Episode 65: All the Colours of the Dark (1972) & The Omen (1976)

And now we are getting into the spoilers for the film, so if you have yet to see it, now is the time to tread carefully, as I'm going to give the entire plot away.

Like many women in Peril Jello, including the strange vice of Mrs Ward, this film owes a great deal to the 1955 movie Les Diaboliques, but it also takes a great deal of inspiration from the urban Satanism narrative of Rosemary's Baby, released in 1968.

As well as the occult elements, we also have an increasingly paranoid female lead, Jane, played by Edwidge VanEck, a very suspicious husband in the form of George Hilton's character Richard, a menacing urban apartment building, a mysterious neighbour, and the possibility that Jane is being kept under control through drugs.

That being said, though, there are still significant differences.

Firstly, while Roman Polanski grounded his film very much in reality, Sergio Martino takes the various occult elements and filters them through the very stylized lens of the Italian giallo, creating a movie that starts off fairly bonkers from the outset and which becomes more and more extreme as the story progresses.

This is, of course, why I love it, but it does very much require a suspension of disbelief in pretty much every regard.

Certainly, the more cynical viewer should be prepared for some head-scratching, if not for head-slapping moments as the story progresses, not least in some of the decisions made by its traumatised heroine.

But perhaps the main difference is that in Rosemary's Baby, the satanic threat was of course very real, whereas here, following one of the rules of the Jallo, everything turns out to have a more natural explanation than that with which we are first

presented.

As screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi put it in a later interview, It initially seems like a supernatural film, and then it takes a sinister and more human turn.

The ability to move the story forward while maintaining a certain ambiguity is one of its great qualities.

It is, though, a film with more pretensions than others, and I remember at first it left me perplexed.

Beautiful sequences, but initially it didn't seem that successful to me." It also, by all accounts, seemed somewhat perplexing to its original Italian audiences, who were rather resistant to its surrealism and the occult elements, and who, according to Martino, gave out screams and whistles of disapproval when it first opened.

As a result, the distributors cut some of the more ambiguous scenes, presenting a far more straightforward narrative, something that the director would say took away the air of curiosity and the film's more dreamlike moments.

Quote, I believe it was a pioneering film in the psychological exploration of a character plagued by fear and anxiety, and its exploration of her dreamlike primal vision of fear and her ability to foresee what might happen.

The film's final scene was initially misunderstood by audiences, but now viewed with the perspective of time, I can confirm that it's a very interesting and modern way of telling a story, but perhaps too daring for its time.

End quote.

In terms of creator credits, as with The Strange Vice of Mrs Ward, many of the things that we see on screen were Martino's own, particularly the nightmarish dream sequence which opens the film.

Aside from this, though, there has also been some small disagreement as to the movie's actual authorship.

The credits suggest that the story was written by a Spanish writer called Santiago Moncada, who wrote Mario Bava's Hatchet for the Honeymoon and the brilliant Spanish thriller The Corruption of Chris Miller, released in 1973.

There is also a co-screenwriter credit for another writer, an Italian called Sauro Scavolini.

But Ernesto Gastaldi disputes both of these, saying that other names alongside his were there for co-production reasons only, and that, quote, All the thrillers I wrote, I wrote alone.

End quote.

And to be fair to Gastaldi, most commentators do tend to fall on his side of the argument, as the themes and concerns across the narrative are common in many of his screenplays, Jalo or otherwise.

He would later say that he intended the film to be against paranormal phenomena, but that the audience interpreted it backwards.