This is a shockingly good prequel, particularly given that the film it prequels—The Omen (1976)—is one of the bumpier domestic horrors of the ’70s in terms of overall film quality. Don’t get me wrong: I love the original film for its delicate handling of the ostensibly benign patriarch as an insidious source of domestic horror. But there’s no denying that The Omen is campy and awkward at times, with some really spongy scripting, inconsistent acting, and mortifying special effects. Moreover, Omen Il and Omen III are perhaps my least favorite of all the remakes and sequels of the original six films prior to 2020—which is really saying something, because they’re all pretty god-awful (see appendix A). So I had the bar in my mind set quite low for The First Omen.
My skepticism was misplaced, however, because The First Omen is truly excellent. But I won’t spend a whole lot of time extolling the virtues of this film, nor swooning over how terrifying it is.
What I want to do is address how the film jumps right into the very same controversies that animated its obvious forebear The Omen, as well as its only slightly less obvious forebear Rosemary’s Baby. Namely, it’s a film that’s profoundly concerned with reproductive rights and with what it means when women lack them.
As we’ve seen, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby make the argument – sometimes very subtly – that denying women their reproductive freedom not only endangers their physical safety, but also literally brings the Antichrist into the world.
The First Omen receives that legacy from the original films and dials the volume way, way up.
The reproductive coercion in the original 1976 film is subtle enough that you can miss it, while the reproductive coercion in The First Omen is the explicit, overt storyline.
A convent in Italy recruits girls – orphaned girls, no less—to be raped by Satan in hopes of producing the Antichrist.
The viewer knows some of this going in, since the movie is the prequel to a story that almost every horror afficionado is familiar with—we know the goal of the film is to explain how Damien comes into the world.
The circumstances of the convent are revealed to us brutally: There are numerous scenes in the film of women giving birth to demonic halflings; there are scenes of violent restraining of pregnant women; there are rape scenes—one of which, as in Immaculate, very specifically echoes the rape of Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby—that are facilitated by members of the clergy.
The film opens with a gorgeous shot of a stained-glass window being lifted into place on a cathedral. The stained-glass window positioning leads us to shots of an old priest making a confession about his participation in some kind of ritual involving young women and babies. The confession scene is intercut with shots of a young woman, lying on her back, with someone covering her head in a black fabric covering. We are meant to understand that these scenes are memories that the priest is confessing to his confessor— things he witnessed or participated in.
The woman is strapped down to the table by her hands. She begins breathing in and out heavily; we can even see the black cloth being sucked tight to this woman’s mouth as she draws in her jagged breath. It looks like—and is—a torture scene.
Back in the present of the confessional, the priest says, “I can’t do this anymore,” and then the young, hooded, bound woman says the same thing, “I can’t do this anymore.” The crosscutting of lines serves a very important purpose: It shows us clearly that the secret workings of the clergy – whatever exactly they are—are somehow coterminous with the enforced suffering of this young woman.
As the repentant and newly confessed priest leaves the church, the other priest who had been confessing him runs after him – it’s Father Brennan, who had tried to warn Robert Thorn in the 1976 film about young Damien.
Here, in the prequel, Brennan (Ralph Ineson) addresses the priest who had been making confession; when that priest turns toward Brennan, we hear the pulley holding the window creaking, then a loud bang.
Everything holds still for a moment as the glass crashes in beautiful extreme slow motion around them. The camera angles up to the sky, and we can see that the window depicts Jesus, and that a metal pole is piercing through the Christ Child, sending huge shards of glass down below.
A discordant choral piece shrills in the background as we watch thousands of fragments rain down onto the repentant priest along with the metal pole, which rips through the back of his head. This scene is a direct homage to a scene from the original Omen when Father Brennan attempts to take shelter in a church but is impaled by a falling pole. Here, in the prequel, we see Father Brennan witness a scene that anticipates his own impalement six years later. History, it would appear, repeats itself.
This post-Dobbs film wants us to note that dynamic explicitly because, of course, women’s history in the United States is repeating itself, as we slide back to a states’ rights model of reproductive freedom, and one that is every bit as restrictive in many states as the laws that obtained prior to Roe.
From the impaled priest, we cut to a glorious shot of sunrise over Rome in 1971.
