The First Omen

 I haven't posted anything on this blog in a while, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk about what is this year's biggest cinematic surprise so far: a "legacy" horror prequel/ sequel/reboot that is actually really good!

After approximately seven hundred thousand Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel, prequels, and reboots and especially after last year's crushingly terrible The Exorcist: Believer, you would be excused for believing that the carcass of '70s horror classics had been well and truly picked clean. 

Not that there haven't been decent follow-ups to the big horror hitters of the 1970s. The Exorcist had The Exorcist III, a genuinely pretty great horror film in its own right, even with all its flaws. Alien had Aliens. Halloween had at least a couple of sequels/ remakes that are well regarded. But overall, abominations like The Exorcist II - and The Exorcist: Believer - are more the norm than the exception.

Which brings us to The First Omen. I can hardly think of anything that has been less in-demand than a prequel to Richard Donner's horror classic, The Omen. It already had a remake that crashed and burned in the mid 2000s and its sequels, which I admittedly haven't gotten around to yet, are not overly well-remembered. But a prequel? Prequels suck in general, but I would have thought I would rather have seen the origin story of Bruce the Shark than of a pre-Damien Omen.      

But not only is The First Omen a worthwhile prequel, I think it might actually even be better than the original film. It does wobble a bit in the final act, as so many horror films do (horror monsters are almost always scarier before you see them and certainly before they are explained), but it gets enough right to forgive its occasional dips into silliness and over-exposition. 

Set in Italy in 1971, the film follows a young American novice named Margaret who joins a Catholic orphanage in Rome as a teacher before taking her final vows, but as we learn more about her troubled past, it soon becomes clear that something deeply wrong is going on at the orphanage. 

Wildly original, it ain't - the Sydney-Sweeney-starring Conception looks to be treading very similar ground in cinemas overseas right now (it only hits South African shores in a few weeks, I believe) - but the great strength of good theological horror has always been the way it taps into some of humanity's oldest beliefs and fears. Along with ghost stories, theological horror is easily my favourite sub-genre of horror for this exact reason. 

It doesn't matter whether you believe in the particular religion at hand - which in horror is, let's be honest, usually Catholicism - or even, I assume, if you have no religion at all, the existential questions that religions deal with (why are we here? is there life after death? is there more to the universe than the purely physical? if God is "good" why is there so much evil in the world?) are so baked into the human psyche, that ghosts and demons have an ability to grab us and scare us in a way that, say, vampires and werewolves never will. They certainly do for me.  

Director Arkasha Stevenson (Legion, Brand New Cherry Flavour) and his co-writers, Tim Smith and Keith Thomas (working off a story by Ben Jacoby), clearly understand this too. No, they're not above some cheap jump scares and they are careful to connect the dots between this and the original film, both narratively and visually/ auditorily, but the reason the film is as good as it is, is precisely because they clearly have an excellent understanding of the foundations on which good theological horror is built. 

To go back, once again, to The Exorcist, as I slowly morph into Mark Kermode before your very eyes, the genius of the Exorcist, especially of Blatty's original novels of both it and Legion/ The Exorcist III, is how seriously it takes its questions of faith, evil and the existence of God, and though the original Omen is a much more superficial affair, traces of the same questions still exist. On the flip side, while these sorts of questions were all but completely absent in the utterly vacuous The Exorcist: Believer, they still permeate The First Omen - arguably more than they did the original.

And it's on top of these basics that Stevenson and co. craft this particular tale with expert care. The film is genuinely creepy - and, at times, very, very gory (it just avoided the dreaded NC-17 in the US and is rated 18 here, though the BBFC in the UK only rated it 15). The story is gripping. The production design somehow manages to draw a connection between the 1970s, the 1930s and today in the way the film looks and sounds. The connections to the original film are woven together nicely. And the performances are uniformly terrific with standout performances by the likes of Bill Nighy, Ralph Ineson, and Sonia Braga. 

But at its heart, and why it all ultimately fits together as well as it does, is that the whole film revolves around a well-defined main character, Margaret (played by an outstanding Nell Tiger Free) whose own questions of faith, evil, and her place in something with as complicated a history as the Catholic Church, drive both her actions and the film itself. It's a performance and a character that gives weight, grounding and focus to a film that could so easily have gone wrong, but instead might just be the greatest horror prequel... ever? That may not be saying much, but it's certainly not nothing.

8/10