The First Omen review: A horror prequel done (mostly) right

Horror prequels have a tendency to fizzle for a number of reasons, whether they lean too hard on the lore of the original or they start telegraphing all the punches that made the film they’re prequelizing scary to begin with. On a more primal level, prequels also run the risk of disrupting and undermining one very potent element of horror—the fear of the unknown—by simply making everything, well, known. It’s a minefield in any genre, but in this particular genre, it can be especially calamitous.

If you had to choose a horror franchise ripe for a prequel, though, you could do far worse than The Omen, simply because the original 1976 classic leaves so many things unanswered. At its core, it’s essentially the story of a small group of people who slowly realize they’re in the company of an evil child, then fall victim to gruesome and apparently supernatural ends. For all its hints at a much larger, more frightening conspiracy, Richard Donner’s film keeps those glimpses of something bigger at a distance, focusing instead on two parents who must come to grips with the idea that their child is not what they thought he was.

That leaves all the raw material of how we got to The Omen up for grabs for a new story, one that director Arkasha Stevenson grabs gleefully by the devil horns to deliver a film that’s both a satisfying prequel and a grisly piece of Catholic horror that stands on its own.

This time around, instead of a family learning their place in a dark web of secrets, we get the story from the perspective of a single novitiate nun. Bright-eyed and devoted, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) arrives in Italy to prepare to take her final vows and work at an orphanage in Rome, caring for children who, like her, are in the care of the Church. It’s a job she immediately takes to, much to the delight of her Cardinal patron (Bill Nighy), and she’s especially keen on connecting with a troubled girl named Carlita (Nicole Sorace), who seems shunned by the other nuns for occasional behavioral issues.

Of course, because this is an Omen movie, no sooner has Margaret settled in than trouble starts to seep into her new duties. Weird things happen around the orphanage, some of them seemingly tied directly to Carlita, and a rogue priest named Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, playing the character portrayed by Patrick Troughton in the original film) offers her cryptic warnings that she’s in danger. Soon, Margaret is enveloped in a secret so shocking, it will challenge her faith, and her ability to survive, in ways she never expected.

If this sounds a little bit paint-by-numbers similar to the formula of the original Omen, that’s exactly what the filmmakers want you to think, at least at first. The script, credited to Stevenson, Tim Smith, and Keith Thomas with a story credit for Ben Jacoby, is adept at weaving in story beats from the original film, right down to a hellish homage to the “it’s all for you” suicide sequence from The Omen ‘76. You’ve got the unsuspecting caretaker just trying to support a helpless child, the mad priest warning of imminent danger, and of course the freak accidents claiming lives across the landscape of the narrative, but this sense of holding a mirror up to the original film and sort of vaguely tracing its outline is only there to provide a framework on which the film can hang its own particular horrors.

This is, of course, the film about how baby Damien made it to the Thorn family at the beginning of The Omen. That means by necessity it deals with a freaky pregnancy, and rooting the experience of the horror in the eyes of a woman dramatically alters the emotional landscape of what happens next. Casting Free in the central role, fresh off her triumphant work in stuff like Servant, was a master stroke for the production, and allows Stevenson to anchor the emotional roots of the terror in an actor well equipped for a slow-burn turn from the strange into the full-on nightmarish. So many horror films require their lead actors to simply react to things, to let things happen to them with increasing levels of intensity, and it’s hard to wring an emotionally solid performance out of that. Free does it and then some.

Then there’s Stevenson’s direction, which is at once witty and decidedly wicked in its pacing and ability to toy with our expectations. The film’s opening kill will remind you instantly of similar deaths in The Omen, but just when you think you know exactly how the hammer’s going to fall, Stevenson finds a new way to make your stomach churn and your skin crawl, and that carries through to the rest of the film. It’s a movie that delivers the prequel goods—complete with a pleasant ‘70s throwback style that will surely please retro horror buffs—while also playing with our expectations of what this particular prequel will look like and expanding the world of The Omen in ways that future sequels could wield with ease.

There are still issues, of course. The First Omen’s ambitious effort to be a standalone crowd-pleaser and a prequel steeped in Omen lore make it feel a bit overstuffed, a bit too jumpy as it tries to leap between plot points, and of course fans will be able to quibble with certain bits of the lore that strain credulity in ways the original film’s more reserved take just didn’t. But these are, in the end, minor complaints, because the film just works so well as a pure horror thrill ride. Forget what you think you know about horror prequels. The First Omen gets it, goes for the throat, and never lets go.

The First Omen open in theaters on April 4