A film can live or die by its club scene. A successful one captures the dance floor as a world onto itself. As Barbara Ehrenreich theorizes in Dancing in the Streets, it’s a place of “ecstatic ritual.” And as evinced by one thrilling sequence from Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, a prequel to 1976’s The Omen, it’s where the divine and the blasphemous dance hand in hand. In the film, soaring choral notes blur the lines between the holy and the profane, just as the club’s strobing lights derange the thrillingly sexy and the dangerous.
The night before she takes the veil, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) trepidatiously grabs her last opportunity to experience what she’s about to relinquish to the Catholic Church. The young American, who’s recently relocated to Rome to work at a convent that runs an orphanage, trades her novitiate garb for an ocean-blue sequined dress with a razor-sharp slit down the front. Looking in the mirror, she begins to grasp her own desirability. But at the discotheque, the transcendent possibilities of dancing to Italian pop music under flickering orange lights soon submerge Margaret, and by extension the audience, into the nightmarish world of the Church.
Stevenson, making her feature directorial debut, clearly delights in taking the familiar tropes of horror movies, even set pieces from and references to Richard Donner’s The Omen, and subverting them just enough so that they feel not only enlivened but even more upsetting. The 1976 film’s famous “it’s all for you” scene is transformed from possibly dated and obvious fan service to a frame that lingers in the mind long after the scene containing it has ended.
As Margaret races to protect a young girl (Nicole Sorace) in the orphanage and figure out the secret that the centuries-old institution has been hiding, Stevenson conjures the young nun’s fraying psyche with unhinged expressiveness. Here and elsewhere, Stevenson dabbles in body-horror tropes and visual metaphors, enlivening them using a rigorous and painterly approach. As the camera glides to and fro through the amber light glowing in the orphanage’s hallways and deep into its shadows, the film makes plain that this is a physical, cultural, political, and social institution at the breaking point—a Pandora’s box about to be smashed open.
Pulsating in the film’s veins is an eerie eroticism and a tactile awareness of the way the Church is controlling the bodies and minds of its women. Inside the annals of the orphanage’s cathedral, Margaret stumbles upon a plot to impregnate a devoted young woman with the Antichrist, giving non-believers something real to fear, and thus inspire a return to the Church. Those evil glances that so often proliferate in supernatural horror movies here have an added dimension, gesturing not only to demonic spirits but untapped and repressed desire. That want—and its terrifying and all-consuming power—is as scary to the Church as it is to us.
Stevenson feels like a new, urgent voice in horror cinema, namely for the way that she zooms in and out (literally and figuratively) on matters personal and political. The film’s story is fascinatingly set in the context of labor protests and the mass exodus of a younger generation from the Church while maintaining the personal stakes of Margaret’s mission to take care of and bring back that generation. Throughout the film, Stevenson slides easily between earthly delights and disgusts, wedding them together through viscera and audacious aesthetics. In The First Omen, Stevenson atomizes all the darkness and the light within ourselves.
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