'The First Omen' Lurks in Theaters This Weekend

Easter was just a week ago, but that's not stopping a new horror prequel from mining Catholic beliefs for fresh scares. The First Omen tells the story that preceded the 1970s hit horror film The Omen,  and it doesn't pull any punches as it dives into the warped theology underlying the story. Read on for details.

Via Variety.

“Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” spat Hamlet. “Get thee to a nunnery!” Oh, if the Prince of Darkness … er, Denmark, only knew what evil lurks within such walls.

In the first “Omen” movie, the infant Antichrist, Damien — born at 6 a.m. on the sixth day of the sixth month — is given to an American diplomat and his wife to be raised as their own. The adoptive father is told that the boy’s mother died during childbirth, but upon closer investigation (exhuming her grave, marked Maria Scianna), he discovers not a human skeleton but that of a jackal. For nearly half a century, that was practically all the backstory audiences needed for “The Omen” to remain one of the most terrifying movies ever made.

Now comes “The First Omen,” the latest in a frenzy of high-profile prequels fleshing out the origins of long-running franchises. Tapping into another trend, “The Omen” also got the reboot treatment in 2006, though this latest entry proceeds as if said reset never happened. Set in 1971, the atmospheric period piece fits rather neatly into the classic trilogy setup, creatively reverse-engineering the legend of Damien’s birth (the fourth, made-for-TV chapter can also be ignored). Who was his mother, and how did this demon child come to be conceived?

Since horror fans know where things are headed, director Akasha Stevenson and co-writers Tim Smith and Keith Thomas can slyly embed references that achieve full ominousness by association with what’s to come — like the nun who steps off a high ledge after pledging, “It’s all for you,” or the close-call opening scene, which foreshadows how the surviving priest dies in the original film. For most audiences, our imaginations did a freakier job of extrapolating Damien’s provenance than this prequel can manage.

That said, Stevenson’s consistently unsettling and gleefully sacrilegious offering packs its share of legitimate shocks en route to one glaringly obvious “surprise.” Like “Rosemary’s Baby” — the film, along with “The Exorcist,” that paved the way for this Satan-centric saga — “The First Omen” focuses on the female perspective and deals in the darkest sort of pregnancy anxieties. After all, what could be worse than carrying the child of a jackal, or whatever the film’s ungodly parent is supposed to be?

Incidentally, long after Ira Levin wrote “Rosemary’s Baby,” he followed it up with a potboiler called “Son of Rosemary,” in which the assumed Antichrist grows up to be a celebrated humanitarian. On the eve of the millennium, the charismatic 33-year-old convinces the whole world to light celebratory candles, unleashing a toxic substance that wipes out humankind … and then Rosemary wakes up — not at the beginning of Levin’s sequel, but at the start of the first book, effectively invalidating all that has come before. There’s a risk, in extending any popular horror myth, of diluting the impact of the original.

Stevenson takes a respectful approach to the “Omen” series, if not to Catholic traditions or clergy.

Get the rest of the story at Variety.