A beautiful, happy, bright-faced young nun (Nell Tiger Free) makes her way up a staircase at an airport; she seems keen, focused, and palpably nervous.
She reunites with a man named Cardinal Lawrence, and through their conversation, we learn that he’s been a part of her life since she was a child. He is warm and friendly, embracing her and praising the grown young woman she’s become, nun’s habit and all.
Riding around the city in a car, this young nun, Margaret, is enraptured by the sight of the Colosseum and everything else around Rome. She seems content, relaxed, and eager to begin her new life, until – bang—a student protester slams her hand onto the car window, startling Margaret badly. Cardinal Lawrence tells her that the students are rejecting authority and the Church.
He invites her to “play her part” in the Church’s effort to “win back” the youth. Eventually, they arrive at the convent school where Margaret will be living and teaching. It’s in the city, and everyone seems friendly. The children seem happy, the nuns industrious.
The children are playing, laughing, and socializing. The nuns often join them and seem attentive and concerned with the children’s welfare.
The interior courtyard is well manicured and bright, and the rooms of the school are old-fashioned but beautiful. It looks like the kind of place that very wealthy people would rent to host their destination wedding.
I love this as a cinematic choice. Rather than making the place scary from the get-go, as in Immaculate, this film chooses to allow Margaret – and the audience—to feel a sense of openness, possibility, and comfort upon her arrival at the convent. This sense of ease – which extends even to the beatific choral soundtrack – only makes the collapse into the horror to come all the more powerful and striking when it happens. It’s the equivalent of the still shots of Kathy, Robert, and Damien in the part of The Omen before Damien has revealed his true, devilish character. We are lulled into a false sense of security, in lockstep with Margaret herself, before the rug is jerked out from under us, and we find ourselves in the freefall of domestic horror and reproductive violence.
Margaret tours the hospital wing; in this convent school, unwed mothers can give birth and be cared for by the nuns.
It all seems fairly rosy, until Margaret finds her way to a room in which a very young girl named Carlita (Nicole Sorace) sits on the floor, drawing.
Margaret attempts to bond with this girl, who is pale, thin, and terribly alone. Creepily, the girl crawls over to Margaret, only to grab her roughly by the face and lick her cheek. Margaret is repulsed and afraid. Something is perhaps not quite right with this place after all.
Fortunately, Margaret doesn’t have to stay there right away. She’ll share a room with another novitiate named Luz (Maria Caballero) until the time comes for them to take the veil, a short while hence.
As the two girls share backstories, we learn that Margaret suffered from some kind of delusional state as a child, and that the cardinal – who had known her when she was just a young orphan—had helped her to understand that everything she feared was only in her mind. Perhaps for this reason, as Margaret starts working during the days with the girls at the school, she feels drawn to young Carlita—she sees something of herself in the tormented child.
At one point, through a partially open door, she sees young Carlita being restrained by the nuns; watching this upsetting scene, Margaret recalls how nuns had subdued her during her own juvenile fits and visions years before.
A short time before Margaret is due to take the veil, Luz invites her out for a last night of partying. Luz goes through her own clothes and selects a silver lamé plunging neckline top for Margaret and makes her wear it. Margaret looks incredibly uncomfortable, frowning as she gazes at all the skin she’s showing, but Luz praises how sexy she also looks.
Out at a disco, Luz and Margaret do shots and pick up men, though Margaret is still clearly uncomfortable with it all. But eventually, the alcohol, music, and pheromones do their magic, and we find Margaret dancing with a young man named Paolo on the dance floor. With strobing blue lights around them, they dance, and eventually, Margaret licks Paolo’s face – recalling what Carlita had done to her earlier. As viewers, we have a foreboding sense that something is about to go terribly wrong for Margaret.
The very next shot shows an extreme close-up on a hairy spider, which is revealed to be crawling along Margaret’s face in an extreme close-up. As we zoom out, we see Margaret’s head with her hair spread out like spiders’ legs over a pillow, her makeup blurred and smeared. Our first thought, and seemingly also Margaret’s, as she comes to consciousness and checks herself over to confirm that her clothes are still on, is that she might have been raped or seduced the night before.
