Letter from Camp YWA: Damien and the Book of Books (Patreon)

Before anything else, you should know I’m writing this letter to you while listening to Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack to The Final Conflict: Omen 3, a movie that follows grown-up Damien as he dates a TV news presenter and goes fox hunting and honestly does hardly anything else. I watched it, oh God, more than a decade ago. (When I think about what I learned in college I usually come back to all the horror movies I was watching at the time).

The score is probably the best thing about it--a sentence which really fails to give you the impression that the score actually is improbably grand, majestic, complex, uplifting...honestly, maybe too good, since it gives a lot of dramatic heft to our protagonist’s quest to destroy The Nazarene. (Whoever that is!) I would happily dress up and sit in a room festooned with velvet to hear it performed. But what really sells me on it, I think, is that Jerry Goldsmith appears to have written it around the same time he worked on The Secret of NIMH, and they sound...well, if not similar, then like sister pieces, taken from the same musical galaxy. Antichrists! Genius rats! It’s all magic in the end.

I am writing to you from Camp You’re Wrong About today (where it is very hot, please buy me more tokens for the snack bar) because I am pertly assuming that your appetite for cheesy Satanic paperbacks has somehow not yet been satisfied by the giant plate of Satan Seller we just served you. I have spent a lot of the past month sitting in my backyard, reading books, but mainly re-reading books I’ve read in the past several years, and summarizing and outlining them in notebooks. (I call this project the Book of Books.) And as you can imagine, that stack has included a fair number of horror paperbacks.

We are reluctantly taking a break from Patreon bonus episodes this summer, as you may have noticed. It’s frustrating to not have the time and energy to dedicate to them that we need to give you something we love, but my hope is that you might also enjoy this newsletter substitute. (And if you don’t, then now, as always, feel free to stop sending us your hard-earned money and spend it instead on a nice sandwich, or an avocado mask, or pencils for your children...or some horror paperbacks.) You can expect a couple more letters from me this month--and actually, I’d love to know your thoughts on what newsletter frequency you prefer. Can email ever truly be fun? Is really the operative question here, and it seems like a highly personal one.

But today, oh blessed day (Oh bad day, as our friend Dean the Satanist might say), we’re talking about The Omen. No, not the movie. The book. There’s a book--kind of. Like Erich Segal’s Love Story, it is amphibiously both novelization and not: the movie’s screenwriter, David Seltzer, wrote it after he finished the screenplay, but the book was released two weeks before the movie.

The only reason I can imagine for this is that it gave the movie a patina of...relevance? It was familiar, and therefore seemed more worth the money? You could see if you liked the story before actually going to watch it, the way people do with Wikipedia today? I honestly don’t know. I grew up reading novelizations when they were, I think, already on their way out. Today, they speak to me of a time when video, moving images, were scarce, hard to conjure, and caged within little rectangles or reels like the magical creations they were, and remain. I don’t wish we still lived in a time when I had to just buy Labyrinth or pony up $3 for a rental whenever I felt like watching it, but...well, it’s still like that, actually, so that’s nice.

I imagine a lot of kids read The Omen because they couldn’t figure out a way to see such a scary--such a cursed--movie, and for them, the book includes eight fabulous pages of movie stills: it’s like a flipbook of Gregory Peck looking concerned until you get to the part where David Warner’s head flies off. I bought this book at a dollar store in New Brunswick, and I like to think that whoever had it for the forty-odd years before it entered my custody was once a child of the 70s who wanted to read a scary movie they weren’t allowed to see.

The Omen feels like a “yes, and” sequel to Rosemary’s Baby: the Antichrist is born, so now what? In Rosemary, we met little Anti when he was a newborn, and hadn’t had much of a chance to flex his evil muscles, though the book specifies that he has pearly claws (concealed in mitts so he won’t scratch himself, not because they aren’t cute!) and teeny tiny horns. But how do you depict that Satanic nature beginning to emerge? When would you start to see it? Will the baby have magical powers? How often do you trim his claws? Can you paint them? Do you have to buy tiny little black candles for his birthday cake? Can you get the trick kind? Questions, questions.

