The Exorcist (1973) vs The Omen (1976)

Exorcist, IMO.

Linda Blair, the makeup, special effects, etc. They just knock it out of the park on the creepiness scale.

I think The Exorcist is better and of a completely different fabric, in that The Omen concerns the birth and early childhood of the Antichrist; while The Exorcist concerns the possession - by a demon, not Satan - of a child. In the first, the Antichrist must be killed by the Daggers of Megiddo; in the second, the demon is expected to be **cast out** by exorcism, but is eventually **drawn out** by the altruistic sacrifice of Fr. Damien Karras.

The Exorcist's subject matter, in my view, is much more serious and "realistic" than The Omen's.

There is nothing really at stake in The Omen, except of course for the success or failure of killing the Antichrist.

But in The Exorcist, much more intimate concerns are evinced: the endangered innocent child; her distraught mother; the murder of a renowned film director and the subsequent police investigation; Damien Karras's near-loss of faith and his tremendous guilt over "abandoning" his mother for his priestly vocation; and the (supposed, expected) reliance on Fr. Lankaster Merrin - a holy, brilliant, but very sick elderly man - to carry off a successful exorcism. Much is at stake.

At the end of The Exorcist, we are joyful that Regan has been saved, and sorrowful that Fr. Karras is dead. But at the end of The Omen, we really don't care that much about the deaths of the Antichrist's mother and father. We are only left with the stereotypical cliche of the monstrous protagonist/antagonist having survived all attempts against him - the same kind of discount ending that so many 50s horror sci-fi films finish with - the end title that says, "THE END" ... "?" A cheap trick and very unsatisfying, in my opinion.

So that's my summary of why I think that The Exorcist is superior to The Omen.

The Exorcist

The Exorcist. It always feels like either side can win. Damien in The Omen feels like he has plot armour and like the people trying to take him down will always get tripped up by the screenwriter. The Exorcist is more of a battle as a result. It's not that the Omen is bad, just that the Exorcist manages its stakes and tension better.

Steveb1 articulated this a better, but The Exorcist also makes us care more about the characters and the situation, which gives us more attachment and makes us care more as we watch it.

The Exorcist is a serious film whereas The Omen is a genre movie.

Ex is about exploring faith and the nature of good and evil, it really pushes the boundary and takes you through a traumatic experience but with the purpose of making you reflect on these things.

That said, the Omen is in some ways a nastier experience because evil wins, and the journey of Damien’s ‘mother’ is gut-wrenching, from sensing that her own child hates her, to surviving a psysical attack by him, to ultimately being murdered by the evil forces that guide him.

There’s also depth because it may well be that Damian is an innocent child and the whole ‘son of Satan’ malarkey is just Robert Thorne’s guilty conscience latching onto stories from a cult of crazy priests, and all the deaths mere coincidences - you never see anything supernatural. When Damian screams ‘no daddy, no!’ as Thorne is about to skewer him with daggers it could be genuine - so it’s actually quite a sophisticated and effective horror film.

But yeah, Exorcist transcends the genre and is about much more than being shocking or creepy for the sake of it - much like The Shining.

The Exorcist (1973).

https://i.ibb.co/9NcYt4w/ezgif-5-00cbda484c.gif