WARNING: This article contains plot spoilers about two movies you are unlikely ever to see: The First Omen and Immaculate.
When I was four years old, I was assaulted by a nun. Her name was Sister Hilda, and she was the headmistress of my convent school. By all accounts she was a kind and pious old woman, but as small children she seemed to us a leviathan in human form. On the occasion in question, she beat me with a shoe as punishment for breaking a window. It’s a vivid memory that has never faded, probably because it was painful and humiliating in equal measure. I suppose the intention was to teach me to better control my temper, but all it did was leave me with a lifelong mistrust of nuns.
I’m no psychoanalyst, but perhaps this is why I chose to spend my day off last week at the local cinema complex watching two different horror films set in convents, interspersed with ice cream and some ten-pin bowling. I haven’t done this kind of thing since I was fourteen. Let’s call it a midlife crisis.
The nun-based horror film is quite a niche sub-genre. The best of its kind is Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). A less sophisticated example would be The Conjuring 2 (2016), whose “demon nun” character was so popular that she snagged her own spin-off called, rather imaginatively, The Nun (2018). And now, two Hollywood studios have simultaneously released their own contributions: The First Omen (a prequel to 1976’s The Omen) and Immaculate.
There are notable parallels in the plotlines of these movies. Each film tells the story of a young novitiate settling in to a convent where mysterious supernatural events are taking place. In each case, there are older nuns that spend most of their time loitering and glowering and behaving in a generally sinister fashion. And each of the protagonists falls pregnant against her will. In The First Omen, this occurs after Margaret (played by Nell Tiger Free) is raped by a canine demon while unconscious. In Immaculate, an evil priest-scientist has extracted DNA from a relic – one of the nails from Christ’s crucifixion – and has created a new Jesus in the womb of Cecilia (played by Sydney Sweeney). So the premise is pretty much identical, and your preference will depend upon whether you’re more interested in the birth of the Christ or the Antichrist. Take your pick.
Such is predictability of modern horror that the similarities don’t end there. In both The First Omen and Immaculate, we are shown images of deformed babies that represent previous attempts at producing these supernatural offspring (fans of 1997’s Alien: Resurrection, if there are any, will recognise the conceit). And in both films we also get plenty of what critic Nigel Floyd has described as “cattle-prod cinema”, where long periods of silence are interrupted by sudden loud noises. Usually it’s a CGI demon jumping out of the shadows, the kind of trick we’ve seen in Insidious (2010), Sinister (2012), The Conjuring (2013), and almost every other film of this infernal ilk ever since. Having now watched the trailer for the forthcoming horror Tarot, it looks very much as though the film’s major innovation is to provide a variety of CGI demons – called things like the “High Priestess”, the “Hermit” and the “Hanged Man” – that each jump out at characters while making loud guttural snarling noises. This is the golden rule of twenty-first century Hollywood: if you can’t think of any new ideas, just multiply the ones you already have.
And so we shouldn’t be too surprised that neither The First Omen nor Immaculate are particularly original. We’ve seen it all before in one form or another. The best version of this story is Rosemary’s Baby (1968), where Mia Farrow is raped by the Devil and eventually delivers a son. Another precedent is Village of the Damned (1960), in which all of the women of Midwich are impregnated simultaneously by alien beings, giving birth to creepy Aryan children with a collective consciousness. At a push, we might also mention Sewage Baby (1990), in which an aborted foetus that has been flushed into the sewer system becomes contaminated by toxic waste and returns as a rampaging mutant to seek revenge on its mother. I recall renting this particular masterpiece from my local video library on the basis of the strapline alone: “All he wanted was a cuddle”.
The First Omen is a terrible film. The studio presumably knew that it was bad, because reviews were not permitted until the opening night, which meant that there was little in the way of advance publicity. In this case the tactic backfired, because as it happens the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. If nothing else, this suggests that critics have become so accustomed to dross that they are willing to praise anything that isn’t completely unwatchable.