Luz is nearby and explains blithely as Margaret comes to consciousness that nothing too out of control happened the night before, but Margaret is badly shaken nonetheless. She smiles weakly, with chagrin playing around her eyes, while she sits wrapped in a blanket, her mascara streaked along her cheeks. The soundtrack has shifted from choral or happy disco to creepily ethereal chanting, in minor keys.
Soon, Father Brennan tracks her down and warns her that “evil things” will start to happen around young Carlita.
Margaret doesn’t know what to make of him, but he seems agitated, unhinged. She pulls away to leave, but not before he can share his address with her, promising that if she comes to see him, he will “tell her everything.”
Back at the convent, the little girls Margaret is teaching tell her that Carlita is “in the bad room.” Margaret intervenes, advocating for Carlita with the higher-ranking nuns, questioning the very idea that there should be “a bad room.” After Carlita is released, Margaret comforts her; the two bond.
Immediately thereafter, however, Margaret hears panicked screaming and goes to investigate. Through a small window, she sees a young woman in labor in the hospital wing. She’s strapped down, her eyes frozen in terror, screaming, until the doctors and nuns administer laughing gas.
As Margaret watches her, the woman’s face contorts into one of sadistic mirth; she looks like a demon and turns her head toward Margaret, giggling and smiling evilly.
Suddenly, she breaks into seizures as the doctors and nuns unceremoniously pick up cutting tools, presumably to do an episiotomy. The woman’s face isn’t just in pain; it’s in abject terror, her eyes wild. Soon, Margaret can see why: In a truly graphic close-up on the woman’s genitals, we see a large, clawlike, bluish hand reach out of her body and paw the air. This is not a normal human baby, not by a long shot. And these doctors are also not trying to do good for this woman.
Margaret is horrified and overwhelmed by this scene, her eyes rolling back into her head as she faints in horror. When she comes to, however, she doesn’t quite yet know what to do with what she saw; we get a sense she doesn’t trust her own reality. Had it been a dream?
Margaret’s suspicions that something insidious may be going on at the convent are gradually confirmed.
After she sees a drawing Carlita has made of herself strapped to a bed with a fetus in her belly and two Munch-like nuns standing on either side of the bed, her fears start to take more concrete shape.
She asks both Carlita and a strange nun, named Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie Wilson, why a young girl would draw such an image, and is informed that Carlita drew the image of herself strapped to the bed, but Anjelica drew the “ragazzo,” or little boy, who’s growing in Carlita’s belly.
Margaret cautions Anjelica that such a drawing is not “very appropriate.” Anjelica responds in anger, roughly snatching back the drawing from Margaret’s outstretched hand.
Moments later, Carlita gets pulled into a party game the little girls are playing in the convent courtyard. During the game, Carlita looks up. Sister Anjelica is high up in a windowsill. She appears to be doused in something.
The camera looks up at her from below as she stands there and says to Carlita, “It’s all for you,” in a direct quotation of the line that Damien’s nanny shouts out in the original Omen just before jumping to her death at his fifth birthday party.
Anjelica then sets herself on fire and jumps; the rope she had around her neck snaps hard, and her body flies back through a window on a lower level – exactly as Damien’s nanny did in 1976, minus the fire.
History repeats itself: The 1970s are born again in the 2020s, and this film is bound and determined to make us feel that truth through its citations of its parent film.
Anjelica’s bizarre suicide convinces Margaret that maybe some of what Father Brennan had told her was true, so she visits him. Brennan tells her that “There are two Churches. The one that follows the teachings of Christ – the one that you and I are part of – and the other. The Church that will turn a blind eye to torture, to rape.” He reveals that the impure Church’s greatest fear is secularism. He explains to her that a culture that is outspoken and rebellious—like the emergently secular culture of the 1970s—is not a culture that the Church can readily control.
So this dark, power-hungry Church will create something for the people to fear, to lead them all back to the ostensible safety of the Church.
As Margaret listens, her eyes are wide open, unblinking, alert, and her brows are knit in concern and confusion.
“These priests” says Brennan anxiously and conspiratorially, but with great conviction, “believe they can birth the Antichrist and then control him.” This, according to Brennan, will drive people back to the Church.
Margaret responds exactly as any sane person would: “That’s insane!”
He goes on to suggest that Carlita has been selected as the mother of the Antichrist. Margaret smiles gently, looks down at her lap, and says quietly, “You’re crazy.”
