It takes me a while sometimes, so it only occurs to me now, with a child of my own to worry about, that I probably should not have been watching The Omen when I was a kid.
My parents were very young when they had me and my two sisters, and looking back, they were clearly making it up as they went along. They did a pretty good job in the end - all their kids have turned out to be okay human beings - but there are times I doubt their full credentials.
Especially with the things they let us watch. I was generally allowed to watch age-appropriate movies and television, but things would sip through, like an episode of Hammer House of Horror which was deeply traumatizing, or the trailer for Dawn of the Dead which suddenly popped up at the start of other rented videotapes.
And yet, even though Dad refused to let me watch more than 10 minutes of Beverly Hills Cop when I was 12 because of the incredible and prolific profanity, I was watching the first couple of Omen films well before I turned 10, even though they were full of exceptionally gory deaths and some deeply troubling black magik music that still burns the soul.
The weird thing is that these films never gave me nightmares - the deaths were so operatic and over the top, it was like watching a cartoon, especially with the extensive use of bloodied dummies and fake bodies. While I have, at times, been awfully nervous when I've been near a truck carrying panes of glass or in any elevator anywhere, the bouncing decapitated head of David Warner or the elevator dissection were more hilarious than terrifying.
And the films were so simple - whenever anybody crossed Damien in any way, that music would kick in, and something very slight and innocuous would happen, with mortal repercussions. Like the Final destination films years later, it became a game to see how things would go wrong, and how they would lead to gory awfulness.
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