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SATANIC PANIC
THE FIRST OMEN Turns out that before the birth of Satan’s son, things were really scary…
When director Arkasha Stevenson (Legion) was seven years old, her mum showed her The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen. Fast-forward a couple of decades and she found herself reading a screenplay that served as a prequel to the last of those aforementioned religious horror classics. And she was hooked.
‘What I really liked was that the script wasn’t trying to remake the Richard Donner movie,’ she says, namechecking the famous 1976 film that deals with the coming of the antichrist. ‘I don’t think you can touch that movie. It was presented like a drama – horrible things happening to real people. This script, you fall in love with this one woman, as just awful things happen to her.’
Set five years before the original movie, The First Omen sees novitiate nun Margaret (Servant’s Nell Tiger Free) travel to Rome with the intent of taking her vows. ‘What she finds makes her question her own faith, but also her own reality,’ says Stevenson with a wicked grin. ‘She’s confronted with a dark conspiracy.’
Stevenson promises a ‘slow-burn psychological thriller’ that ‘turns the screw’ as it escalates towards ‘some graphic moments of body horror’. One of its primary concerns is ‘what happens to women in a male-dominated enterprise’. Margaret finds herself in a patriarchal system, surrounded by the likes of Bill Nighy, Ralph Ineson and Charles Dance.
A lot has changed in horror since the original Omen trilogy came out, or even John Moore’s 2006 remake. Now, at last, women are getting the opportunity to scare the bejesus out of audiences, with films like The Babadook, Raw and Saint Maud proving devilishly effective. Stevenson’s naturally delighted. ‘One of the reasons I gravitated towards horror, growing up, was that I found that a lot of the body horror was fetishised, or hypersexualised. That didn’t really resonate with me, but I did feel a lot of fear about my body, and I did have a lot of fear about what could be done to my body, and what people wanted to do to my body.’
Now that’s scary.
THE FIRST OMEN OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 5 APRIL.
Q&A
Nell Tiger Free
We know you from Servant. Do you naturally gravitate towards eerie material?
I’m a big horror buff. I love all things scary and creepy and weird. I also think it’s the most challenging genre to shoot. Towards the end [of The First Omen], I was a broken woman.
How much were you allowed to shape Margaret?
She was a lot of fun to play. She goes on a very interesting – and unexpected – trajectory. We definitely worked a lot of my clumsiness into the character. I sustained a lot of injuries purely because of my total lack of spatial awareness. There’s a 15-minute blooper reel of me just falling over shit.
Would you describe The First Omen as a feminist horror film?
It’s definitely got a feminist wash over it. It’s a story about taking ownership of who you are, and ‘fight the power’.
Women are delivering many of the best horror movies now…
It’s about fucking time. Unfortunately, you know, it took for the rest of the world to catch up with what is so blatantly obvious, which is that women know what’s scary. And it’s nice that we’re expanding from women only being utilised in horror films to run with their tits out, or to get cut in half by somebody.