Undeterred, Brennan begs Margaret to search for the birth records at the school to confirm that Carlita was born at 6 a.m. on June 6-666.
As Margaret listens to all this, we watch dawning horror coupled with disbelief spreading across her face. Finally, she stands up abruptly and heads nervously for the door. Brennan grabs her and begs her to help him. Margaret continues to protest, saying, “Carlita is a little girl! And she is not pregnant.”
There may be something sinister going on at the convent school, but surely Brennan’s theory is fantasy. Her parting words to him clearly indicate that she thinks he is more insane than whatever is going on at the convent: “You need a doctor. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
But the seed of suspicion has been planted, and soon the sinister incidents at the convent pick up again.
The nuns harshly discipline Carlita, locking her into solitary confinement in “the bad room.”
Eventually, Margaret is told to stay away from Carlita by Sister Silva, the highest-ranking nun at the school, and to postpone her taking of the veil.
She watches her friend Luz take the veil, don the ring of Christ, and become His bride.
Jealousy and self-doubt play across Margaret’s face as a tear escapes down her cheek; her desire to be accepted by God and by His community is almost all-consuming. Almost, but for the increasing skepticism she feels about the nuns, and the gnawing belief that Father Brennan may not be so insane after all.
During Luz’s initiation, Margaret slips out and sneaks into the convent record office as Brennan had asked her to do and looks for any information related to Carlita’s birth. She finds the birth certificate, which reveals that Carlita was, in fact, born on the sixth day of the sixth month, at 6 a.m. But there’s more. Carlita Scianna is evidently the fourteenth of fourteen reproductive experiments, all performed on orphaned girls given the last name Scianna. When Margaret looks at the folder for the thirteenth Scianna baby, she finds that it was stillborn and terribly deformed. Looking further back, she ascertains that all the prior Scianna babies were female, most were deformed, many stillborn. This convent is, indeed, is at the center of some kind of cruel and often lethal reproductive conspiracy.
At this point, the audience realizes that Arkasha Stevenson’s First Omen is not simply a prequel to The Omen and the backstory of Damien’s mother. It’s about reproductive abuse, tout court. But where the original Omen laid the responsibility for that abuse jointly at the husband’s feet and the feet of a Satanic conspiracy, this film lays it squarely and exclusively at the feet of the Catholic Church. More specifically, it lays responsibility at the feet of a Church that is in a blind panic about the rise of “secularism” and about the lack of faith among the young.
The First Omen portrays Christian moral panic as the point of origin for the horror of reproductive violence. There is a reason that this film, set in 1971, was conceived, directed, and released post-2022.
And there is a reason that it was a woman who directed it: Arkasha Stevenson is suggesting that a Christian moral panic about the rise of secularism today is to blame for the sudden danger in which thousands and thousands of young women now find themselves plunged, through state restrictions on their access to reproductive care, reproductive medicine, and reproductive agency.
After Margaret and a sympathetic priest named Gabriel smuggle the birth files out of the convent to bring them to Brennan, the three of them sit on the floor, puzzling through the files to figure out who the one baby is that the nuns seem to be planning to impregnate with the devil’s son.
They have realized it’s not Carlita – there’s someone else in queue ahead of her. Gabriel, Margaret, and Brennan see photographs of deformed, often stillborn, children. Gabriel, a devout member of the Church, gasps in horror at what he sees, and his reaction is important. Gabriel is shocked by the fates of children, the cruelty to the mothers, the cruelty of a Church that enforces this accursed pregnancy on people; his shock models for the audience how anyone – even someone utterly devout in his Catholicism – should feel at these horrors.
Set in 1971, this film takes place before Roe v. Wade and, indeed, is set in Italy, which had similarly restrictive reproductive laws in the 1970s. This scene of photographic revelation allegorizes actual reality in the early 1970s, when the Catholic Church, both in the United States and in Rome, was so adamantly opposed to abortion that it wouldn’t allow even therapeutic abortions in cases where a growing fetus was too badly deformed or sick to survive outside the womb.
In The First Omen, we’re talking on the surface about a twisted scheme to prop up a failing Church by forcing women to carry ill-begotten pregnancies. But on a deeper level, we’re seeing a cautionary narrative about the possibility of going back to a world in which the Church prevented abortion even in cases where the mother’s life was in danger, or a fetus was known to be deformed beyond viability.
