At the end of “The Final Conflict,” the third “Omen” movie from 1981, Damien the Antichrist croaks out the words, “Nazarene, you have won ...
nothing,” then collapses. When Jeymes Samuel saw that scene as a kid, growing up in West London, he thought it was so cool that Damien referred to Jesus Christ as “Nazarene.” So when Samuel wrote and directed his own biblical-era epic — “The Book of Clarence,” now streaming on Netflix — he wanted to draw the curtain on his seriocomic (but ultimately quite earnest) movie with the same word.
“In me saying ‘Nazarene,’ it makes the song less preachy, less religious,” Samuel explains on a recent afternoon in West Hollywood. “Whatever that element is, it’s crying for all of us. But I think the song is about the hope that Clarence hopefully has at the end of the movie.
” In the film, Clarence — played by LaKeith Stanfield in a predominantly Black cast — navigates the oppressive world of Roman-ruled Jerusalem during the time of Christ. He refuses to believe in Jesus and instead starts to perform faux miracles of his own, only to have his life threatened in a way similar to Jesus — and his disbelief challenged. The song “Nazarene,” which plays over the end titles, is both a ballad and a kind of prayer.
Samuel, performing the vocals on his own original composition, sings about an approaching storm (“Gale force winds from the east I see”) and an aging man: “Old man time and his weathered hands /.