The Omen takes the daring approach of...not really answering any of those questions, and instead just kind of putting them off until the sequel, which you can tell did a great job addressing them because of how many of you went "oh, there's a sequel?" just now. 

Yet when I first read this weird little book, three years ago, I remember buying it in the hopes that it could have some interesting moments, and then being amazed to find myself riveted. I love it when a book that tells us it’s about unearthly evil is actually about something very knowable indeed--too knowable to see as horror without a Satanic veil. To me the most interesting character in The Omen is Jeremy Thorn, Damien’s dad, because oh my God, Jeremy is the worst!!

Jeremy and Katherine Thorn were played in The Omen by Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, two actors who are unable to even hint at the backstory Seltzer spins in the book, which is like a version of the movie where no one loves each other and everyone is miserable before Satan shows up. We open on Jeremy reflecting on his wife’s struggle with fertility, and seeming certain that her “instability” means that if this pregnancy fails, it will “be the end of her sanity.”

Jeremy has tried to help Katherine, but he does have limits: “It was even suggested that he masturbate so that his semen could be injected artificially, but here he drew the line. If a child were that important to her, she could adopt.”

!!!!!!!

I just want to take a moment to bask in...well maybe bask is the wrong word...to just let the weight of those two sentences sink into my brain. I don’t think they ever will, really. Jeremy Thorn knows that his wife’s sanity is hanging by a thread (men know everything about their wives’ mental states, it’s the 70s), that a baby is the antidote, and that maybe they could have a much easier time conceiving if he provided some sperm…  but we’ll just never know, will we?

This is the part of the book--five pages in, by the way--when I start feeling like Satan might be an improvement. It reminds me a lot of the experience of reading Peter Benchley’s Jaws, which is like a version of the movie where no one loves each other and everyone is miserable before the shark shows up. It’s great. There’s a lot more to talk about than I can possibly get into here, but let me submit my favorite paragraph in the whole book, which depicts Sheriff Brody coming home mid-shark-attack-week, getting some lip from his adolescent sons, and miserably fixing himself a sandwich:

The remains of the pot roast sat on the kitchen table in a roasting pan, surrounded by a scum of congealed gravy… He found a piece of American cheese, dried and curled with age, and he folded it and popped it into his mouth. He debated heating up the pot roast, then said aloud “The hell with it.” He found two pieces of bread, spread mustard on them, took a carving knife from a magnetic board on the wall, and sliced a thick slab of roast. He dropped the meat on one of the pieces of bread, scattered a few pickles on top of it, covered it with the other piece of bread, and mashed the sandwich down with the heel of his hand… In T-shirt and undershorts he sat down on the bed and began to eat his sandwich. The meat was dry and flaky. All he could taste was mustard.

(Source)

A book is an object made of a finite number of pages; this edition of Jaws has 278 in it, and Benchley has just spent half of one focused on the pathos of his sandwich-making protagonist. I think I’m fascinated by this section because of its very out-of-place-ness: why on earth are we supposed to care about Brody’s dinner, and the implication that it reveals how his wife doesn’t adequately provide for him, his sons don’t adequately respect him, and the world is not offering him what he somehow deserves?

Steven Spielberg, who said reading Benchley’s Jaws made him root for the shark, turned this story into one where Sheriff Brody ventures out onto the salty seas to protect his beloved, edible wife and sons. His children provide him with affection and motivation, not challenges to his authority (and his wife does not--as she does in the book--have an affair with Hooper--Hooper!). The movie is about an outside threat challenging the safety of a town; the book is about a town harboring the kind of pressure for which shark attacks, and the opportunity to prove your masculinity by executing bloody revenge, is the only possible release valve. And by “a town” I mean “a man.” A man driven close to the edge by having to make his own sandwich.

Jeremy Thorn gives off that kind of energy, but I honestly feel like we’re supposed to see him as a beleaguered everyman--well, actually, someone more special than that. “The estimate that his personal wealth was close to a hundred million dollars was unverifiable,” Seltzer writes, “and in truth Thorn himself did not know. To account would have meant to pause, and Jeremy Thorn was in constant motion.” 

