Interviews
‘The First Omen’ Director Arkasha Stevenson Reveals How The Score Plays a Unique Role in the Horror
Nell Tiger Free (“Servant”) stars in The First Omen, an upcoming prequel to the original 1976 horror classic directed by Arkasha Stevenson.
The new prequel movie from 20th Century Studios will unleash hell in theaters on April 5, 2024. It’s rated “R” for “Violent content, grisly/disturbing images, and brief graphic nudity.”
The First Omen is based on characters created by David Seltzer (The Omen), with a story by Ben Jacoby (“Bleed”) and a screenplay by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas (Firestarter). It follows young novitiate Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) as she’s sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church. There, she encounters a darkness that causes her to question her own faith and uncovers a terrifying conspiracy that hopes to bring about the birth of evil incarnate.
Ahead of the film’s release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with filmmaker Arkasha Stevenson about tackling a prequel to a heralded classic, including a unique approach to sound and capturing period authenticity.
Creating a horror prequel comes with the unenviable task of keeping savvy audiences on their toes when the ending seems preordained. How do you keep viewers invested in a story with a seemingly forgone conclusion?
Stevenson walks us through her approach to that, “I think you actually stated the key to that is that we know what’s going to happen at the end, right? I think the script, we were just so in love with it because it dovetails into the ’76 version so seamlessly and answers the question of how Damien came into existence. For us, I work with a creative partner, Tim Smith, who is my co-writer on this. For us, there’s a lot of anxiety involved in trying to expand upon The Omen franchise. The original Omen is one of my favorite movies, and it’s a perfect film, so you kind of can’t touch it. But what the script allowed us to do was, it allowed us to explore a whole new character and a whole new world and journey that allowed us to bring our own personal thoughts and perspectives to it.
“I think that’s what Richard Donner did so well in the original, and why that film is such a classic is because everything’s very grounded. These relationships are very grounded. The camera and the way everything is covered is very egoless and un-stylistic, but very elegant. So, you’re constantly just aware of these relationships on screen, and then it’s really just in these very dramatic horror set pieces that you start to see a little bit more style, which I really loved and really appreciated. We wanted to emulate that a bit in this film by making it really character first and keeping the camera quite quiet until you start to feel the presence of something supernatural. This world is starting to swirl, and then the camera can take on a life of its own and become a little bit more stylish.“
Nell Tiger Free as Margaret in 20th Century Studios’ THE FIRST OMEN. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Stevenson’s prequel takes place in 1971, a time and place familiar to The Omen fans. The director took care in establishing the period through sepia tones, soft lighting, and a robust cast of extras to further flesh out this lived-in world. Getting the period right was vital for Stevenson, and she credits her crew for bringing her vision to life.
She explains, “I think something that was really important to us was to make it feel like we’re in the 1970s. A big hope dream of mine was that maybe if somebody watched this in a double feature with the 1976 Omen, that maybe they would think our film was filmed in the same era. So aesthetically, really trying to couch it within that aesthetic. We got to work with these incredible collaborators. Eve Stewart was our production designer. Paco Delgado was our costume designer, and then our cinematographer was Aaron Morton. They had such a keen attention to detail that they were able to really transport us back in time.
“Then also, we got to shoot in Italy and we got to shoot in Rome. I think everybody, no matter what they do in Italy, is just an artist. It’s just in their blood. And so even the extras brought so much passion to what they were doing in the scenes. The riot scene was really daunting to me thinking about shooting that. We wrote it in and then realized, ‘Oh, we have to put this on camera.’ There was 300 extras.”
(L-R): Director Arkasha Stevenson and Nell Tiger Free as Margaret on the set of 20th Century Studios’ THE FIRST OMEN. Photo by Moris Puccio. © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
The First Omen also has a rather recognizable name among the crew in the credits: director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey At Night). Collaborating with Roberts on The First Omen brought Stevenson full circle when it came to her love of horror.
“He did our second unit in principal photography, and he is just one of the most delightful humans on earth,” Stevenson said of Roberts. “He had known our producer, Keith Levine, who brought him on. It was really fun because his DP was Ryan Samul who did, have you seen this movie? We Are What We Are. He shot that. That was one of the films I saw going into film school that got me really excited about making films. So it was just this really interesting full circle moment.”
While The First Omen offers a myriad of ties to the original film in narrative and style, Arkasha Stevenson also pays tribute to Jerry Goldsmith‘s iconic score and “Ave Satani” from the original film. But it’s more than just a tribute; Stevenson evolves the score in The First Omen and brings it more directly into the horror.
“We got to work with Mark Korven, who I think is just such a dark genius,” Stevenson tells Bloody Disgusting. “It’s very intimidating to work with him just because I think he has a hand in a whole other world. The assumption would be in an Omen prequel that you’re going to use the Oscar-winning Goldsmith score. Something that was really important to both Mark and me was to be able to create something that felt like it could be a sister of that score but also was its own creature. Using vocals was really exciting because a lot of this has to do with Margaret’s suppressed intuition and trying to hear her own voice, while these exterior voices are also telling her so much.
“So, to create that feeling with the score by using these vocals that were slowly escalating throughout the entire film. But also, there are these moments where Margaret and the score interact with each other. There’s a moment where she hears the score and pays attention. Then there’s a moment later where the score is feeling what Margaret’s feeling, and physically, she gets pushed down on the bed, and the vocals go, ‘Whoop,’ like they just got pushed on the bed, and it created this feeling of a Greek choir was constantly surrounding her. I thought that was brilliant on Mark’s part.”
(L-R): Director Arkasha Stevenson and Nell Tiger Free as Margaret on the set of 20th Century Studios’ THE FIRST OMEN. Photo by Moris Puccio. © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
Much has already been teased about the near NC-17 rating the prequel almost received for a graphic scene, but there’s one key horror moment that’s sure to get horror fans talking that sees Nell Tiger Free channel her inner Isabelle Adjani from 1981’s Possession. That nod wasn’t accidental, either, as Stevenson walks us through what it was like filming this riveting scene.
“I mean, of course, we did a shameless Possession homage. That was, I think, one of my favorite moments in any film ever. I am obsessed with it, and it felt like such a natural climax for what Margaret was going through. Nell is a force of nature. One of the things that’s so amazing about her is that she is very aware of her body and very intuitive and very instinctual. So, in that scene, we didn’t know each other that well yet. That was the second week. It was, I think, maybe the first day of the second week. The crew was still getting to know each other. She was still trying to get to know the crew. And it was 4:00 AM. We had just smashed a car. Then it’s like, Nell walks on, and I’ve never been more nervous in my life.
“I don’t know why. Just because this, in itself, is such sacred territory and there’s a lot of pressure to bring your own vision to it. I was worried, ‘Does Nell feel comfortable?’ I was like, ‘Do you want music? Should we block it out? What do you want to do?’ And she was like, ‘I just want to do it.’ Okay, rock on. She did two takes, and that was it. Each take lasted over three minutes. I mean, I would just play the whole take. In the director’s cut, the whole takes in there.”
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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