Eventually, Brennan and Margaret work out that it’s Margaret herself who’s destined to give birth to the Antichrist.
She suddenly recalls the final events on the night of her disco rebellion in an extended, gruesome, color-saturated, strobing flashback. She remembers herself drugged, strapped down, and surrounded by shrouded clergy. Like the woman at the beginning of the film, she is hooded, while manic female voices chant in Latin. She remembers a demonic face with a monstrous eye perched over her – clearly referencing Rosemary’s Baby with both the demonic face and the hooding of the rape victim – and remembers a small spider crawling across her abdomen toward her genitals. She remembers the leathery claw of Satan rake across her belly—exactly as it had done fifty-six years earlier across Rosemary’s body.
In full possession now of her recovered memory, Margaret collapses into screaming sobs while Brennan and Gabriel attempt to hold her and help her. As she recovers her wits, she says, simply, “If I am pregnant, I need it out of me. I need it out of me now.”
This, of course, is where The First Omen parts ways decisively with Rosemary’s Baby and situates itself decisively in lineage with the original Omen: Rosemary didn’t want an abortion, even when it appeared her pregnancy was going to kill her. Margaret and Kathy Thorn, on the other hand, believed they should have some right to determine whether they would carry a pregnancy to term.
That was an impossible belief to act on, however, when the entire shadow Church was lined up to keep the baby in utero until it was fully formed and ready to emerge on its own.
Indeed, as Margaret’s pregnancy supernaturally accelerates, so that she goes from invisibly to very obviously pregnant in a matter of minutes, she is picked up by members of the shadow Church. Tearing at her own clothes to allow her belly to expand with the suddenly burgeoning Antichrist, Margaret loses consciousness. When she comes to, she is strapped to a table, with Cardinal Lawrence hovering above her, assuring her that he loves her and will be with her. Heavily drugged, she is wheeled into a subterranean operating room where she gazes upon row after row of blunt, old-looking gynecological instruments.
Her tormentors—the nuns and priests of the shadow church— perform an awake C-section on her, with her gasping, “I’m in pain!” Soon, Cardinal Lawrence lifts a baby from her belly, still in its amniotic sac. He pierces the sac, revealing not one, but two babies, fully formed.
The first child, to everyone’s disappointment, is a girl. When Margaret hears Cardinal Lawrence joyfully announce that the second child is a boy, she bursts into tears: against her will, without her knowledge or consent, and in spite of her desire to prevent it, she has been forced – literally forced, being bound, drugged, and ripped open by a priest—to give birth to the Antichrist.
Just at this moment, in a truly brilliant moment of synergy with the 1976 Omen, the same song that plays when Kathy is murdered by Mrs. Baylock starts thrumming: “Sanguis, bibimus! Ave Satani!”
The boy is taken from her by the evil nuns and priests who have been coercively controlling and reproductively abusing her all along.
Margaret asks to hold her son, and the clergy joyfully agree, thinking that she, Rosemary-like, is going to succumb to maternal feeling.
Instead, she uses this opportunity to jam a scalpel into Lawrence’s jugular. She then turns the scalpel on the Antichrist himself, but is stopped before she can murder him by Luz, who stabs Margaret with another scalpel. The shadow clergy grab the Antichrist and decide to incinerate Margaret and her unwanted baby daughter together. But Carlita arrives and helps rescue the very seriously injured Margaret and the baby girl.
The final shots of the film are of Margaret, Carlita, and Margaret’s daughter trying to make a life for themselves in a secluded cabin in a wintry wilderness. The room they’re in is lit by dozens of candles and decorated with dozens of bouquets of hanging dried herbs and flowers. They are all laughing and smiling together.
The First Omen, then, leaves room for another chapter in the story, in which a superhuman girl – baby, raised in an all-women environment in the middle of nowhere, could grow up to challenge and perhaps defeat the Antichrist and the wrong-headed clergy who brought him to life.
If that sequel gets made, I can only hope it is directed by Arkasha Stevenson, with her finely attuned sensitivity to how women experience their own bodily suffering as well as the suffering of other women around them.
hexafu 