For those keeping score, The First Omen is the third movie released this year where the Devil plays a significant role.  Previously, Late Night with the Devil and Immaculate reminded us that Old Scratch should never be underestimated.  What does this trilogy of cinematic devilness portend?  While I can’t speak for Immaculate (which I haven’t yet seen), the two movies featuring Beelzebub have been very good indeed.  Perhaps it’s time for someone to revive the Oh, God! franchise to balance things out.

The First Omen, set a short time before the events of the original take place, exists to answer the question that everyone who’s familiar with Damien always wanted to know, namely who was his mother?  I suspect they’re also curious about Damien’s conception and birth, and this movie addresses those questions in ways that challenge what the franchise mythology previously implied.  In case you’d forgotten, The Omen implied that Damien was born from a jackal.  This movie says that something different yet equally satanic happened to bring Damien forth into the world.  I suppose how this movie alters the mythology would upset Omen purists, but I doubt any actually exist.

The story is about a young, pretty novitiate named Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) who has arrived in Rome to take her vows and become a nun.  She was raised in orphanages in America, with Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy) taking a keen interest in her personal growth.  He’s proud to see Margaret all grown up and ready to devote her life to Christ, as is she.  Despite having the rest of her life planned for her, Margaret is a walking bundle of anxiety.  This is due to her troubled upbringing.  While exchanging life stories with her roommate Luz (Maria Caballero), Margaret confides that when she was younger, she saw things that the nuns told her weren’t real.  Of course, we already know why.  Margaret will give birth to the Antichrist at some point in this movie, it’s just a matter of when.

The movie does throw the audience a curveball in the form of Carlita (Nicole Sorace), a troubled young girl at the orphanage where Margarite has been assigned.  Like Margaret, Carlita is unruly and is regularly banished to “the bad room” as punishment.  (The room has no windows and a bare mattress for furniture.)  When not strapped to her bed, Carlita creates drawings that imply a disturbing relationship between herself and the nuns.  Could Carlita also be a candidate to bear Satan’s offspring?  The movie wants you to consider this as a possibility, and given how thoroughly creepy everything becomes in the orphanage, I never ruled it out.

Margaret sees Carlita as a kindred spirit and immediately befriends her.  Then things begin to get strange.  Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie-Wilson), whom the other nuns say brings joy to the children, kills herself in a very flamboyant way.  (It’s one of several nods to the original that are purely obligatory.)  Margaret also begins to see things, including a birth that scored high on the queasiness scale for me.  She’s then approached by a somber priest, Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), who states gravely that he’s been tracking down a child in a photograph who will be giving birth to Satan’s son.   Brennan was told this by Father Harris (Charles Dance) at the outset of the movie, and Harris is promptly dispatched in a way that serves as another callback to the original movie.

From here on out, Margaret desperately tries to uncover the name of the child in the photograph before June 6, 6:00 AM arrives.  As you may recall, the Devil only does important things when sixes align chronologically.  Margaret discovers a vast conspiracy by members of the Church, but it ends up being all for naught because nothing can stop the Devil’s Due Date.  There’s another gruesome birth scene, followed by an ending that sets up a sequel that I don’t think will come to pass.

The First Omen accomplishes something I never thought possible with this franchise.  Instead of being an exercise in campy spectacle, it’s a credible horror movie that is filled with dread and actual suspense.  Like the movies that preceded it, The First Omen is a contrivance, a story jerry-rigged to take us from point A to point B and deliver a series of shocks along the way.  However, this movie differs from others because it was made to be a horror movie first and an Omen movie second.  Whereas previous entries emphasized shocks at the expense of character development, we get to know Margaret intimately throughout her ordeal.  This means that when the shocks do arrive, they are genuinely horrific because we like Margaret and care about her.  Even though the story is routinely outlandish, I never chuckled at any of it because everything was grounded by writer-director Arkasha Stevenson’s character-driven approach.

Although this franchise will always be indebted to Rosemary’s Baby as a primary source of inspiration, this is the first entry in the franchise to use that movie as more than a jumping-off point for the plot.  Since Damien has not yet arrived, The First Omen is liberated from the franchise formula that reduced audiences to awaiting each character’s spectacular demise.  Instead, it focuses on Margaret as she learns the truth behind the awful visions that have haunted her since she was a child.  While Margaret’s journey of self-discovery does lead to what we always knew would happen, it still terrifies because the event is framed with an immediacy that has always eluded this franchise.