I’m not one to demand logical consistency in a horror film. These are stories that are by their nature preposterous, and I wouldn’t be a fan of the genre if I couldn’t suspend my disbelief. But whereas The Omen had a twisted kind of internal logic, the plotline of The First Omen just doesn’t make any sense at all even on its own terms. As you’ve guessed, Margaret is to be the mother of Damien, the son of the Devil. But it turns out that she has been selected for the role by a shadowy cabal of priests and nuns who have decided that the only way to defeat the rise of secularism is to enable the Antichrist to return to the world and scare everyone back into the arms of the church. Their intention is to allow Satan’s son to reign, but only just enough to remind everyone that existence is more enjoyable when God’s in charge. Even as I write these words, I cannot believe that not one executive at the studio thought to exercise his or her right of veto.
Not that any of this matters, because the story doesn’t even work as a coherent prequel. In The Omen, we learn that the boy Damien was born of a jackal. We even see the dog’s skeleton when its grave is opened up by Gregory Peck. But in The First Omen, the writers have decided that the Damien’s mother is actually a pretty young nun who was impregnated by a demonic bear-sized CGI mutant jackal which, for some inexplicable reason, is eventually burned to death. One would have thought that a hound of Hell would be impervious to fire.
So are we to believe that the evil priests behind this whole chicanery simply dumped any old dead dog into the grave? Who cares, really? Because as an extra touch of absurdity, they’ve decided that Margaret was herself genetically engineered with Satan’s semen (or something like that; I lost interest by this point), because the Antichrist can only be born of a woman who is also the offspring of his father. And to think this script probably went through many drafts, and would have been discussed at length in meetings, only for everyone involved to somehow agree: “Yes – this is the best that we can do.”
Thank God for Nell Tiger Free, who gives her all in service of this tripe. In the scene where the foetus of Satan suddenly expands within her, she is seen convulsing and barking like a dog, which is almost as undignified as appearing on Loose Women. That she commits to this so wholeheartedly is an impressive feat, and she is clearly an extremely talented performer. I have nothing but admiration for good actors in bad films, especially when they manage to elevate this kind of material to the condition of the tolerable.
Immaculate is a much better film. It’s more stylish, better written, and includes several effectively menacing set-pieces. But once our priest antagonist stops the action for a monologue in which he fully outlines his evil schemes, most of us will switch off. It’s a real Dan Brown moment, with all the subtlety of a mallet to the face. This strikes me as the most common failing of contemporary horror, one that invariably derails even the most promising efforts. When it comes to prolonged disquisitions on the plot, the worst recent offenders are probably Hereditary (2018) and Us (2019), both of which would have worked so much better if the filmmakers hadn’t felt the need to explain every aspect of the story.
I wonder whether this comes from the temptation to pander to audiences that are becoming increasingly literal-minded. Would Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) have been improved if Mitch and Melanie had encountered some mysterious ornithologist who appears out of nowhere to expound upon the reasons for this sudden outburst of avian savagery? Wasn’t Alien (1979) more interesting when we didn’t know anything about the craft that had landed on LV-426? Did we really need the elaborate backstory of Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) to overcomplicate the origins of this deadly species? Isn’t horror meant to be about the unknown and the unknowable? Let’s not forget that the word “occult” comes from the Latin for “hidden”.
For all their faults, one positive aspect of watching The First Omen and Immaculate back-to-back is that I feel that my appetite for ecclesiastical gore-fests is now satiated. I certainly won’t be watching The Nun II, even though I must admit that I rather enjoyed the original. Perhaps the problem stems from the fact that as a teenager I so enjoyed films like The Devils, The Omen and The Exorcist that I had a craving for more of the same. Psychologically, I am in no doubt that all of this is connected to memories of infancy: the games we used to play in the church graveyard, the ghost of the “black nun” that haunted my school (and which I once saw), and my beating with a shoe at the hands of Sister Hilda. On reflection, I suppose this article has been half a film review and half an attempt at Freudian self-analysis.
Anyway, time for my penance. Where did I put those Rosary beads?
I’ve never much liked horror films but, for me, The Omen was an excellent example of the genre. The story was tightly scripted & brim full of talented actors: Gregory Peck, Billie Whitelaw, Lee Remwick & Patrick Troughton. The ‘cattle prod’ moments were used judiciously & were all the more effective for that. It’s true about the Catholic tropes being especially suitable for horror film; they seem to resonate precisely because of the power of symbolism.
Thank you for the review. I will avoid this dross with even more energy than I would have before 🤣