Nothing starts a conversation about abortion better than the coming of the Christ or the Antichrist. The nuns above sought abortions but were thwarted by church leaders, and after birthing their sons took matters into their own hands. (The one on the left succeeded, the other failed.)
I watched Immaculate and The First Omen almost back-to-back, and I recommend them as a horror double-feature. They’re both surprisingly good — and given the stench over the Omen franchise, that’s saying a lot about the second film — and unlike so much horror these days which is predictable and not scary at all. The performances are great, the direction in each superb, and the mood gothic and unnerving in the extreme. Graphically they pull no punches, and The First Omen was almost slapped with an NC-17 rating.
What’s remarkable is that the two films have nothing to do with each other but were released only two weeks apart (March 22 for Immaculate, April 5 for The First Omen), and have striking parallels. In each story a young American nun arrives in Italy, excited to embark on a fresh career in serving God. Each woman (Cecilia in Immaculate, Margaret in The First Omen) discovers a conspiracy in the Catholic church, a faction that has a plan to impregnate a woman (with a biological heir to Jesus Christ in Immaculate, with the Antichrist in The First Omen) without her consent. (In Immaculate, a priest uses the blood of Jesus from a ancient crucifixion nail to create a clone of Jesus and put it inside Cecilia’s womb, and so there’s no supernatural element in play; in The First Omen, Margaret is drugged and then raped by a jackal-beast who leaves her impregnated with the Antichrist.) In each film the unwilling nun desperately seeks an abortion but is forced by church conspirators to deliver her baby. In each case, she (satisfyingly) kills the priest looming over her while she’s in labor, though when she turns her murderous intentions on her newly born son the results are different (Cecilia succeeds in killing in the Jesus-clone baby, while Margaret of course fails to kill Damien since The First Omen is a prequel). Each story, put simply, focuses on an isolated woman who has no choice regarding her pregnancy.
A writer for Vulture notes the way horror films often throw our world back at us:
“The stuff you see in horror films is not sui generis [unique],” the great Wes Craven said back in 2007. He was speaking at the time about how the popularity of the so-called torture-porn genre and the resurgence of gore was linked to the shocking images coming out of the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is a unique time in American history, where the government has admitted to torturing people,” he said. “The culture cannot help but reflect that atmosphere.” In other words, why should anyone have been surprised that the horror genre, already a psychological barometer of American society, began giving us images of torture right around the time the real world became filled with such images?
So why should anyone be surprised that suddenly, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, as state after state attempts to enact religious laws depriving women of bodily agency, America is getting horror movies about people forced into monstrous births by religious institutions worried about their growing irrelevance? Whether it’s from a direct desire to be topical or a subconscious need to make our anxieties tangible, horror throws our world back at us.
And yet, blessedly, neither film feels preachy, as if it needs to make a pro-choice statement. Nothing kills a film like politics and having artistry trumped by ideology. I hate films like that, even when — no, especially when — I agree with the political message. Rather, Immaculate and The First Omen function the way Rosemary’s Baby did in the pre-Roe year of 1968. Abortion wasn’t an option for Rosemary either, but that film didn’t feel agenda-driven. In all of these films, the issue of forced pregnancies are clearly present as demanded by the drama. You can make of that horror what you will.
Nor did I even mind The First Omen‘s retcons. In the original Omen, the jackal was Damien’s mother, not his father, but a story about a human male getting raped by a female jackal — while that would certainly entertain me — would end up being a very different kind of story. Less trivial is the change involving the church conspiracy. In the original Omen there was no such conspiracy. The birth of Damien was orchestrated by Satanists, not Christians. The original Omen was a very pro-Christian movie about the necessity in stopping the antichrist. That worked fine in a 1970s film. For a film made in the 2020s (though still set in the ’70s) I suppose it was inevitable that the Christians had to become the bad guys, especially if the story is focused on a raped woman forced to deliver her baby. (You gotta admit, the Catholic church is into that kind of thing more than Satanists for whom any form of murder is no big deal.) So in The First Omen, we are now to understand that fringe Catholics are willing to bring the Antichrist into the world in order to combat the evils of secularism that has been on the rise in the ’70s. In other words, the Antichrist’s evil will be so great that it will drive people back to the church and religion in desperation. If you look too closely, this doesn’t work very well, because when Margaret gives birth to Damien, the Catholics involved in the conspiracy are practically worshiping the baby. Oddly, even that bit doesn’t bother me too much, because it’s just an example of the illogical rabbit holes you can be sent down when embracing extreme religious beliefs.
I really enjoyed these films. If Dune Part 2 and Furiosa are the double-feature of epic desert worlds, then Immaculate and The First Omen show us the hellish world inside the church. The second in each pair is a prequel, and prequels usually fight an uphill battle to impress me. But the year of 2024 has given us some fine cinema so far.
The Busybody 