Seminar: The Omen

Critics in 1976 described The Omen as at once “riveting” (LA Times) and “silly” (NY Times). 

Set to an Oscar-winning score, the movie’s mélange of affects, supernatural gore, and questionable Biblical interpretation worked to produce a horror classic and launch an undying franchise. 

Join MIT Professor of Film and Media Jessica Ruffin for a historical, personal, and theoretical discussion of the work and its many manifestations. We will unpack the broad function of religious horror, the film’s engagement with filicide taboos and class inheritance, as well as its unique metaphysics of evil, from women and dogs to the photographic image. 

About Jessica Ruffin: 

Jessica Ruffin is professor of film and media in MIT's Literature and Comparative Media Studies/Writing Sections. Her research interweaves aesthetics, media theory, philosophies of race, and moving image history, including early and avant-garde cinema, the German Weimar and Nazi eras, popular, new media, and science film. Her publications can be found in Camera Obscura, New German Critique, History + Technology, Millenium Film Journal and qui parle, with forthcoming work in The Routledge Companion to Media Archaeology and Discourse.