The Omen

Studio horror at its most polished. A diplomat's son may be the Antichrist, the evidence mounts through a series of elaborate deaths, and Jerry Goldsmith's Latin choir won an Oscar for making the whole thing feel damned.

It is the respectable end of the occult cycle, expensive and restrained where the imitators were cheap and lurid, and the set-piece deaths, the nanny, the pane of glass, are staged with real craft. Gregory Peck lends it a gravity it might not otherwise earn.

Handsome, effective, and the template for prestige horror.