re: #170 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I had a crush on a Baptist girl in the 8th grade who loaned me a copy of 666 by Salem Kirban, one of the first End Times fiction works; truly awful by any metric and basically written by an Evangelical Ed Wood.

I’d bet $5 that’s one of the books David Seltzer read when he was writing the screenplay for The Omen (along with “The Late Great Planet Earth”).

Seltzer incorporated a lot of Dispensationalist ideas into his screenplay and turned what were, up until then, little more than fringe Christian eschatological notions and made them mainstream thanks to the success of that film; I’d argue that The Omen probably had more lasting cultural influence than The Exorcist.

The very idea that the Antichrist was the literal son of Satan comes from The Omen….anyone who’s familiar with Christian eschatology knows that the Antichrist is simply a follower of Satan - but Seltzer kicked that idea up a notch for dramatic license. He had to explain the whole idea of 666 through exposition because mainstream audiences at that particular point in time (1976) weren’t all that familiar with the concept of the number of the beast (or the mark of the beast).

And the “daggers of Meggido”…totally made up by Seltzer. In fact, the very idea that you’d need to kill the Antichrist runs counter to Revelations, something you’d think the film’s religious consultant (an Evangelical Christian) would’ve picked up on, but completely failed to notice.