THREE more pastors have joined in the call to warn Jamaicans against watching the movie The Omen, saying the film could open aup the souls of its viewers to evil spirits.

The movie, which debuted last Tuesday – the sixth day of the sixth month, 2006 (6/6/6) – is the remake of the original 1976 horror flick and portrays a young boy, Damien, as the anti-christ or the son of Satan.

Last Friday, in a letter to the Observer, Rev Al Miller – the outspoken head of the Fellowship Tabernacle for a Truth Commission – issued a stern warning to the public against watching the eerily-dated film, saying it posed great danger to anyone who watches it, particularly teenagers and young children.

“The movie opens up realms to unsuspecting persons that are ignorant of the relic of the spiritual world and this makes them prone to being demonised and molested by evil spirits,” Rev Miller wrote.

Pastor Franz Fletcher, who heads the St Andrew-based Church on the Rock, agreed.

“I have a problem with it,” he told the Observer. “The whole idea of the movie is that the spirit of deception is out there,” he said.

He said while he has never watched the movie, Christians are taught to be wary of deceptive spirits that are rampant in the world today.

He also argued that in the same breadth that “certain” songs evoke memories, movies like The Omen have the power to leave an ‘impression’ on its audience.

“Forces of wickedness get into the spirit of people and they do all sorts of crazy things,” he said. “People’s mind are fertile ground… so you would be amazed to see what are the channels to the soul and the mind.”

Rev Lloyd Maxwell of Agape Christian Fellowship also believes that the movie spells evil. “It entraps people and brings them into a realm that we ought not to have entered in the first place,” he told the Observer, adding he had already advised his congregation about the dangers of watching the film.

“In some of the scenes the actors are not acting, they are possessed!” he added.

In his letter to the Observer, Rev Miller warned parents not to allow their children to watch the horror flick given that they are at extremely high risks of “demonic oppression and possession, because they do not understand all the concepts of life.”

According to the pastor, his concerns stemmed from the incidents that followed the release of the original movie in the 1970s. According to the pastor, he and his colleagues had to deliver countless youngsters that had been possessed and demonised as a result of the movie.

“When the first movie came out, a number of people a few years later were demonised and traumatised because of [it],” he told the Observer. “A number of young people developed an interest in the spiritual realm and began to experiment with Ouija boards and tarot cards, so supernatural things began to happen.”

Ouija boards and tarot cards are highly associated with occultic activities. He said, too, that the ’70s movie also gave rise to the popularity of the name Damien. “But what the parents failed to recognise was that they were calling their sons little demons,” he said.

Rev Donald Stewart, pastor of the Covenant Community Church, said he also had to deal with situations where persons became possessed after watching the 1976 movie, and he said the remake was just one of a series of films that opened up the floodgates for “demonic movies”.

“The movie expose a lot of the occult world in a sense, makes it enticing and what happens is that people will just go out of curiosity, not realising that because of how the movies are produced and the kind of occult involvment – the supernatural element – that they can end up being demonised or demon possessed and not understanding the fierceness of it,” he said, adding that the effects are sometimes delayed.

“It lodges all kinds of things into people. … I am one of those people that have had to be dealing with those kinds of things behind the scenes over the years.”

davidsont@jamaicaobserver.com