Trivia for
The Omen (1976) More at IMDbPro »

• Charlton Heston, Roy Scheider, Dick Van Dyke, and William Holden turned down the lead role. Gregory Peck, accepted the lead. William Holden did eventually accept a role in a sequel.
  
  
• To make the baboons attack the car in the Windsor Zoo park scene, an official from the zoo was in the back seat of the car with a baby baboon, but the baboons had no response at all. They then took the head of the baboons, and the baboons outside went crazy. Lee Remick's terror as the baboons attack the car was real.
  
  
• When the fishbowl falls to the ground, (dead) sardines painted orange were used in place of actual goldfish, which director Richard Donner refused to kill for the sake of making a movie.
  
  
• The shot of Lee Remick falling to the floor was done by building the "floor" on a (vertical) wall and dollying an upright Remick backward towards it.
  
  
• Having changed its title from "The Antichrist" to "The Birthmark," the film seemed to fall victim to a sinister curse. Star Gregory Peck and screenwriter David Seltzer took separate planes to the UK...yet BOTH planes were struck by lightning. While producer Harvey Bernhard was in Rome, lightning just missed him. Rottweilers hired for the film attacked their trainers. A hotel at which director Richard Donner was staying got bombed by the IRA; he was also struck by a car. After Peck canceled another flight, to Israel, the plane he would have chartered crashed...killing all on board. On day one of the shoot, several principal members of the crew survived a head-on car crash. The jinx appeared to persist well into post-production... when special effects artist John Richardson was injured and his girlfriend beheaded in an accident on the set of A Bridge Too Far (1977).
  
  
• Richard Donner and Harvey Bernhard asked Alan Ladd Jr. then the head of Twentieth Century Fox for extra money during the film's post-production period to hire composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose music they strongly felt was right for the movie after seeing him perform a live concert at the Hollywood Bowl earlier that year. Ladd was finally talked into giving Donner and Bernhard around $25,000 to hire Goldsmith, who would deliver his first and only Academy Award win for his score in 1977.
  
  
• Richard Donner credits the success of the film to composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose music made the film scarier than it would have been had he not been involved.
  
  
• In the closing scene, Richard Donner used reverse psychology on young Harvey Stephens telling him, "Don't you dare laugh. If you laugh, I won't be your friend." Naturally, Stephens wanted to laugh, and he instead smiled directly into the camera.
  
  
• As part of its pre-release publicity campaign, and to point out the significance of "the three sixes" as The Sign of Satan, the movie was sneak-previewed nationwide in the USA on 6 June 1976. While audiences inside the theatres were being scared witless by the film, theatre employees were out front, busily putting up specially made posters declaring: "Today is the SIXTH day of the SIXTH month of Nineteen-Seventy-SIX!" Hokey though it was, the gimmick worked quite well, as many a theatre patron literally "freaked-out" upon seeing those posters as they left the previews.
  
  
• According to at least one biography of Gregory Peck, he took this role at a huge cut in salary (a mere $250,000) but was also guaranteed 10% of the film's box office gross. When it went on to gross more than $60 million in the U.S. alone, The Omen (1976) became the highest-paid performance of Peck's career.
  
  
• According to director Richard Donner, he talked the noted cinematographer Gilbert Taylor into coming out of retirement to shoot this film.
  
  
• Mike Hodges was offered the chance to direct the movie. He refused, but actually went on to direct three weeks of Damien: Omen II (1978) before he was fired over creative differences.
  
  
• Rottweilers experienced a surge in popularity in the US after the release of this film.
  
  
• Richard Donner decided that Harvey Stephens' naturally blond hair should be dyed black to give him a more sinister look in his role as Damien.
  
  
• More than twice the film's original $2.8 million budget was spent on the film's advertising and promotion.
  
  
• Father Brennan's quotation about the "eternal sea" is completely non-Biblical, and was written for the movie.
  
  
• 'Guglielomo Spoletini' and Alf Joint are dubbed by Robert Rietty.
  
  
• Terry Walsh who was stunt double for David Warner was badly injured while filming the dog attack scene despite being properly prepared for the stunt.
  
  
• Harvey Stephens, as Damien, was largely chosen for this role from the way he attacked Richard Donner during auditions. Donner asked all the little boys to "come at him" as if they were attacking Katherine Thorn during the church wedding scene. Stephens screamed and clawed at Donner's face, and kicked him in the groin during his act. Donner whipped the kid off him, ordered the kid's blond hair dyed black and cast him as Damien.
  
  
• The last feature film of 'Anthony Nicholls'.
  
  
• In the scene where Gregory Peck goes to see his wife's psychiatrist, at the beginning of the scene notice the inverted cross on the table.
  
  
• One of the films included in "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (and how they got that way)" by Harry Medved and Randy Lowell.
  
  
• Gregory Peck was given the role of Ambassador Robert Thorn after Charlton Heston turned it down in order to make Midway (1976).
  
  
• Harvey Stephens, the original Damien also is in the 2006 remake. He is one of the reporters at the embassy.
  
  
• The site used for the Megiddo archaeological dig is a real dig, just not in Megiddo. It is located in the Old City of Jerusalem, on the southern end of the Temple Mount.
  
  
• Because Harvey Stephens was so young, Richard Donner found that the best way to direct him was to provoke genuine reactions before the camera. For example, when Damien is angry at being taken to church, Donner got his peeved facial expression by shouting to Stephens off camera "What are you looking at you little bugger? I'll clobber you."
  
  

• SPOILER: It was Richard Donner's intention to film and edit the scene where Jennings is decapitated in such a way that the audience, having closed there eyes at the beginning of the scene, would open them only to see the head still floating in the air.
  
  

Related Links