Hollywood gone to the Devil

Press, 26 February 1977, Page 20

Hollywood gone to the Devil

By CHARLES FOLEY, of the Observer Foreign News Service Los Angeles When the Vatican recently re-affirmed the existence of the Devil, studio chiefs in Hollywood were surprised. Who needed affirmation? Domestic rentals alone showed that the Devil was certainly alive in America and coining money for them. Around the globe, he was doing almost as well. Those other staples of the movie industry, Westerns and love stories, can no longer be relied on to ring the cash register. Television did the Western to death, and boy meets

girl these days in "Deep Throat.” But the Devil is a great internationalist. “Satan is equally good box-office in Peoria and Peru,” says Harvey Bernhard, who should know: he is the producer of this season’s big hit, “The Omen,” which is about the Devil’s return to earth in the person of the five-year-old son of America's Ambassador to England. It has netted almost SSOM in the United States and the distributors, 20th Century Fox, are confident that it will gross more than SIOOM world-wide. It cost u mere S2.BM to make. With profits like thai, everyone wants to get in on the Devil’s act. "There isn’t a major studio in Hollywood that hasn’t got a Satan-movie in the works,” says Mr Bernhard. M.C.A., Inc., in fact, has three. American International Pictures has two already in the market, and two more in preparation. Warners has just completed a sequel to “The Exorcist” (which is one of the top money-makers of all time at SI2OM). A sequel to “Roseman’s Baby” is at present on American screens. And already the first of two, perhaps three, sequels to "The Omen” is in production.

"The Omen” was shot in England (the declining pound helped, a British technical crew that refused to work full days as contracted did not), with Gregory Peck as the Ambassador to the Court of St James who finally decides to give the Devil his due with a long knife. An exorcist instructs Peck as to how this should be done, Abraham-and-lsaac style, on the altar of a church. The film is cleverly directed by Richard Donner. hitherto best-known in the industry for his TV work (Kojak, Columbo, etc) and it includes — as one critic put it — “The best decapitation scene I have ever seen.” Gore is cheap, however, and manv movies offer it in larger •uppliea than “The Omen ’

without the same success. What really appears to' entertain audiences is the spectacle of a thoroughly tiresome child being tortured (as in "The Exorcist”) or done to death. Since the child is, if not the Devil himself, possessed by one of his lieutenants, the viewer is absolved of any responsibility for what happens to him or her, and can wallow in the defilement without guilt-feelings. Such films also offer the comforting idea that prob terns can be solved by magic without recourse to rational solutions. And they provide a simplistic explanation for the apparently inexplicable phenomenon of evil. It is nice to know that Satan is to blame for everything, and there is not a darned thing you can do about it, except buy another bag of popcorn. Church leaders are highly displeased. "The Omen” has been attacked by the United States Catholic Conference as “one of the most distasteful films ever released.” "Christianity Today” and the Luth* 'eran publication. "Cinema Sound,” have both assailed the film as a sleazy potboiler which can onlymuddle the faithful and mislead the unbeliever. "It violates rudimentary Christian principles,” says a Californian theologian, Robert Munger, of the Fuller Seminary. “It turns Christ’s message upside down by suggesting that the Devil can be defeated with his own weapons, by murder. What’s more, the makers of this movie can't even spell. They refer to the Book of Revelation as the. book of revelations.” Controversy is good for business, and Mr Bernhard stirs the pot when he can. To him, the success of “The Omen” is due to a growing belief in the

supernatural among Americans. “Our movie is plausible. It explains a lot.” Humanity has a deep inner need for religion, however ersatz: if Satan did not exist, man would need to invent mm.

It is not only Hollywood that is cashing in on visions of apocalypse and the coming of the Antichrist. The script of “The Omen” has been “novelised” — as it is called in the trade — by David Seltzer for New American Library which has more than 2.5 M copies in print There is a plethora of doom-laden books, fictional and otherwuse, on the market prophesying Armageddon, the Second Coming. and so forth

None has sold better than Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth” (10M copies) and its successors. Lindsey, a 46-year-old Californian who left a group called Campus Crusade for Christ in 1968 to devote himself to popularising Biblical prophecy, fits all the pieces of the Revela tion jigsaw neatly into place. Earthquake, fire, flood, the Middle East crisis, and other signs that signal Ihe End are bound up in one highly-readabl* apocalyptic package. His sales have soared in the last six months, and r film version of "Th* Late Great Planet” will be on United States screens next year.

Other films in production include “The Heretic'" from Warner Bros., which shows you the usual scary happenings from the Devil’s point of view Then there’s M.C.A.’s "The Sentinel,” about a security guard who keeps some select demons in an ancient New York rooming house. From Universal comes “Resurrection.” reported to feature a young woman whose body is occupied in turn by Christ and the Antichrist. Fox’s sequel to “The Omen” will continue the story of Damian, the devil-child, as a teen-ager (Peek never was cut out to be a murderer) and will combine the joys of disaster movies with Satanism. Mr Bernhard has already planned the itaging of Armaggedon.