Once seen it's difficult to forget the wild decapitation of David Warner in the very first OMEN movie. A offspring of the Exorcist style movie wrapped around a strong religion vs evil story it also makes effective use of that the unsettling creepy child factor.
An indelible moment in cinema history indeed, the character of Jennings an investigative reporter played by David Warner rushes over to recover an important set of blades angrily discarded by Gregory Peck who is expected to use these ceremonial daggers to kill his son.
As Jennings crouches after reaching the knives , a flying sheet of glass in what can only be described as a freak accident decides to intersect with his neck, graphically we get to witness David Warner's height and life span being drastically reduced.
Striking in that this was the first time in a mainstream Hollywood offering that such a shockingly explicit demise of a character was shown, all masterfully played out before our eyes and exactly the sort of grisly and spectacular stunts that the FINAL DESTINATION franchise would later build its brand on.
It was shot simultaneously with a five camera set-up so once the footage is edited and presented in slow motion the sequence would play out that little bit longer. The idea being that any audience members who would look away from seeing the head being sliced off would look back thinking it would be safe to do so but still find themselves subjected to seeing the scene from another viewpoint!
It's worth mentioning that although in the movie the head impressively flips over several times after its separation there is a noticeable and quite distinct lack of blood spilt , in actual fact although I mention this point the impact of this scene doesn't suffer from the lack of wound juice, however I childishly decided to attempt to capture the moment with an excessive arc of claret and with that blood spray spelt out the words DAVID WARNER.
You must have heard of the term
graphic blood letting well this is graphics blood lettering at its most apt, incidentally in my tool box in among the hammers, saws and screwdriver I keep a bottle of fake blood and I decided to use that to add some crimson color to my drawing, however unforeseen by me it soaked right through the pages and spoilt some of the drawings overleaf.
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| My cartoony OMEN drawing, and I noticed that if you spell OMEN backwards you get another cartoon character! |
