NBC has Hannibal, A&E has Bates Motel and now Lifetime has Damien, the upcoming requel to The Omen which will be a scripted series from Glen Mazzara, the former showrunner of AMC’s smash genre hit The Walking Dead.
The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Mazzara will write a script and executive produce the series that “centers on the film’s young boy Damien Thorn. Now an adult and haunted by his past, Damien is faced with a series of macabre events and must finally face his true destiny: he is the Antichrist.”
Although Mazzara hasn’t worked on The Walking Dead for a few years, he hasn’t strayed from genre. It was announced last month that he is currently writing a feature film prequel to the Stephen King classic “The Shining” titled Overlook Hotel. Details on that project are scarce but according to reports, Overlook will focus on events in the hotel taking place long before Jack and Wendy Torrance moved in.
Even if one isn’t the biggest horror fan in the world, most people have seen or know of The Omen, Richard Donner’s 1976 Academy Award winning classic starring Gregory Peck. That film spawned multiple sequels including three feature films, a couple of TV movies and an NBC series starring Bill Pullman retitled Revelations. You might also remember the remake of the first film starring Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles in 2006 but having just revisited most of the sequels myself, I’d say that you can skip all of them and just watch the original.
All that being said, it seems about right on the old horror remake/reboot/requel-whatever calendar for a new entry into The Omen franchise and I have to say, if they’re going to do it at all, approaching it from the angle of Damien as an adult is a pretty good idea. It would seem that Mazzara, The Omen and Lifetime are a strange coupling but it never hurts to try new things and horror being one of the most lucrative genres in entertainment these days sure leads to strange bedfellows.
What do you all think of genre continuing its take over of TV? Are you ready for more from The Omen? Why can’t Hollywood come up with any original scary stories to tell in the dark? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
Could be intriguing. I always thought they dropped the ball with the original Omen films. The first two were good, even though the second film is way too derivative of the first, but they massively screwed it up after that.