'The First Omen': The Horrors of Womanhood

Director/co-writer Arkasha Stevenson uses the prequel as a platform to discuss everything from assault to childbirth.

The Non-Spoiler Version

The media hasn’t been covering last month’s Immaculate and this weekend’s The First Omen as two different versions of the same movie (see also: Dante’s Peak and Volcano, Deep Impact and Armageddon, Antz and A Bug’s Life, and Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War). But that’s what they are: a pair of horror films about a young American novitiate who travels to Italy to take her vows, finds that everything within her new home is not as it seems, becomes enmeshed in a Catholic Church conspiracy involving the birth of a deity. They even have some surprising overlap in plot details.

On the whole, The First Omen is the much, much stronger offering. At least half of it is, in fact, goddamn great. It is an often genuinely disturbing film containing a profound subtextual discussion of religious fundamentalism and the revocation of women’s rights. I don’t know for a fact that its shortcomings are the results of studio mandates, I do know that most of them derive from the film’s need to cater to the IP. It’s the first movie from director/co-writer Arkasha Stevenson, who has previously directed episodes of shows like Legion and Brand New Cherry Flavor, and it makes me eager to see what she might be able to do if she wasn’t beholden to a particular brand.

The First Omen is a prequel to Richard Donner’s iconic 1976 horror flick, which stars Gregory Peck as a U.S. ambassador who suspects his child is the Antichrist (as all parents invariably do at some point). Set in 1971, the new film centers around Margaret (Nell Free Tiger from Servant and Game of Thrones), the aforementioned young American novitiate. She’s newly arrived in Rome and assigned to an orphanage for girls, and she has a troubled past, as tends to be the case with the protagonists of horror films. But now she has found the path to God, thanks to the tutelage of the warm, avuncular Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy).

Margaret is quickly taken with Carlita (Nicole Sorace), a seemingly-disturbed girl with no real friends or advocates at the orphanage. For reasons Margaret doesn’t understand, this severely bothers her superior, Sister Silva (Sônia Braga), and attracts unwanted attention from an excommunicated, possibly-insane priest, Brennan (Ralph Ineson, playing the same role occupied by Patrick Troughton in the ‘76 original and Pete Postlethwaite in the 2006 remake). And then some really spooky shit starts going down, and Margaret, understandably, decides she needs to get to the bottom of things.

The viewer, knowing this is a prequel to The Omen, will likely figure out what’s going on long before Margaret does, even with a late-in-the-story twist that I suspect most people will guess in advance of its reveal. But there are a number of elements to keep the audience engaged regardless. The casting is uniformly excellent, with even the smallest of roles filled by actors with arresting, unusual features. Stevenson has visual flair as well a knack for conjuring an aptly disquieting atmosphere. And the film bristles with unsettling, often graphic imagery that plays on a the many terrors of womanhood, from sexual assault to childbirth.

That imagery is just part of how Stevenson manages to smuggle in some of her more profound political ambitions: the movie is also set against the 1971 student protests in Rome, features a plot point in which women are told they’re crazy as a means of being kept under control, and has a less-than-sunny view of the Catholic Church. Immaculate hinted at this sort of discourse, but The First Omen revels in it. Maybe that’s why The First Omen feels thirty minutes shorter than Immaculate despite the inverse being true.

Where The First Omen falls flat is in its repeated use of jump scares you’ll see coming a mile away and, most of all, its various homages and connections to the ‘76 film. This includes a recreation of that movie’s most famous scene, only with an extra element added; I believe this element was intended to really make the scene the Doritos Extreme to The Omen’s regular Doritos, but it winds up being a hat on a hat, which makes it unintentionally funny. And the conclusion is a mess, precisely because it needs to bend over backwards to remind you how much you love The Omen (the film’s final line of dialogue is especially egregious, and especially stupid). Paradoxically, The First Omen may also anger some fans of the original picture, because it makes at least one fairly substantial change to that movie’s mythology.

These issues are exacerbated, perhaps, by some inconsistencies in tone. There’s one death in particular that starts out being really emotional and intense… until Stevenson takes it to a place where it’s cartoonish and comedic. The abrupt cut to a heightened Sam Raimi spook-a-blast is jarring because the serious stuff is so very effective.

