Sometime in the early 1970s, Harvey Bernhard met Robert L. Munger for lunch. They were an odd pair. Bernhard was a recent transplant from Las Vegas, where he had mounted innovative stage shows. Mugger was an L.A. based advertising man who was also a born again Christian. The topic of the lunch, as is so often in Los Angeles, was a pitch. How the Christian Munger came to pitch his idea to the presumably Jewish Bernhard remains something of a mystery, but presumably they were friends who had encountered each other at some point in their equally illustrious careers. Mugger may have been a neophyte, but the pitch he aired excited the otherwise stolid Bernhard, who abruptly left the meeting, made some plot outline notes on a napkin, and eventually approached Richard Seltzer to fashion a screenplay from those fevered notes. 

How Munger knew Bernhard, or Bernhard knew Seltzer, is unknown, as is so much else about the early history of The Omen, for that is the film that resulted from Munger’s pitch.

Not that it was an easy path to movie fame. Initially titled Antichrist, the script was rejected, according to legend (and there is a lot of legend circulating around The Omen, some of it, apparently, true) rejected by every studio in town, including Fox. Finally, on the eve of the project’s destruction, the script came to Richard Donner via an agent friend. Donner, an experienced TV pro, was seeking entry into the illustrious realm of movie directing. Stories conflict, but Donner was about to have dinner with Alan Ladd, Jr., then head of production at Fox, and having sat and read the script in one enthralled sitting, took the opportunity of the dinner to re-pitch the film, which this time, Ladd accepted. Mutatis mutandis, the film went into production quickly thereafter, with Donner enjoining Seltzer to make significant changes in the text (including a couple more title changes, to The Birthmark, and then The Omen). Seltzer’s main mandate was to remove all evidence of hocus pocus, cloven feet, red tails, and other impedimenta of Satan tales since time immemorial, or at least Dante, all the way up to Rosemary’s Baby.

Donner wanted a “clean” text, one that could be interpreted in numerous ways, not unlike The Exorcist, its obvious progenitor. Is Damien really the spawn of woman and wolf? Or is diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) really crazy, in an escalatingly nutty trap with his wife Katherine (Lee Remick). Donner must have been right, as his film made some $28 million dollars upon initial release from a $2+ million dollar budget, spawning two sequels, a TV movie, a short-lived TV series, and a recent remake. The Omen it appears, is the franchise that Fox turns to in tough times, or whenever the date June 6 Something6 pops up in the calendar.

The recent special edition The Omen (Fox Home Entertainment, No. 29 in its Collector’s Edition series, 1978, 111 minutes, color, R, 2.35:1 enhanced, two single sided dual layered discs, Dolby Digital Mono, Dolby Digital 5.1 in English, Spanish, and French, with English and Spanish subtitles, animated musical menu with 36-chapter scene selection, 6-page insert with chapter titles, trivia, pix, dual DVD keep case, $26.96, released on Tuesday, June 20, 2006; supersedes a DVD published in September 2000) disc’s celebratants, such as Wes Craven, recall how topnotch the film was. However, I recall that Omen was rather mocked by reviewers. Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote “The Omen takes all of this terribly seriously, as befits the genre that gave us Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. What Jesus was to the 1950s movie epic, the devil is to the 1970s, and so all of this material is approached with the greatest solemnity, not only in the performances but also in the photography, the music and the very looks on people’s faces.” and Bill Kelley in Cinefantastique (Vol. 7, No. 3) perhaps put it best when he noted that it was a “flabby series of mechanical vignettes.” Some, like Kelley, thought that the sequel, directed by actor-turned-director Don Taylor, was better, which no doubt had to be bitterness and gall to Donner whose insight had established the future franchise’s credentials.

The jocular Donner mentions just about everything else but that in the wealth of chat that he serves up on this set. Donner appears in three or four featurettes and no less than two audio commentary tracks, the first with editor Stuart Baird, the second with writer-director Brian Helgeland, clearly a big fan of the director.

