The American scholar Brad Duren argued that "The Omen" was part of a trend of films featuring cosmic horror that started with "Rosemary's Baby" in 1968, but the film was unusual at the time in that concerned the "end times" predicated in "The Book of Revelation" and its use of the ideology of Premillennial Dispensationalism favored by American fundamentalist Protestants. Duren further maintained that the box office success of "The Omen", which concerned the first stages of the Apocalypse as the Antichrist in the form of the apparently angelic child Damien Thorn appears on the earth to be adopted by an unsuspecting American diplomat and his wife, reflected the "zeitgeist" of 1970s America.