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Tales of cursed horror film sets are usually good for two things: headlines, and eye-rolling. When hundreds of people work on any given production, the fact of one or two dying, a year or three after it’s released, isn’t exactly hard evidence of Satan’s handiwork – but pretty handy PR when we’re trying to sell supernatural horror.
That said, the mad litany of coincidences that plagued The Omen – the 1976 horror hit about the second coming of the Antichrist which spawned three sequels, a 2006 remake, and now a prequel, The First Omen – are more likely to provoke stunned silence.
Let’s start in September 1975, when lightning struck a plane containing Gregory Peck, who was flying over to London to begin work on the film, in which he played a diplomat who adopts an unsettling child, Damien, after his wife suffers a stillbirth. The actor was grief-stricken at the time, after the suicide of his son Jonathan that June, when Peck was travelling in France. It’s been said that Peck, who had only made a couple of cheapo westerns in the first half of the 1970s, agreed to carry on with The Omen to work through his terrible feelings of paternal guilt.
A single lightning strike, causing no physical harm to anyone on board, is hardly much to write home about. Try a second: the executive producer, Mace Neufeld, was hit on his own transatlantic journey. He described it as “his roughest five minutes” ever on a plane. Now try a third: screenwriter David Seltzer’s plane was also struck as he headed over.
When filming shifted to Rome, the producer Harvey Bernhard narrowly avoided being blitzed by a lightning bolt on the street. For the rest of the shoot, he carried a cross at all times. “The devil was at work,” he would later explain, “and he didn’t want that film made.” For outing him as real, do we suppose, or exposing him to casual mockery?
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