All the way back to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, with its little creeps Flora and Miles, kids in fiction have been trouble. In the ’40s, Agatha Christie’s Crooked House featured a twelve-year-old psychopath named Josephine, and Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Small Assassin” gave us a baby out to murder his parents. But the ’50s were the true decade of the terrible tyke. The decade kicked off with Richard Matheson’s short story about a spider baby, “Born of Man and Woman.” In 1953 came Jerome Bixby’s classic “It’s a Good Life,” with its all-powerful, bratty three-year-old psychic god Anthony. It has been adapted three times for The Twilight Zone (the original series, the reboot, and the feature film) and once for The Simpsons.
The next year saw the arrival of the twin masterworks of killer-kid literature: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and William March’s The Bad Seed. John Wyndham rounded things out with The Midwich Cuckoos in 1957, which was adapted for film as Village of the Damned in 1960. For the next ten years, evil kids belonged on film. Turn of the Screw became director and cinematographer Freddie Francis’s dripping, doomed, black-and-white chiller The Innocents (1961). Lord of the Flies hit the silver screen in 1963, and then Jack Hill gave us Ralph, Virginia, and Elizabeth Merrye, three murderous adults with the minds of children in 1964’s Spider Baby, followed by the game-changing satanic fetus of Rosemary’s Baby and in 1970 Freddie Francis did it again with Girly.
As discussed in Chapter 1, Thomas Tryon’s 1971 evil-twin best seller The Other inspired the horror boom of the ’70s, with its underage murderers playing big brother to the most infamous killer child of them all: Damien Thorn. Wanting to cash in on the success of The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard hired screenwriter David Seltzer to write The Omen, a smash that spawned two sequels and numerous remakes (as well as popularizing 666 as the “number of the beast”).
A few weeks before the movie debuted, Seltzer wrote a novelization of his screenplay that ran a slim 202 pages and it became a surprise hit, selling 3.5 million copies. It’s one of the better movie novelizations, with the film’s big scenes all present and accounted for. Seltzer adds even more details, such as gutter journalist Keith Jennings being so lonely that he creates a friend by sticking a cooked chicken on a root beer bottle and making it dance. There’s also a nutty backstory in which one of the priests selected to kill Damien reminisces about doing missionary work in Africa, where he fell in love with a young man and was forced to watch his lover eat his own testicles before being flayed alive.
Unlike David Seltzer, Joseph Howard isn’t even credited on the cover of the 1978 novelization Damien: Omen II. His book isn’t terrible, but it pales compared to the original. Characters communicate mostly by reciting long passages from the Book of Revelation or shouting, “Your child is the Antichrist! He must be destroyed!” Nevertheless, it sold about 1.5 million copies.
The third novelization (and the last to correspond to a motion picture), Omen III: The Final Conflict (1980), was written by Gordon McGill, whose name appears on the cover but who had nothing to do with the screenplay. Damien’s character, now the head of Thorn Corporation, talks as if he was raised in a German military academy (“Pleased to meet you, Miss Reynolds. You are the Barbara Walters of the BBC, perhaps?”), recites death metal lyrics (“Birth is pain. Death is pain. Beauty is pain.”), and waxes rhapsodic over, as he charmingly puts it, “the gaping wound of a woman.” A bunch of priests are on a holy suicide mission to stab the now-adult Damien to death with the Seven Sacred Daggers of Megiddo; after Damien makes love to the Barbara Walters of the BBC, the priests manage to stick one of these magic Ginsu knives in his back. That seems to be curtains for Damien, and it certainly was for the film franchise.
Not so for McGill, who returned in 1982 to write an Omen novel not based on a film, Omen IV: Armageddon 2000, which opens with a scene of rectal childbirth. The Barbara Walters of the BBC ushers Damien’s son, Damien Jr., into the world via her anus before dying (probably of shame). Cut to seventeen years later, in the futuristic year 2000: Thorn Corporation is run by Paul Buher, a relatively minor character from the series who keeps teenage Damien Jr. isolated on the grand old family estate, Pereford, where Dad’s embalmed corpse stands like a mannequin in the black chapel.
The Final Conflict wasn’t so final—Damien Thorn’s progeny kept the family business going for two more installments. Credit 33
Credit 34