How The First Omen Broke the Curse of Legacy Sequels
By Richard Whittaker, April 3, 2024, 6:20pm, Picture in Picture
There are scenes in The First Omen that will restore your faith in studio horror. In fact, said director/screenwriter Arkasha Stevenson said, “I’m shocked at what we got away with.”
The new prequel to the 1976 classic Satanic chiller The Omen, The First Omen follows a young woman (Nell Tiger Free) on the verge of becoming a nun who becomes caught up in a sinister conspiracy to unleash the Son of Satan on the world. It’s the debut feature as a director for Stevenson, and also the first writing credit for her creative partner and cowriter, Tim Smith. A Texas native and UT-Austin grad, Smith now faces a moral conundrum: Should he show the film to his 91-year-old grandmother, who still lives in Marble Falls? “She’s back and forth on if she’s going to see it,” he said. “My mom just saw it and she said how scary it was, so she’s firmly back in ‘I’m not going to see it.’” If grandma does finally watch it, he said, “it’ll be in broad daylight and there might be a bit of fast-forwarding.”
The idea of a prequel to the horror classic had been floating around since 2016. That was two years before David Gordon Green’s Halloween wowed audiences, but also before that franchise fell off a critical and commercial cliff, and the catastrophic failure of The Exorcist: Believer. There have been exceptions, like the fan favorite Predator revamp Prey but when it comes to horror, Stevenson said, “The words ‘prequel’ and ‘sequel’ come with so much dirty baggage.”
According to Smith, they were as skeptical as anyone about taking on the project. “There’s an incredible cynicism to take on a legacy franchise, or to tackle a sacred text like The Omen,” he said. When they were approached by 20th Century Studios, they came as horror veterans, having already worked together as director and producer on SyFy’s Channel Zero season 3 (“Butcher’s Block”) and Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavor. After eight years writing together and struggling to get anything off the ground, “it was huge to get our first feature together.”
However, they also came as fans with an understanding of the franchise and no desire to just repeat what had been done before. Smith said, “It’s only once we realized that this focused on Margaret, this young novitiate, that it gave us an opportunity to take a completely different angle on the story and make it our own.”
Stevenson explained that she saw The First Omen as being in conversation with the original. It even shares a character in Father Brennan: Played by Patrick Troughton (also famous as the second Dr. Who in 1976, this time it’s Ralph Ineson as the devoted but excommunicated priest. Stevenson said, “My experience watching The Omen as a kid is that when Patrick Troughton turns up you’re terrified of him because he’s so unhinged and he’s so manic.” So her conversations with Ineson were about “how to humanize that man, and tell the backstory of how he got there. … Seeing him in a much calmer, more composed mental state at the beginning of the film, and then getting to see just what a weight this journey has placed on him.”
That journey is one of supernatural horror, and audiences expecting another run-of-the-mill studio shocker may be caught off-guard by how graphic The First Omen gets. Smith referred to it as “confronting imagery, imagery that we’re not used to seeing onscreen,” but the duo were protective (and, he admitted, a little stubborn) of their vision for their calling card feature debut.
“It did feel like we were going out on a ledge,” Stevenson added, “but it also felt that the story and the material and the themes push us out there.” She pointed to that original underlying concept of the whole movie being from Margaret’s perspective, “and as a result of that we can center the film around the idea of birth and female body horror, and all the horror set pieces should really reflect that.”For Stevenson, it all comes back to the ability of horror to both be a thrill ride and to be a forum to discuss real-world issues. “If you’re telling the story of how Damian came into the world, you’re talking about birth and you’re talking about forced reproduction and you’re talking about female body autonomy and the female form. Especially right now, that’s an extremely combustible issue to be talking about, and needs to be talked about.”
Fortunately, Stevenson added, “Everybody on every level, including the studio, understood that, OK, if we are going to tell that story then we need to show the female and female body in a very specific, very tactful light, and we cannot shy away from that.”
The idea of investigating the Roman Catholic Church’s role in birthing the Antichrist allowed Stevenson and Smith to investigate another inherent element of the franchise, that of a simmering intergenerational war. The original film centered on Gregory Peck’s fears as a father, and the idea of not being able to trust your kids, was a constant factor in films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. “Nowadays it’s a bit the opposite,” said Stevenson. “Kids are maybe a bit afraid of their parents’ generation.”
That fear of authority keys into another huge influence on The First Omen: the conspiracy cinema of director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis. Both Smith and Stevenson described The Parallax View and Klute as being as influential to their film as the shattered psychosexual dynamics of Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now. There’s even a subtle homage to All the President’s Men and its use of helicopter footage of Washington D.C. That feeling of being under constant surveillance is evoked in an aerial sequence over the Vatican. Stevenson explained that it begins as “almost a postcard of Rome – ‘Oh, we’re here, this is just another shot’ – and slowly evolving into this omniscient perspective and giving it this life of its own. At first, it’s very benign, but then it starts to look for Margaret to the point that it’s frantic.”
Of course, there can be no more suitable location for a Catholic horror than Rome. Smith said, “You can just reach both arms out and touch an incredibly gorgeous church. We got there, and we realized how naive we were.” First of all, Rome is an incredibly packed city, where ancient streets filled with beautiful buildings are also filled with commuters and pedestrians. “They’ll just walk into frame. They don’t care. … ‘Enjoy making your movie, we’re going to go about our day.’”
Moreover, Smith noted, this is the seat of Catholicism, “so making a film about the Antichrist, they’re not the most hospitable to you.” The production quickly realized the power of the Holy See while filming one scene in front of the Vatican. “As soon as the permit kicked in, they turned the lights off so the entire street went dark.”
As Margaret explores Rome, simmering counterculture discontent about the state of the world and the powers that be explodes into sporadic violence. That political liberation is matched by sexual freedom – again, tying into that discussion of bodily autonomy. There’s a sensuality to The First Omen that often equals the gore, and Stevenson knew it was core to Margaret’s identity as a woman who has gone straight from a Catholic-run orphanage as an abandoned child to a Catholic-run orphanage as a novitiate. “There is an inherently a lack of knowledge and exploration about sexuality,” Stevenson said. Like many women, she added, “Margaret is a bit of a stranger to her body [and] to have somebody like that land in such a sensual city and to be enticed sexually to explore that, I think already is such an interesting story that I would want to watch, even apart from having this supernatural element.”
“I know it sounds trite to say that she’s a force of nature, but she is,” said Stevenson. The part required someone “who could go from heaven to hell with Margaret, and not be afraid of the hell. … It’s terrifying for the audience to see a really kind, beautiful woman get very down, dirty, and vicious, and I think it must also be terrifying to go there and see yourself like that, and Nell was never afraid.”
That commitment reaches its zenith is a truly shocking moment that is a direct homage to another psychosexual supernatural classic, Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 nightmare Possession. There’s a pivotal scene in The First Omen which pays tribute to a now-legendary explosion of a performance by Isabelle Adjani. Stevenson described watching Free’s own feral outburst as “one of the most exciting moments I ever had on set. … She did it in two takes. We didn’t rehearse and we didn’t block and we didn’t talk about it. She just did it.”
The First Omen opens in theatres on April 5.
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