Editorials
She is Risen: Make ‘The First Omen’ an Easter Horror Tradition
When horror fans talk about The First Omen, Arkasha Stevenson‘s wildly entertaining and stunningly elegant prequel to The Omen, they tend to focus on one scene in particular.
As the film reaches its climax its protagonist, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), realizes that she is pregnant with the literal spawn of Satan, and in one of the most striking horror moments of the 2020s so far, seizes and writhes and growls in the middle of a Roman street while her belly distends, signalling that she’s doomed to deal with this baby no matter what.
It’s a remarkable moment of performance, and a terrific tribute to the one-take wonder that is Isabelle Adjani‘s signature Possession moment, but for me, it’s not actually the most interesting piece of Free’s work in the film. That comes much earlier when, as a young novitiate nun newly arrived in Rome, she lets her roommate and fellow novice Luz (Maria Caballero) take her out for dancing and drinking. Tipsy, scantily dressed, and overwhelmed by what’s around her, Margaret allows a young man named Paolo (Andrea Arcangeli) to lure her out onto the dance floor for something seductive, dangerous, and – though she doesn’t know it yet – terrifying.
Rewatching the film this week, I was lost in Nell Tiger Free’s eyes in this moment, because she’s holding so much there. Margaret is intrigued, thrilled, and eager. She’s also terribly frightened and, as Free’s movements suggest, seemingly not entirely in control of her own body. As a young woman who’s done nothing but live as virtuously as possible for years, she is caught between two worlds, her feet carrying her into uncharted territory.
The First Omen is unique among the other films in its franchise, in no small part because of its decision to center the narrative entirely on a woman, particularly a woman brought up in the innately patriarchal corridors of the Catholic Church to trust in a system poised to betray her. Like Mary, the Mother of God, Margaret has given herself over to the labors and burdens of her faith, finding salvation in her calling to serve. And like Mary, she will be called to bear a savior, only to be pushed to the back of the narrative when her job is done.
But Margaret is not so easily dismissed. That look in Nell Tiger Free’s eyes as she approaches the dance floor, stepping out of one world and into another, indicates the start of something much more, a kind of chrysalis state from which she will emerge forever changed, and not just because of her impending motherhood. It’s a rebirth, and because Easter is both a holiday centered on fertility and the bloom of spring and a holiday devoted to resurrection and new life, it makes The First Omen the perfect horror film to turn into an Easter viewing tradition.
Easter, like every other major holiday in Christendom, is a time of symbols, some of them pagan and some of them relatively new. From the cross to the eggs to the budding flora, it is all an aesthetic appreciation of new life, both spiritual and biological, and because The First Omen is a horror film, Stevenson and co-writers Tim Smith and Keith Thomas immediately latch on to many of those symbols to twist them for their own purposes.
The promise of children living in the orphanage where Margaret starts work seems to be all about new life and fresh starts, and yet the nuns there, led by Sister Silva (Sonia Braga), seem devoted to punishment and order more than celebration and potential. Margaret’s own sexuality, carefully obscured by her faith but emerging nonetheless, becomes both a tool of oppression for those manipulating her and a way to blame Margaret herself for any pain she’s about to experience. Even the nun’s wimples (the white headpiece that runs from their neck all the way over the top of their head) are perverted, converted to sinister black hoods for dark purposes. But even beyond symbolism, there’s the way Stevenson is able to twist gorgeously rendered shots of Christian ritual and architecture into something frightening.
The most famous of these moments is Margaret at prayer, framed by two long iron candelabra that resemble jaws studded with sharp teeth, but that’s far from the only example. Every frame in the film is packed with movement and depth, which serves not just to up the ante on visual motifs but to create the sense that something might lurk in the shadows, or just out of the corner of your eye, in every single frame.
Because it’s a film about a nun who’s unwittingly impregnated with the Antichrist, The First Omen‘s focus on fertility and its light and dark sides also makes it a great Easter film. There is undeniably a part of Margaret that delights in what happens when she’s unleashed, when she lets herself free of the moral codes by which she’s lived her whole life, even slightly, even if guilt follows. More importantly, though, the horror elements of the film zero in on the contradictions of the powerful people who guide Margaret’s path. Like the Mother of Christ before her, she is simultaneously expected to endure the pains and restrictions of childbirth (in truly horrific fashion) while also withholding all sexual pleasure. In the early days of Christianity, Church Fathers went to great lengths to argue that Mary remained a virgin for life. Here, while she might not be a virgin, Margaret is expected to live the same kind of life and be revered as a Mother of the New Church.