Still, none of these failings negate the ways in which The First Omen is frequently impressive and effective. I think this movie is worth seeing, and I think Arkasha Stevenson is a director to watch: she has greatness in her.

The Spoiler Version

I’m not sure I ever really thought about how infrequently mainstream studio films explicitly portray childbirth until I watched a spindly, clawed, demonic hand emerge from a vagina in The First Omen.

It is, to put it mildly, a striking image. You may find it upsetting, gross, funny, or all of the above. But it speaks it Stevenson’s willingness to go there in ways most movies won’t. It’s astounding that she got the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios to agree to it.

But it’s not there purely for shock value. The moment occurs as Margaret is watching another woman give birth within her convent. Later, Margaret realizes that she herself is pregnant, the result of being drugged by another novitiate and raped by a mostly-unseen “beast” that also happens to be her father; she begs for an abortion, and is not only denied, but also forced to undergo a C-section, seemingly without anesthesia. Oh, and both the assault and the caesarean, by the way, occur in front of an audience that watches passively, ignoring Margaret’s cries for help.

This is not particularly subtle metaphor, but it is a potent one. The First Omen began production in the fall of 2022, just months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Clearly (and understandably), Stevenson had the cruelty of anti-choice laws on her mind. Like all the best genre narratives, The First Omen is a fantastical reflection of our contemporary reality.

That makes it, somewhat oddly, a bummer that the movie includes both a relatively happy ending and a monumentally dumb coda. Thematically, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to let Margaret, Carlita, and Margaret’s daughter escape at the end.

But what really doesn’t make sense is Brennan concluding the movie by ominously telling Margaret that her daughter’s twin son, taken away from her immediately after his birth, has been named “Damien.” This is one of those moments in recent franchise films where a character reveals some information and the filmmakers play it as big dramatic moment, even though it means nothing to the other characters in the movie. The most-cited example of this is in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness, when the antagonist (Benedict Cumberbatch) announces to Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) that he’s Khan. The audience knows that Khan is a big deal, because we’ve all seen him portrayed by Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But this iteration of Kirk has never met or even heard of him before; the moment is highlighted for our benefit, even though, in-universe, he might as well have said “My name is John Smith.” No one has any reason to give a shit.

The Damian “reveal” in The First Omen is even worse, though, because it’s not even news to the viewer. Nobody who sees this movie is unaware that Margaret’s male child is the same kid from The Omen… and even if they were, prior to this last scene with Brennan, there’s a montage where the priests and nuns are discussing the family to whom they intend to “gift” Damian - and that montage includes a photograph of Gregory Peck from the original movie. So, like, yeah, no kidding the baby’s name is Damian.

The last point I’d like to address, because it was a worry of mine going into the movie and I’ve seen other The Omen fans fretting about it online, is Damian’s actual parentage.

In The Omen, there’s a scene where Gregory Peck’s character goes to a graveyard to dig up Damian’s birth mother; but upon opening her casket, he finds the carcass of a jackal. This is why I’ve spent the past few months joking that The First Omen was going to about a creep who fucks animals (although even that wouldn’t make sense - isn’t Damian’s dad supposed to be Satan?).

There is, I suppose, an argument to be made that the jackal corpse was placed inside just to give the coffin weight, presumably so the graveyard employees tasked with lowering it into the ground wouldn’t put together that it was empty; in other words, maybe it was never really meant to be the authentic grave of Damian’s actual birth mother.

But I always interpreted it to mean that the jackal was Damian’s actual birth mother. And I’m not the only one: in Damian: Omen II, which was directed by Don Taylor (Escape from the Planet of the Apes), it’s confirmed that Damian is part-jackal. But perhaps that movie is no longer canon?

In any case, the fact that Damian’s father/grandfather is a “beast” means that he is still technically a human somehow born of bestiality. And really, The First Omen is good enough that I kind of don’t care if it breaks continuity with the other movies. Still, the contradictory nature of this story point reinforces my general feeling that Stevenson would have been better off making her own movie, not the latest entry in a long-running franchise.