The shot that sticks with you the most was there from the beginning.
Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The First Omen and references to sexual violence
The Big Picture
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The First Omen
revitalizes a middling franchise with a bold, provocative approach that will unnerve and surprise audiences. - Director Arkasha Stevenson’s intense pitch for the film included graphic, visceral body horror scenes to explore themes of sexual assault and empowerment.
- The film faced issues of censorship during production, with the MPAA allowing graphic violence but having more qualms about sexual content.
The First Omen is a return to a franchise that may not hold as much weight as its 1970s horror contemporaries, but is iconic enough to maintain a legacy. The latest addition takes a lot from its predecessor, creating a slow burn-style horror that relies more on atmosphere and imagery than creepy jump scares. It makes for a refreshing approach to the nearly 50-year-old franchise that is sure to leave an impression on audiences. Part of this is the result of the first-time feature film director Arkasha Stevenson and her particular take on the material. In fact, what made her stand out to producers in her pitch was one particular image that would turn into something so visceral, it’s hard to believe a studio owned by the Disney corporation allowed anything of the sort.
The First Omen
A young American woman is sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church, but encounters a darkness that causes her to question her faith and uncovers a terrifying conspiracy that hopes to bring about the birth of evil incarnate.
- Release Date
- April 5, 2024
- Director
- Arkasha Stevenson
- Cast
- Ralph Ineson , Nell Tiger Free , Bill Nighy , sonia braga
- Main Genre
- Horror
- Writers
- Tim Smith , Arkasha Stevenson , Keith Thomas , Ben Jacoby , David Seltzer
‘The Omen’ Needed a Fresh Approach
The original story of a parent discovering that their child is the anti-christ was a huge hit upon release in 1976. The Omen even won an Academy Award for its iconic score. Despite this, the sequels that followed, Damien: Omen II and Omen III: The Final Conflict, proved to be diminishing returns, and a fourth entry, Omen IV: The Awakening, was relegated to being a TV movie that was generally reviled. The franchise remained dormant for 15 years, until a straight remake was made, possibly to capitalize on the release date of June 6th, 2006 (or 6/6/06.) The Omen (2006) was a certified box office hit, making over 100 million worldwide, but proved to be another disappointment for fans and audiences alike. But ten years went by, and it was time for 20th Century Fox to revisit the franchise once more.
‘The First Omen’ Sequel Could Explain This Unexplored ‘Omen’ Lore
“I have a lot of theories about that, and I think that’d be an interesting thing to explore.”
The development for The First Omen was first announced in April, 2016. Along with the announcement, it was revealed that Kevin Turen and David S. Goyer would produce a prequel written by Ben Jacoby, to be directed by Antonio Campos. Campos was fresh off of Sundance hit Christine (starring Rebecca Hall) and would further prove his dramatic chops by directing episodes of The Sinner and all of The Staircase. But The First Omen lingered in development, likely due to the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney and the Covid-19 pandemic, and little was heard of the film until 2022. That May, it was announced that Stevenson would be the new director and that she would be re-writing the script with her writing partner Tim Smith. But audiences could not expect what the two would have in mind.
How Arkasha Stevenson Pitched ‘The First Omen’
In a recent interview with Sean Fennessey on The Big Picture podcast, Stevenson detailed her path to filmmaking and The First Omen. Inspired by seeing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at a bar in Los Angeles and subsequently watching another David Lynch film (Wild at Heart), she left her career as a photojournalist and applied to Lynch’s alma mater, the American Film Institute. After graduating, she made two short films which subsequently led to her work directing on TV shows like Briarpatch and Legion. But it was her work directing season three of Channel Zero that showed horror fans she had the chops to direct larger-scale horror movies. Over the course of this schooling and professional experience, Stevenson explained, she developed an affinity for expression through body horror, finding that it helped her to connect with her own body image in a strange way. Naturally, this came into play in the first meeting she had about The First Omen.
While she was initially skeptical about a prequel to The Omen, she read the script that had been developed and recognized a lot of the themes she was interested in exploring through film. Feeling under-qualified, she and Smith decided the best approach was to go all out with the pitch, and the producers would either like it or it wouldn’t be the right fit. Together they pitched a scene where Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) watches what she thinks is a baby being born, but in a slow and explicit close-up, is revealed to be a demon’s hand emerging from a vagina. It’s an image Fennessey describes as “provacative and aggressive,” and while it definitely is, Stevenson wasn’t aiming for pure shock value. For Stevenson, the pivotal scene represented the movie as a whole.
“This is a movie about sexual assault and the female form getting mutilated and violated. If we’re going to tell this story, we’re going to do it with imagery like this,” Stevenson said to Fennessey. She stuck to her pitch, and Goyer and Turen responded positively. Stevenson was offered the job and began re-writing the script with Smith. To add to the body horror, the final film includes a pretty striking sequence as Margaret rapidly comes to terms with the anti-Christ, only to be followed by her receiving a cesarean section. While the initial scene from the pitch ultimately made it into the final film, it didn’t have the easiest path to get there.
‘The First Omen’s Birthing Scene Faced Censorship Issues
A close-up of a vagina birthing a demon’s hand wasn’t going to avoid raising eyebrows along the way. As Stevenson told Perri Nemiroff of Collider, the major battle to keep The First Omen from receiving an NC-17 rating was how this scene was edited. Initially, Stevenson had a frontal view in mind and some shots of the birth as it’s just beginning. But after a lot of back and forth, they came to a compromise to start in a profile shot and only move to the forward-facing shot once it was clearly a demon’s hand. While ultimately different than what was intended, Stevenson felt she had full support from the producers and the studio to make this happen. What she was surprised by was what the MPAA didn’t seem to have issues with.
She would go on to say, “We have a pretty gory movie, we have a lot of violence, we have a lot of body horror. And we also have a demon phallus, and none of that triggered an NC-17 rating.” But the MPAA has always had strange rules and more qualms about sexual content than violence or horror. For one reason or another, graphic violence can make it into a PG-13 (sometimes with a simple removal of the blood), but a mild sex scene with natural, un-gratuitous, nudity makes it an R-rated film. But in hindsight, Stevenson found the scene in The First Omen “strangely more graphic” after they made all the edits.
‘The First Omen’ Revitalized the Franchise
The Omen is not a franchise with the same power as the enduring Halloween movies, nor the prestige of The Exorcist (despite it’s mixed sequels). Rather, The Omen exists somewhere in between, not unlike The Amityville Horror, but with slightly higher regard. Stevenson’s bold ideas that both provoke and unsettle are exactly what this movie needed. Despite returning to a nearly 50-year-old franchise, The First Omen is unnerving and surprising, and finds a way to be relevant to the current world. While it’s not yet a box office hit, hopefully word will spread and more people will see the pervasive images Stevenson created.
The First Omen is currently playing in theaters in the U.S.
This article was originally published on collider.com