Such constant motion, in fact, that he doesn’t really pause to contemplate whether or not it might be a bad idea to follow the advice of the for sure trustworthy priest who meets him at the hospital where his wife has just given birth, and informs him that his son didn’t make it, but they have another baby to give to his wife, who is out cold and will never be able to tell the difference. In the words  of Jeremy Usbourne: Is this a terrible idea?

He does it, of course; and it’s striking to me that both Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, released a decade apart, take as their opening horror the act of a man betraying his wife in order to bring a Satanic cuckoo into the home. Jeremy Thorn does Satan’s bidding unwittingly, Guy Woodhouse very wittingly, and though it does occur to me that publishing is an unoriginal business this is exactly the kind of thing you might include while trying to manufacture a bestseller, the connection feels deeper than that. When sitting down to write a scary story that resonates with your audience, it helps to present them with some real facet of their lives, dusted with enough supernatural glitter that we can’t quite tell what we’re looking at, and can finally admit that our mundane reality is as scary as heck.

Rosemary’s Baby scares the shit out of me because Guy’s neighbors only have to to have two conversations with him in order to convince him that drugging his wife and letting the Devil rape and impregnate her is both a) a great way to advance his career and b) something that won’t even negatively affect his wife, not really, in the end. He seems capable of believing this, and the author, Ira Levin, was capable of understanding that this was where the true horror lay.

I don’t know about The Omen, and the story might be all the scarier, in its way, for that general lack of self-awareness. Seltzer may have felt that giving your wife a substitute baby was a pretty relatable thing to do, and Jeremy latches onto the idea very quickly; he only entertains real doubt when his son starts attracting sinister playmates. “Thorn was unaccustomed to doubting himself, to accusing himself,” we learn. “His mind struggled for reassurance that what he had done was right… Could it possibly have been wrong?”

As in Rosemary’s Baby, Katherine is undermined by the medical establishment. Her psychiatrist dismisses her dawning awareness of her husband’s lies as wish fulfillment and paranoia. “She fantasizes that her child is not really hers,” Dr. Greer tells her husband. (Because why not tell your patient’s husband all about your sessions?) “...She searches for a reason that won’t make her feel inadequate. She fantasizes that the child isn’t hers, that the child is evil…”

“...What?”

“She’s unable to love it,” explained Greer, “so she invents a reason why it’s not worthy of her love.”

In this world, men tell brazen lies and are never questioned, whereas women discover the truth and are deemed insane. I give the book an A+ for realism, with extra points for having a picture of David Warner’s head flying off.

As for Damien’s evil, or relative lack thereof--this may in fact be a feature, not a bug. Director Richard Donner reportedly preferred to see the story as an ambiguous one, where Damien might be the Antichrist, or his parents may have just lost touch with reality altogether. It’s hard to come away from either version with that reading, but Damien’s agency is just...well...lacking. We know that he caused his mother to fall from a height and miscarry a pregnancy, but we can’t really say whether he did it on purpose. We know he attracts big, weird dogs who wander over from the forest, but who doesn’t?

We hear he’s a reserved little boy who hardly speaks, but...again, that describes a lot of children. Cast across this story I can feel the chilly shadow of all the families around this time who ended up with a child they didn’t order--a child who was not evil at all, but was somehow different than whatever they hoped for, reasonably or not--and became consumed by disappointment. How could it be? What had they done wrong? Had they been given a changeling? How to make sense of this equation?--A pursuit time-consuming enough to take up energy you might need to accept your child as they are.

“‘Why ever did we have a child, Katherine?’” Jeremy asks, in what might be the book’s most self-aware moment.

“Our image,” she replied.

“...What?”

"How could we not have a child, Jeremy? Who ever heard of a beautiful family not having a beautiful child… It’s true, isn’t it? We never thought of what it would be like to raise one. We just thought of what our pictures would look like in the newspapers.”

In conclusion: give the devil boy to me, and he can sit quietly and have all the weird dogs he likes.

PS--sometimes I think of a joke so simple and daringly unfunny that I feel a pang of emptiness in the part of my life where Twitter used to be, and I just thought of one, just now, so I’m going to tell it to you instead:

“Google dogs”

That’s it, that’s the joke.

--Love, Sarah