The First Omen (2024)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers for this as well as for Immaculate!

1971. Young Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), raised as an orphan by the Catholic church, is sent to Rome to take her vows as a nun in a convent-orphanage. After early moments of genuine female companionship with the other nuns and an invitation to the pre-vow wild life by the place’s other novitiate, the not terribly nun-like Luz (Maria Cabellero), Margaret’s time at the nunnery turns increasingly nightmarish.

There appears to be something very wrong with one of the orphans, Carlita (Nicole Sorace), and the older nuns’ treatment of the child seems rather extraordinarily strange and cruel, particularly when you compare it to their usual behaviour towards the children in their care. Margaret herself is increasingly plagued by visions connected to creepy demon fingers touching her, bad sexual experiences and pregnancy; nightmare and reality become increasingly difficult to keep apart.

When the rogue priest Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), contacts Margaret with a highly unlikely tale about what’s really going on at the orphanage, our protagonist isn’t quite ready to believe him yet, but she’s certainly beginning to look at the things that might be hidden in plain sight all around her.

Apart from movies about spiders, this is apparently a year for movies about young women having to fight the not so tender attentions of Catholic Church breeding programs (one would be tempted to defend the Church against horror scriptwriters, but given its history, it has to fend for itself there). Though only one of the latter movies has a scene where a woman smashes the little baby Jesus, second edition, with a rock. The movie at hand is not that movie.

But seriously, even though The First Omen does share quite a bit with its out of wedlock sister film Immaculate – namely the feminism, the Church breeding program and the palpable love for the weirder corners of 70s horror – it does have a feel of its own.

Mostly, that’s because director Arkasha Stevenson’s visual imagination quickly transcends the quotes from the original Omen, numerous stylish Italian horror films, and 70s horror in general, and instead starts using the visual elements taken from there to create a language of horror that feels personal to her as a filmmaker.

Stevenson has an indelible eye for the freaky shot, for short, metaphorically loaded tableaux, a command of mood that drags her protagonist – as well as at least this viewer - ever further in the direction of dread and the weird. The big horror sequences don’t just work as set pieces, but are always also metaphorically loaded for bear, creating the kind of film that does little of its metaphorical work through plot or character work and instead puts all emphasis on mood and style as carriers. Again, very much in the spirit of the era of horror filmmaking it builds much of its aesthetic grounding on.

I wouldn’t say the film’s subtextual interests are terribly original: a young woman trapped in a system that only sees her as a breeder for the men that are going to be really important; a sense of paranoia where nearly every paranoid thought our protagonist has is based on truth, and where even her own identity doesn’t truly belong to her; childbirth as a form of body horror. However, the way it puts these interests into movement, colour, and sound makes them feel like things you’ve never seen or heard about before quit this way. Which is quite the trick in a prequel to a franchise that on paper really didn’t need one.

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015)

New England around 1630. The family of William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) goes into voluntary exile from their main settlement for theological reasons I never got a grasp on and which the film might have kept purposefully vague, given how focused and clear everything else about it is, even its ambiguities.

In this place and time, this means the family goes right into the wilderness, settling down near a patch of woods. Things don’t go well at all for the family. Katherine’s baby disappears into the woods while Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the family’s eldest and the closest we have to a main protagonist, is playing with it near the woods. The child is just silently taken when Thomasin closes her eyes while playing peek-a-boo with it. William tries to explain the inexplicable with what we must imagine to be the sneakiest wolf in existence, but in truth, it was taken by the witch living in the woods to do what witches traditionally do with babies.

The loss of the child throws Katherine into deepest depression and certainly doesn’t make for an easy relationship between her and Thomasin. All the while the family’s crops are hit by some kind of sickness and during his attempts at providing meat, William doesn’t turn out to be much of a hunter – or the woods are against him. There’s even worse waiting for the family, and things will truly fall apart.

Generally, stating that a film isn’t for everyone is stating pretty much the obvious, yet I still feel the need to explain that Robert Eggers’s The Witch will most certainly not be for everyone, though for those of us who can appreciate it, this is an incredibly affecting and effective movie. If you’re going into the film expecting something even vaguely following the rules of modern mainstream or the slightly different ones of much of modern indie horror, you might be sorely disappointed, for this is a film that seems very little interested in genre conventions good or bad. In fact, for parts of the running time, The Witch approaches its horrors from the perspective of a historical psychodrama, though one that tries its hardest to share in the historical views of its characters concerning the supernatural.

Herein lies one of the film’s biggest strengths: while all of the supernatural or possibly supernatural occurrences here can be explained as outward manifestations of/metaphors for all the fears the characters’ faith brings with it and/or (the film is very conscious of the fact it is both) just barely helps them cope with, and everything they repress and leave unsaid, they are also presented through the mind set of the film’s characters. For them witches do exist as a matter of course and a black he-goat might in fact be the devil, so the film does indeed show us witches and the supernatural the way the family sees them. Eggers keeps to this approach stringently, successfully putting quite a bit of effort into making beliefs that are a difficult pill for most of its prospective audience to swallow real, even trying to keep the film’s dialogue as close to the written sources of the time to add a further level of authenticity and strangeness.

At the same time, the film – clearly very consciously – avoids treating characters who are deeply religious and superstitious in a way that can sound just plain insane to you or me as the Other, people for us to gawk or snigger at and feel superior to. Not just by sharing their view of the supernatural world for ninety minutes, but also by approaching them with a psychological realism that turns what might be difficult to relate to into something deeply human, with this only further pushing the audience into nearly sharing the characters beliefs and world view and understanding them for ninety minutes or so. These people may believe in things that sound strange or outright insane to us, yet there’s quite a bit less dividing them and us than we might pretend. With this understanding quite naturally also comes empathy, and with empathy comes an intense emotional wallop once things become increasingly intense and horrifying for the characters, who are not only beset by a witch but also their own failings. And, going by William’s Puritanical conviction of the essential sinfulness of everyone, those failings are as myriad as they are painfully human.

In this context, as a (non-New) atheist, I found it incredibly refreshing that the film neither just assumes an audience will (or needs to) share its own spiritual assumptions nor goes the route where beliefs we don’t share are things made for ridicule that make those carrying them less than human. It is very uncommon for a film to show characters like these as anything other than mere fanatics, and fanatics exclusively, so it is particularly affecting how clear the The Witch is about this being a loving family, with William not the clichéd religious patriarch who rules with an iron fist, but a decent man who truly loves his family and cares for them while struggling to keep with the demands of his faith and the harsh life he has damned them to. Of course, love doesn’t necessarily save anyone or anything.

I was also deeply impressed by the actors, who have to bring life to dialogue written in – and at least partially quoted from – the style of the time and place as it has come down to us in primary sources and need to go through intense, often painful, emotional scenes without sliding into the melodramatic or overly artificial. Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely brilliant, and even the younger kids – Harvey Scrimshaw in particular - do some fantastic tour de force stuff here.

Eggers’s direction is on the same level as his script and the actors are, bringing all kinds of feelings to life – the loneliness and oppression of the woods (a place that can’t help but suggest the supernatural), the hard life the characters live even without folkloric witches besetting them, but also the moments of joy and love. There’s so much going on here without the film ever feeling overloaded that it’s a joy to watch. Or rather, a harrowing experience full of emotional tension and horrors, but you know what I mean.

The Witch also happens to be rather brilliant at being a horror film, creating a world so real – even if it is very much un-real – its horrors become just as real, even if they are as strange as those in the film’s folkloric sources. I, at least, won’t forget this one quickly.