Which brings us to the most potent element of The First Omen, at least where Easter is concerned. Like every other Christian holiday, symbol, or piece of doctrine, Easter has often been used as a cudgel, a blunt instrument designed to break up dissent, repress believers, and allow the powerful to take advantage of the masses. Margaret’s experience in The First Omen is the ultimate example of precisely that kind of manipulative thinking.
She is pulled in many directions at once, forced into compliance while also given glimpses of the life she could be living without the church’s cudgel hanging over her head, and Stevenson is a smart enough filmmaker to be sure that we always see the distinction. More than that, though, Stevenson uses this power imbalance as the platform for a different kind of resurrection, a kind in which a novice nun pushed into a pregnancy she didn’t want gets to reclaim something of her narrative by the end.
Margaret is, for better and for worse, reborn by the end of this movie. She is Risen, and for horror fans, that’s cause to celebrate.
The First Omen is currently available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.
Of the three films that make up the Diabolical Trinity of classic religious horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)—The Omen is the most purely entertaining.
While Rosemary’s Baby digs into the societal shifts of the 60s and The Exorcist explores spiritual tensions between faith and doubt in an ever-shifting world, The Omen seems most interested in just telling a thrilling story. It achieves this by blending two major trends of the 1970s, the devil movie and the paranoid thriller, into one crackling adventure yarn. In the process, The Omen has sparked fear and curiosity about what could happen in the “end times” if such events are to occur.
After seeing The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard contacted writer David Seltzer and said something along the lines of, “Hey, write me one of those.” Seltzer, having never read the Bible, thought it would be an interesting challenge, so, according to various interviews, he read the Bible and several commentaries in search of a story. Then he stumbled upon a passage in the book of Revelation, the image of a great Beast rising out of the sea, that sparked his imagination. In the commentaries, he found that the sea represented politics in some interpretations of the text, and he began building his story on that foundation.
Seltzer has told this story often, and I am inclined to believe him. However, from there, much of the theological-sounding lore of The Omen was created purely by Seltzer. Many of the ideas surrounding The Antichrist in the film appear to be drawn much more from the pop-eschatology sensation of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, than any Biblical source.
Lindsay’s book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s and re-popularized views of the “last days” that had been dying along with fundamentalism for decades, namely Dispensationalism, Millennialism, and the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. In dispensationalism, history is broken into several epochs of time (or dispensations) that culminate in the return of Christ and his thousand-year (millennial) reign.
Before this return, a seven-year Tribulation will occur in which the Antichrist comes to power and persecutes all who oppose him, culminating in a battle between the forces of good and evil at the valley of Megiddo, usually called Armageddon. Of course, in this worldview, the true believers in Jesus will be lifted out, or raptured, before all this takes place. Since the publication and popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth, this has been the prominent belief in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian circles, though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant denominations largely reject it.
Lindsay also did something unique that had not been the case even in dispensationalist circles before him—he posited that the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 started the countdown to Armageddon. Fans of the film will immediately realize where Seltzer ran with this idea in the first line of the poem created for the movie: “When the Jews return to Zion…”
Damien Thorn and the Creation of Horror’s “Innocent Villain”
Seltzer’s next inspiration focused on the idea of the Antichrist as a child, what he would call the film’s “innocent villain.” In watching The Omen, it is readily apparent that Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) does not really do anything evil beyond a bit of normal kid mischief. Even the moment in which Damien knocks Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) over a second-floor railing can be read as an accident orchestrated by Damien’s diabolically connected nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The film takes this idea of the innocent villain a step further by casting Gregory Peck, best known for playing arguably the greatest father in film history, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as Damien’s earthly father, an element that greatly satisfied Seltzer.
The New Testament itself says very little about the Antichrist and certainly nothing about his childhood. In fact, the word antichrist is used twice (1 John 2:18 and 2 John 7 for the curious) and refers to groups of people, not a particular person. There is also a passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 in which the writer (usually attributed to Paul) discusses “The Man of Lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God” and “proclaim himself to be God.”
Then there is the Beast of Revelation chapter 13 with “seven heads and ten horns” that Seltzer latched onto, which has been interpreted in a multitude of ways over the centuries. Powerful people throughout history, from Charlemagne, various Popes during the Protestant Reformation era, Napoleon and Hitler, to modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have all had the label placed on them by various circles. Even religious leaders like Billy Graham have not escaped being called the Antichrist.
Lindsay and modern dispensationalists are certain the Antichrist will be a 21st-century individual as they are equally certain that the Rapture, Tribulation, and return of Christ are imminent, likely within their lifetime. Many scholars and theologians, however, interpret these passages as symbolic representations of the Roman Empire and the first-century Caesars who persecuted, tortured, and murdered Christians and Jews who refused to submit to Imperial rule and worship them as gods. For example, that the Beast from the sea in Revelation has seven heads is symbolic of the famous seven mountains of Rome, with the 10 horns referring to rulers and magistrates of the Empire.
