen’s film eschews all audience expectation and travels into more intellectual, unexpected narrative directions, with big ideas that warrant lengthier discussion than one might normally expect from a forgotten, neglected Stephen King sequel that has nothing to do with the original novel.
And of course, it gave us Samuel Fuller as a cigar-chomping, Nazi-killing vampire hunter, all grumpy and self-assured, half-funny and all badass. Midsommar, for all its fineries, for all its horrors, cannot make that claim. And that, surely, is to its (relatively minor) detriment.
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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