Drive-In ‘76: ‘The Omen,’ ‘Jackson County Jail,’ ‘Lifeguard,’ ‘Drive-In’

Each month, from April through September, Drive-In ’76 revisits the drive-in fare of fifty years past, from big Hollywood releases to low-budget exploitation movies that played in the wee hours of the night. Settle in. We’ve got another quadruple feature for June.

Feature One: The Omen (released June 25, 1976)

The night kicks off with a major motion picture.

Many converging currents fed into the creation of The Omen, a film whose climax encourages audiences to root for its hero, played by no less a star than Gregory Peck, to stab a child to death. These include an uptick in interest in the occult spinning out of the ’60s counterculture and an apocalyptic strain of Evangelical Christianity, codified and popularized by Hal Lindsey and C.C. Carlson’s bestselling The Late Great Planet Earth, that contended not only were we living in the End Times but that the signs of a soon-to-arrive Armageddon were all around us. Jim Knipfel has even pointed out a number of parallels between the film’s plot and a 1974 episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. But, above all, the critical and commercial success of Rosemary’s Baby and (especially) The Exorcist helped make horror movies, particularly those with Satanic themes, look respectable. (How popular was The Exorcist nearly three years after it first played theaters? A late-July re-release would top the box office later this summer.) Horror, it seems, could mean big business. And here, for the summer of 1976, was a horror story with nothing less than the fate of the entire world at stake with God on one side and the Devil on the other.