But this is all really of no matter to Seltzer and the story of The Omen. Instead of being concerned with any historical or theological accuracy, he instead built his own lore, which sends Robert Thorn and photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) on a globetrotting investigation into the nature of the Antichrist and how to stop him. Some of this lore includes the child being born of a jackal, the reaction of animals, the protective cult that arises around Damien, the daggers of Megiddo, and maybe most interesting of all, the peculiar flaws in Jennings’s photographs that presage the ways certain individuals will die.
All these aspects are where the paranoid thrillers come in, as films like Blow Up (1966), Z (1969), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), 3 Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) were all the rage at the time. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the idea of journalists (like Jennings) as ordinary heroes who could bring down the powerful, nefarious forces in the world was exactly what audiences craved. And what greater hidden evil force was there than the Devil? This is also why the device of the daggers of Megiddo is so important to a movie like this. If Damien is indeed the Antichrist, there must be a way to stop him, though in the Biblical text, the only power capable of destroying the Devil is God Himself.
The Mark of the Beast, 666, and the Film’s Most Famous Religious Symbolism
The piece of lore created for the movie with the most solid Biblical grounding is the Mark of the Beast. Revelation describes a mark on the forehead or hand of those who worship the Beast and his image. Again, this is symbolic language differentiating those who belong to the power of the Roman Empire and those who belong to Christ, who have the Mark of the Lamb. In Seltzer’s hands, the mark is very literal, a birthmark that is borne by not only the Antichrist but all his followers, meaning they are marked from before birth as belonging to Satan, and there is no escaping it. This is all rather distressing to the priest Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who betrays his mark by warning Thorn about Damien and pays the price by memorably being impaled by a spire that falls from a church steeple after being struck by lightning.
Why is the mark three sixes? Again, this is drawn from a passage in Revelation that states that the Beast can be identified by calculating his number. In Biblical scholarship, this is believed to be the sum of the name of a man transferred into Hebrew numerology, a practice in which each Hebrew letter also represents a number. Using this method, the number of the name Caesar Nero, which many believe to be the most logical choice, is six hundred sixty-six. In the film and elsewhere, this number is changed to three individual sixes. According to the film, this represents the Diabolical Trinity (a designation also unique to the film) made up of Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet. That Damien carries this unique birthmark under his hair convinces Robert that the child is the Antichrist, and it’s up to him to destroy him.
Part of what makes The Omen great is its ambiguity. Damien could be the Antichrist, or he could be at the center of a series of coincidences. Director Richard Donner stated in interviews that he believed Robert Thorn had gone insane by the end of the film, which, to Donner, is the only explanation for why Thorn would attempt to kill an innocent child. However, that enigmatic smile in the final shot suggests that Damien does embody a spirit of great evil. The sequels, however, all but erase this ambiguity.
In audiences, The Omen sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the Antichrist and the dispensationalist interpretation of the end times that continues to echo throughout the last five decades. Around the time of the film’s release, even Elvis Presley was photographed brandishing a paperback copy of Seltzer’s novelization. Dispensationalist authors like Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee have made millions publishing books and giving lectures about the Antichrist and the end of the world.
The Legacy of The Omen, 50 Years Later
Though A Thief in the Night (1972) preceded The Omen in initial release, it gained quite a resurgence (along with the ability to create three sequels) in the wake of the popularity of The Omen and went on to scar the psyches of Evangelical children for decades. Hal Lindsay was also able to release a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1978, complete with narration and a brief onscreen appearance from Orson Welles.
In the 1990s, the Left Behind series became a cultural phenomenon, spawning twelve books in the core series, a YA spinoff series, video games, and a movie series (2000-2005) starring Kirk Cameron. A bigger studio adaptation of the first book was released in 2014, starring Nicolas Cage. 20th Century Fox and The Omen got in on the renewed “end-of-the-world” vigor by releasing a remake of the original film on June 6, 2006. The franchise was revived once again in 2024 with The First Omen, which explores ideas of the Antichrist and the motivations of those in power in our current religious, social, and political context.
But despite all the sequels, spinoffs, rip-offs, remakes, and “end times” money grabs of the last 50 years, the original version of The Omen remains untouchable. Its greatest strength is that it seeks, first and foremost, to entertain. And it does so admirably.
After half a century, its influence can be felt in horror, the culture at large, and even in various faith circles. It is a testament to the power of story and film that, consciously or unconsciously, fans of The Omen and those who have never seen it alike are, to this very day, marked by the Beast.
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