In order for this re-imagining of Omen mythology to succeed, The First Omen had to have an incredible performance at its heart.  As Margaret, Nell Tiger Free never lets us believe that her character is doomed, even though we know she is.  Free’s Margaret is a fully-formed character who runs through an impressive gamut of emotions until she finally realizes what she was put on earth to do.  And when that moment arrives, it’s a white-knuckle affair because Free imbues   Margaret with a sadness and vulnerability that’s palpable.  A movie like this could easily have become ridiculous, but it never does because of Free’s emotionally raw performance.  In her first feature film, Arkasha Stevenson has delivered an ominous and impeccably paced horror movie.  (The beautifully atmospheric cinematography is by Aaron Morton.)  I didn’t care for the ending, which sets up a sequel I don’t believe will ever get made.  Regardless, The First Omen is a surprisingly effective horror movie that is far better than this franchise deserves.  Recommended.

Analysis

Not long after The First Omen was released, someone I follow on social media stated that this movie may be the best of the franchise.  “That would be a low bar to clear,” I snickered to myself.  I first became acquainted with the original Omen trilogy back when I was in grade school, and even though I was very young I thought it was ridiculous.  Instead of being terrified by the evil-doings of Satan, his son Damien and those working on his behalf, I laughed at everything that happened.  Prior to seeing the prequel-sequel, I revisited the original Omen and my original impressions were unchanged.  Director Richard Donner does his best to elevate the material above its schlocky origins, but the movie is still trash.  The acting was fine, if a tad melodramatic.  The Omen is hokum designed to unite a collection of series of shocking set pieces, but the shocks are telegraphed so far in advance that they have almost no shock value when they finally arrive.  The movie, as signaled by the overwrought score by Jerry Goldsmith, is campy fun and not much else.

The First Omen, however, rarely telegraphs its shocks and is the better movie because it takes the horror genre seriously.  The filmmakers (writer-director Arkasha Stevenson, writers Tim Smith and Keith Thomas) know how a typical horror movie should work and they structure the narrative accordingly.  Richard Donner, who went on to direct much better films after The Omen, was not a good match for the material.  As evidenced by his output before and after that movie, he is particularly good at filming action-comedy vehicles (Superman, The Goonies, Lethal Weapon).  As The Omen shows, he doesn’t understand horror movies and allows his natural tendencies to dictate his approach to the material.  This results in a movie filled with scenes that should be scary but never are.

Even though The First Omen rarely makes the same mistakes as its predecessor, it does in the form of two obvious pieces of fan service.  While some callbacks are expected in a movie like this one, these two scenes conspicuously stand out for being a) almost carbon copies of the originals, and b) not as scary as the material that surrounds them.

The Impaled Priest – The Omen

In The Omen, Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton) is killed by a lightning rod.  Before that happens, Brennan is enveloped by a sudden windstorm that drives him from the riverfront towards a park.  The storm pushes Brennan to a nearby church and he bangs on the doors, to no avail.  He walks away from the church, looks up, sees the lightning strike the rod and, after it is struck by lightning, watches it fall until he’s impaled by it.

While it is true that Brennan’s death was predicted by a mysterious image in Keith Jenning’s photographs, those images never stated explicitly how Brennan was going to die.  Furthermore, Donner constructs the scene like an action sequence rather than a horror sequence.  First, he establishes that the Devil has it out for him and is going to kill him.  Next, he shows us the instrument the Devil will employ to do it.  Finally, he shows us the killing with the subtlety of a thunderclap.  There’s no surprise to the scene at all.

The Impaled Priest – The First Omen

The First Omen includes a similar scene, but introduces a degree of uncertainty as to which priest would be killed by way of the construction going on at the church.  Will it be this version of Father Brennan, or Charles Dance’s Father Harris?  While there is some surprise with how the Devil kills Father Harris, the outcome is basically the same.  In this version, the pipe falls from the scaffolding above in slow motion and makes a beeline for Father Harris.  The only surprise is that the blow doesn’t impale Harris–it gives him a partial lobotomy.  There’s a bit of gallows humor with Harris turning around and giving Brennan a bloody smile, as in Dead priest walking.   However, it’s still lukewarm fan service.