But that is not unusual in Hollywood. Civilians may not realize how esteemed a figure Donner is among his peers and other filmmakers. I recall interviewing Doug Liman during the time he was promoting Swingers back in 1996. Since he was hired on to direct something written and starring someone else, like John G. Avildsen on Rocky, I was wondering how he came up with visual ideas. He cited Donner. When the swingers are driving to Vegas, Liman had to figure out whether to shoot them in a car pulled on a trailer, or from a lead car. Turning to the opening scene of Lethal Weapon II he got his answer (use another car). Directors of Brian DePalma’s generation turn to Hitchcock for answers to their technical problems. Of Liman’s generation, they turn to Donner.

Given so much air time, Donner does tend to repeat himself. But then, like most directors would, he’s probably been saying the same 15 things about The Omen since 1977. Donner also provides an introduction to this collector’s edition, and in two other featurettes, “Curse or Coincidence,” he pops up to pooh-pooh the “curse of the film, which Bernherd likes to promote, as well as in “Jerry Goldsmith Discusses The Omen Score,” which gives a fairly detailed account of the music of the film, for which it won an Oscarâ„¢. The first disc also has the trailer, and trailers for five or six other Fox films.

Disc two commences with another intro by Donner, and proceeds to two lengthy documentaries: “666: The Omen Revealed” and “The Omen Legacy,” which goes into detail about the sequels and off shoots, and a healthy photo gallery. There is one deleted scene, which concerns the guardian dog attacking Peck as he arrives at the church with Damien for the kill. This comes with an optional yak track by Donner and Helgeland, in which Donner asserts his reasons for cutting it. There is also a “Screenwriter’s Notebook,” and “An Appreciation: Wes Craven on The Omen.

Personally, I find it puzzling that Craven thinks that The Omen is so good, but Craven, who pops again, of course, on the disc for the unrated version of Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur’s The Hills Have Eyes, suggests that after Last House on the Left, he didn’t want to make a another horror film. It may be that Craven didn’t even see Last House as a horror film, perhaps more of a political commentary. It’s possible that the great tragedy of Craven’s creative life is that he is associated with a genre that he doesn’t care all that much about and is viewed as an expert on. The Omen came out a year after the first The Hills Have Eyes, long before Craven was not much more than a cult director among a few thousand horror geeks, but it seems to me that the first Hills is much superior to the first Omen.

The new Hills of course is based on Craven’s film, which Craven both wrote and directed. It’s about the 10th ’70s horror remake in the past three years and there are more to come. Bur surprisingly, like most of those remakes, it is better than the original, at least on a technical level.

That’s to be expected on one level, since technological and filmmaking skills have improved in 30 years, and anyway, The Hills Have Eyes was a low budget endeavor to begin with. The first one cost $250 thousand, the new one probably cost 50 times more (though it was shot in Morocco, doing an excellent stand in for New Mexico). But on another level, this version, which is produced by Craven and his company, seems more thought out in its particulars. It plays up the nuclear connection in more detail, and brings more complexity to the characters.As is well known, The Hills Have Eyes tells of the Carter family, driving across country on vacation. It’s a large extended family. There is the patriarch, former cop Big Bob Carter (Ted Levine), and his wife, Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan). They have three children and two dogs, which are a matched pair of guard dogs. The kids are Lynn (Vinessa Shaw of a memorable scene in Eyes Wide Shut), married to cellular phone shop owner (and liberal democrat) Doug Bukowski (Aaron Stanford), daughter Brenda (Emilie de Ravin, of Lost, and here lost again), and Bobby (Dan Byrd), the youngest, and the one who most takes after Big Bob. The two Bobs get a lot of mileage from teasing Doug for his politics and pacifism. Doug and Lynn have a baby. The new version hews closely to the original. Out in the New Mexico desert, the family finds itself stranded far from help. Dad goes one way, back to the gas station they just stopped at, Doug the other direction, which leads him to the crater of an A-Bomb test, now used as the dumping ground of a family of mutants, who stalk the family, kill the dad, rape one daughter and kill another, and steal the baby. The surviving family members plot their rescue and revenge.

The new HHE is better shot and better acted than the original. But possibly under the influence of Craven, Aja and Levasseur, who made High Tension, expand some of the ideas found in the original. Here, there is much more tension within the family (just as the characters in Scorsese’s version of Cape Fear are compromised much more than its anodyne source). Doug is downtrodden by the teasing. Brenda is bored. Ethel and Bob are at odds, partially for religious reasons. It is she who insists that they pray before breaking up to hunt for help.

