Richard Donner's horror classic stars Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn, a U.S. diplomat who secretly adopts a newborn after his wife's baby dies in childbirth, unaware that the substitute child, Damien, is in fact the Antichrist. As those around Damien meet increasingly bizarre and violent deaths, Thorn's mounting suspicion of his own son collides with his desperate desire to believe the horrifying truth isn't real. Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning, liturgical-Latin score gives the film an operatic sense of doom that elevated it above typical devil-child fare. A massive box-office success that helped define the "satanic panic" horror boom of the 1970s, it remains one of the genre's most enduringly influential works.