The Hanging Servant – The Omen

The scene where Holly Palance’s character hangs herself at Damien’s birthday party is one of the most famous ones in the original movie.  Although the scene meets the description of horrifying because she kills herself in full view of the children, it isn’t scary because what will happen is drawn out and, yes, telegraphed.  Donner shows her with the rope clearly visible around her neck before cutting to the dumbfounded guests.  Then, when she has their undivided attention, she tells Damien, “It’s all for you,” and jumps.  In a movie that routinely tells us in advance what it is going to do, this scene is only marginally more shocking than the rest.

The Hanging Servant – The First Omen

In The First Omen, it’s a nun who decides to hang herself in front of a crowd that includes children.  As before, she waits until she has everyone’s attention before she utters that curiously obtuse line.  (What is all for you isn’t clear to me.)   This time around, it won’t be an ordinary hanging.  Sister Anjelica douses herself with gasoline, sets herself ablaze and then jumps.  While I’d give this movie points for significantly increasing the degree of difficulty, it results in an unsurprising spectacle.

The First Omen does have several scares that, while influenced by The Omen, actually succeed in being scary.  Both prove that in order for a movie to feel like part of a franchise, the movie only needs to allude to what came before, not mimic it outright.

The Severed Man – The Omen

Photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) knew he was going to lose his head.  His self-portrait predicted as such.  What he, and the audience, didn’t know was how Donner would turn it into such a ridiculously gory spectacle.  It wasn’t enough to show the window pane cutting off Jennings’ head and having it rotate in mid-air.  Donner shows it to us from four different angles, spinning like a bleeding pinwheel.

The Severed Man – The First Omen

Paolo (Andrea Arcangeli), who danced with Margaret one evening, is the one who becomes severed in The First Omen.  This movie, however, never hints at what will happen to him.  Stevenson stages the scene so that Paolo is suddenly struck by a truck after telling Margaret to “Look for the mark.”  Then, it is only after Margaret tries to comfort Paolo and free him that we see that she’s carried off only half of him.  The element of surprise makes it both shocking and horrifying.

Conception & Birth – The Omen

For a movie about the birth of the Antichrist, The Omen is strangely reluctant to explore the evil that it implies.  The movie can barely say that Damien was born of a jackal, as Brennan’s voice is cut off by the sound of people entering Robert’s office.  Then, even after Brennan forces Robert to meet him face to face, he still doesn’t tell Brennan outright who Damien’s mother is.  The movie leaves it up to the sight of a dog’s skeleton to tell us what Brennan could not.

The Omen also never mentions how Damien was actually conceived at all.  He’s clearly not human, but how does a human-looking baby emerge from a dog?  I know, I know, where there’s Satanic will, there’s a way.  But the fact of the matter is that the movie intentionally leaves that critical fact unexplained and instead chooses to distract the audience with carnival theatrics.

Considering what The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby did just a few years prior, The Omen is subdued in comparison.

Conception & Birth – The First Omen

The prequel has no problems with telling us how Damien came into being.  There are several shots where a woman is bound to a bed, has a black hood placed over her head and a noose tightened around her throat to prevent it from slipping off.  Then, when we see the demonic hand (paw?), we know that Damien is the result of bestiality.  The Book of Revelation says that the Antichrist is a beast, after all.

The First Omen also visually depicts Damien’s birth, something that this franchise had avoided for some reason.  Stevenson ensures that the audience fully appreciates what that experience was like for his mother, Margaret.  Damien may have emerged from her as a cute little tyke, but knowing that you’re giving birth to the Antichrist would undoubtedly have produced a wide range of emotions.  Free is masterful in this scene, one that would have capped the movie perfectly if it weren’t for what follows.

The End, or is it?

I understand why the movie didn’t end with Margaret, her jackal impregnator and Damien’s twin sister being burned alive in a fire.  That would have been quite a downer of an ending.  But to have the movie show us Margaret, her daughter Carlita living in some snow-covered hideaway?  Then, when Brennan appears and says that “They’re coming for you,” I was incredulous.  Was this movie implying that the Omen mythology as we all know it was being rewritten, and that a forthcoming sequel would pit Damien and his acolytes against Margaret, Damien’s twin sister and Carlita?  My head was spinning at this possibility, and not in a good way.  Given how this movie performed at the box office, I’m guessing that a sequel will not be forthcoming.  For a movie that did its duty surprisingly well, the ending was a series of bad decisions.  Sometimes, a sympathetic character like Margaret needs to die, no matter how unfair that may be.  I wish this movie had the courage to do that, but it was still surprisingly good.