We had a little Halloween Film Night and watched The First Omen (2024) - we were underwhelmed. Because we wasted Halloween with it and according to Google Analytics no one is reading this blog apart from us, this post ended up more like just a collection of our less than positive opinions on the movie rather than the usual tidy review. So, if someone other than us is reading this, there will be snark and SPOILERS, and no Verdict in the end. You have been warned.
The Plot: Father Bennett learns about a conspiracy to bring about the Antichrist. Meanwhile Margaret, a young American novice arrives in Rome to take her vows and teach at a convent school. There, she meets Carlita, who’s kept apart from the other children. A former problem child herself, who used to have terrifying visions, Margaret tries to help her. However, soon strange things begin to happen, and Father Bennett asks for her help stopping the conspirators.
You can tell The First Omen is Elevated Horror rather than just plain horror because it touches on themes of women’s bodily autonomy and maintaining one’s individuality in the face of oppressive authority. Oh, and because, even though it’s set in Rome, it looks colourless and dull. There’s a good shot of Margaret praying framed by candles and the catacombs where the bad guys do their evil business are suitably creepy, but that’s it. There are horror images, like a nun replicating the ‘It’s all for you!’ suicide from the original The Omen, now with added self-immolation, or the glimpses of a big clawed paw, but it all looks muted and muddy. Even Paolo being cut in 2 after being pinned against a wall by a car doesn’t feel as gruesome as it should, though we get to see part of his insides. Worse, we found the scene of Margaret turning around holding his upper half unintentionally funny, which we’re sure wasn’t the filmmakers’ intention. In keeping with the pregnancy theme, the audience is treated to a long sequence in which Margaret watches a woman give birth and hallucinates a clawed paw coming out of her. It’s raw and so very lazy. Yes, giving birth can look scary, we all know this. There were also spiders. We have no idea why, but there were. This should be suspenseful and permeated by a sense of dread, but not only does Margaret not even know that there’s something abnormal going on, but the audience also doesn’t get any ominous looks or visible suspicious activity from the nuns and priests around her. Her relationship with Carlita could’ve been her way into the convent school’s nefarious plans, but their interactions are limited to Margaret telling her how she was also a problem child and that it’s great that she’s pushing back against the mean nuns (and this after being told that Carlita was punished for having bitten one of the Sisters). The mentions of the visions are frustratingly vague. They could’ve compared visions and talked about the inspiration for Carlita’s creepy drawings, so the audience would get to see Margaret putting the pieces together, but the movie would rather have Father Bennett (who famously got turned into a shish kebab in the first The Omen while its signature spooky soundtrack blared in the background) tell her what the nuns and the nice priest, now Cardinal, who watched over her at the orphanage, are planning to do.
And this brings us to The Plan, this great conspiracy to create the Antichrist. Good Omens blamed Satanist nuns, The First Omen blames ambitious members of the clergy who want to scare people back into the Church. There’s so much stupid involved in this that we’re not sure we’ll be able to articulate just how idiotic this plot is. How would this even come about?
CONSPIRATOR 1: People are abandoning the Church, but our plan will bring them back! All we have to do is summon a demon that would surely freak everyone out if they saw it thus fulfilling our main goal and… get it to impregnate a human woman so she can birth the Antichrist, who will look like a normal baby and thus be substantially less scary than the demon we summoned, so that when he grows up he can do all the Antichrist stuff, which would mean having huge amounts of power that would make him impossible to control. Also, according to the Bible, Satan’s spawn taking over is one of the stages of the Apocalypse, which in turn will mean the End for everyone, including us, who will likely end up in a fiery pit alongside Satan and all his supporters due to our role in bringing about the Antichrist.
CONSPIRATOR 2: That’s brilliant, even if the Antichrist as such doesn’t exist in the Bible and being members of the clergy we should be following the Book of Revelation rather than Hollywood’s interpretation of it.
CONSPIRATOR 3: Hmm, only 2 babies survived and they’re both girls. We could do gender-swapped Beasts, which are mentioned in the Book of Revelation, unlike the Antichrist, who doesn’t exist as such in the Bible.
CONSPIRATOR 1: Nonsense! We will get the demon we summoned and which would surely freak everyone out if they saw it thus fulfilling our main goal and… get it to impregnate one of its own daughters so she can birth the Antichrist, who will look like a normal baby and thus be substantially less scary than the demon we summoned, so that when he grows up he can do all the Antichrist stuff, which would mean having huge amounts of power that would make him impossible to control. Also, according to the Bible, Satan’s spawn taking over is one of the stages of the Apocalypse, which in turn will mean the End for everyone, including us, who will likely end up in a fiery pit alongside Satan and all his supporters due to our role in bringing about the Antichrist.
CONSPIRATORS 2 & 3: That’s brilliant, even if the Antichrist as such doesn’t exist in the Bible and being members of the clergy we should be following the Book of Revelation rather than Hollywood’s interpretation of it.
So, which group didn’t read the Bible? The fictional conspiring clergy people or the filmmakers? And even if you go by Hollywood’s interpretation of the concept of Antichrist, this plan is OTT stupid. The Satanist nuns from Good Omens made a lot more sense.
The identity of the planned mother of the Antichrist is treated as a certainty throughout the movie… until it’s time for the twist. So, turns out it’s not Carlita, but Margaret. There’s more than one problem with this. The first is that we figured it out pretty early on, so all the misdirection and the characters focusing on Carlita felt like a waste of time. If the story had acknowledged this from the start and instead focused on creating a sense of dread as we watched Margaret going around completely oblivious to all the sinister plotting involving her, it would’ve been fine. However, the movie treated it as a big twist. If that was the goal, then maybe there should’ve been less things in common between the 2 young women. Margaret’s parentage and role being only revealed near the end means that she barely has any chance to react to it. On top of that, it’s a fast-progressing pregnancy, so it doesn’t take long until she’s snarling in the middle of the street while her belly grows and her waters break in a scene that was more awkward than harrowing. After this, she ends up in the catacombs, surrounded by the dumbest conspirators in the history of conspiracies. The little demonic bundle of joy comes out via a surprisingly clean c-section performed by a surprisingly considerate doctor who sews Margaret back up though they’re going to kill her. Then, surprise! They’re twins and the other baby is a girl who will, of course be rejected so all the problem, used, unwanted girls can band together and escape the clutches of the oppressive patriarchal Church. Or something. Because even though the conspirators set fire to the catacombs on their way out, and even the jackal burns, Carlita manages to save Margaret and her baby. Just how ridiculous is this? Well, the catacombs are below the convent, so setting them on fire is definitely a bad idea; Carlita was always being closely watched and sometimes even kept locked away but now, in this very important occasion, she’s free, no one notices her in the catacombs, and somehow she knows another way out; and last but not the least, the conspirators not killing Margaret and her baby before setting the fire, when their continued existence could ruin their carefully laid plans.
A few years later, the trio is living in bliss in an isolated mountain cabin when Father Bennett shows up to warn them that the idiot conspirators finally figured out they survived, and tell them that Margaret’s son, to whom he refers as ‘it’, is now named Damien. So, now, the Antichrist has a secret family of Satan spawns that include a twin sister. We found some online speculation that the sister might counteract his powers, which sounded both lame and plausible. We also found some attempts to downplay the jackal being the father rather than the mother as was stated in The Omen, as if that doesn’t openly contradict it. What was the point of dumping all this on a franchise with an already established canon? Honestly, with all these changes and additions, The First Omen could’ve easily been its own movie. Please, Hollywood, just stop with prequels and sequels and requels and make more original content that doesn’t require messing with existing works!