The North Yorkshire ruins where Sam Neill shot ‘most chilling scene’

In 1981, the then-rising New Zealand actor travelled to the Skell Valley in North Yorkshire to shoot the apocalyptic finale of Omen III: The Final Conflict, playing Damien Thorn — the Antichrist at the height of his earthly power — in a landscape that director Graham Baker later said was perfectly suited to the story’s dark ambitions.

“Shooting here was very cold and very eerie,” Baker recalled in the DVD commentary for the film.

It is not difficult to see why he chose it.

(Image: Supplied)

A ruin built for the screen

Fountains Abbey, just three miles south-west of Ripon, is the largest set of monastic ruins in England.

Founded in 1132 by Cistercian monks under the direction of Thurstan, Archbishop of York, it grew over four centuries into one of the wealthiest religious houses in the country before Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries reduced it to the haunting skeleton it remains today.

What the monks left behind — vaulted ceilings, grand columns, a soaring 160-foot tower — gave Baker and Neill a ready-made stage for the film’s climactic confrontation.

The finale was shot entirely on location at Fountains.

Neill was 33 at the time and relatively unknown outside his native New Zealand and Australia.

The Final Conflict was among the films that introduced him to mainstream international audiences — twelve years before he would become truly famous worldwide as Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park.

(Image: Sam Neill (Alamy/PA)

A World Heritage site with a Hollywood habit

Fountains Abbey was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986 — just five years after Neill walked its nave.

It sits within Studley Royal Park, an 18th-century landscaped water garden that frames the ruins with formal pools, statues and sweeping parkland, and together the two form one of the most visited historic sites in the north of England.

The National Trust, which manages the site, recorded more than 400,000 visitors to the Fountains Abbey estate in a recent year.

Its atmospheric quality has drawn filmmakers back repeatedly: productions shot there include Anne Boleyn (2021), The Witcher (2021), All Creatures Great and Small (2021), The Secret Garden (1993 and 2020), and most recently Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025).

(Image: NORTHERN ECHO)

It is that last production which brings the connection full circle.

Like The Final Conflict four decades before it, 28 Years Later used Fountains Abbey’s 12th-century ruins to conjure a world after civilisation’s collapse.

Those who visit Fountains Abbey today — and more than 400,000 do each year — walk the same ruins where a young Sam Neill once filmed in the cold and the dark.