Also, motivation for action is more carefully worked out. In this new one, the gas station operator (Tom Bower), who is also the grandfather of the diseased mutant family, intentionally sends the Carters down the wrong road, because Lynn happened to see the haul of booty that the mutant family has acquired from numerous other now dead families. In contrast, however, there is less motivation for Ruby (Laura Ortiz) who in the original was trying to escape her crazy family. Here it is Brenda who seeks escape, while Ruby is a cipher. The mirroring of the two families, which made Hills 1 so interesting and richly textured despite its drive-in origins, would have been enhanced in Hills 2 if both daughters were brought up to speed thematically.

Back in the 1970s, critics such as Robin Wood pointed out how horror films of the time, such as Hills Have Eyes, Night of the Living Dead, The Omen and others, with their emphasis on sexual repression, cannibalism, and the “terrible house” which serves as a locus for the morbid rituals of grotesque horror, seemed to be symptomatic of the American family as a social institution in crisis, of a collective nightmare from which Americans could not awaken. It was easy to infer that the foundation of society was rattled by social protest, the divisions brought on by the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, though these films rarely explicitly referred to this social tremors. What Aja and Levasseur have done in this remake is to make explicit what was only implied in the first.“You made us this way … we’re this way because of you,” complains one of the more disabled mutants in the movie. The mutant family lives in the prefab houses used on atomic test sites (the third cinematic use of these setting I can think of, the other two being Mann’s show Crime Story, and the end of Kalifornia). The crater of a bomb test is its auto wrecking yard, where the cars of the families they’ve attacked are deposited. The credit sequence and some dialogue make it clear that the Carter family, standing in for America, has brought this disaster onto itself, that the mutant family is the natural result of reckless imperialism. You couldn’t get an image less subtle than Doug ramming a pole with an American flag on it into the skull of the mutant who just tried to kill him, the flag another reminder of the policies that, in its name, caused the nuclear mutations.

The first film was really just about violence. It ended with a freeze frame of the Doug character in mid blow as he continues to smash in the skull of the mutant who took his baby. He was a normal, civilized American male reduced to the level of an animal by the animals who attacked him. The story and its conclusion were the product, it appears, of Craven, a free thinking hippie type and academic, pondering how he might behave in extreme situations. The new The Hills Have Eyes stretches out the climax with uplifting music and a reunion scene in which the survivors hug in a heartfelt (or grotesque, depending on how you view it) mirroring of Ethel’s group prayer, which at that time everyone resisted participating in. The Hills Have Eyes being ultimately a Craven film, it can’t resist the suggestion in the final image that the family is still being stalked. However, this image can be interpreted as a sign of the general American malevolence that the Carters have to beware of, not an immediate threat, or a hint at a sequel (though there was a sequel to HHE, famous for its over-reliance on “flashback” footage to the first film, as various survivors from the first, including the pet dog, remember the past). I’m not sure how much further a sequel to this one could go in terms of political commentary, but it would be hard to beat purely on the level of suspense.

Aja and Levasseur have complained about certain cuts made in the film to meet MPAA requirements, and made it clear that the DVD edition would be their version. The new Hills is 108 minutes long, compared to the theater’s 107 minute length, and the new material appears to come in the rape of xx and the final gunning down of the surviving bad family leader.

The unrated The Hills Have Eyes (Fox Home Entertainment, 2006, 108 minutes, color, NR, 2.35:1 enhanced, one single sided dual layered disc, Dolby Digital 2.0, Dolby Digital 5.1 in English and Spanish, with English and Spanish subtitles, animated musical menu, keep case, $29.95, released on Tuesday, June 20, 2006; published simultaneously with the R rated version) comes on an excellent disc with a great transfer and sound. There are two audio commentary tracks, the first with director Aja, art director and co-screenwriter Levasseur, and producer Marianne Maddalena, who are all very cozy with each other. The second track is from Craven and producer Peter Locke, who also starred in the first one. They mostly talk about doing the first one, so this would make an excellent voice over accompaniment to the first film. In addition, there is the 50-minute “Surviving the Hills: Making of The Hills Have Eyes, a better than average making of, plus seven “Production Diaries, with a play all option, which shows among other things how certain stunts were accomplished from conception to filming. Finally, there is the music video, “Leave the Broken Hearts,” by the Finalists.

 

 

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