This Movie Is Rated 666

This movie continues the great tradition begun with Rosemary's Baby, & the masterfully followed up with The Exorcist as the Devil himself is seriously depicted, though never shown, in a manner that is genuinely intended to keep even the most heartily-minded awake at night.
As in those earlier works, in The Omen, Satan is the unseen antagonist who uses a human in the form of a child to dote out his diabolical deeds of death, despair & destruction.
Y'know, for me, there's something about the 70's era that seems to really lend itself to the atmosphere of hellish dread that are these types of films. Maybe it's because since this was the decade in which "movie realism" had finally come to touch the ground (evidenced thru the films of actors like Dustin Hoffman & Al Pacino), the monster genre had really started to become a caricature of itself, many times to the point of being cartoonishliy silly. Therefore, one of the few avenues of true horror left was to those that focused the evil that resulted from the more sins of man, which of course can be personified best by he who most represents it, ol' Lucifer hisself.
Or maybe it's just because such evil could only come from the decade that was also responsible for polyster suits, platform shoes & dancing Travolta movies.
Whatever the reason,
The Omen carries with it a new-found injection of horror that rattled our nerves more on a biblical sense of hopelessness than thru the fear of a Hollywood-spawned rubber-suited creature of which many movie-veiwers had becomed largely desensitized to at this point.

9/10