This Upcoming Horror Prequel Already Looks Better Than 2023’s Legacy Movie Disaster

Summary

• The First Omen, a prequel to The Omen, looks promising despite an imperfect trailer, offering a departure from the original movie’s premise.
• The First Omen avoids comparisons with its predecessor, unlike The Exorcist: Believer, and stands on its own merits.
• The First Omen sets itself apart from The Omen with a new story and protagonist, guaranteeing a different, unique experience.

While The First Omen’s earliest trailer isn’t perfect, it is still a lot more promising than 2023’s most disastrous horror legacy follow-up. It is never easy to reboot an iconic horror franchise, but this is particularly tricky when it comes to supernatural horror. Scream (2022) had a hard job making Ghostface scary again, but the slasher movie could fall back on its whodunit mystery elements in the lulls between chase scenes and kills. In contrast, supernatural horror reboots must slowly build up dread while hinting at an unknowable evil lurking in the shadows. The problem is, viewers who are familiar with the original movies already know the villains.

This is why The Omen’s prequel The First Omen looks somewhat promising, despite an imperfect first trailer. The First Omen follows the story of a young woman who is sent to Rome to work for the church, only to discover a creepy conspiracy to bring about the birth of the Antichrist. This plot pulls together elements of The Nun movies, Dario Argento’s classic Suspiria, and the original Omen itself, but it still represents a significant departure from the original movie’s premise. The First Omen is unlikely to feature Damien, the young human Antichrist, and has the potential to beat another recent legacy horror sequel as a result.

The First Omen Already Looks Better Than The Exorcist: Believer

The Omen’s Prequel wisely avoids comparisons with its famous predecessor

Unfortunately, 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer took the exact opposite approach to The First Omen. Where The First Omen is a prequel, The Exorcist: Believer was set decades after the original movie. This meant that The Exorcist: Believer inevitably disappointed viewers who hoped to see more from the original movie’s heroines. Although both Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair did appear in the legacy sequel, their roles felt shoehorned in and weren’t central to the story. In contrast, The First Omen’s trailer isn’t filled with nods to the original movie, unlike the promotional materials for The Exorcist: Believer. This is promising as it implies the prequel will stand on its own merits.

Both The Omen and The Exorcist are acclaimed, famous franchises, but The Exorcist: Believer leaned too hard into nostalgia for the original movie. The First Omen has already transplanted the franchise’s setting from America to Italy, replaced its contemporary period with an atmospheric earlier time, and introduced a new heroine. With no shared characters revealed so far, The First Omen looks set to be an extension of the Omen universe rather than a continuation of an existing story. One of the worst problems with The Exorcist: Believer was its attempts to fuse the sequel’s story with the original movie’s plot, making The First Omen even more appealing.

Why The First Omen Being A Prequel Gives It An Advantage

The First Omen’s new story distinguishes it from The Omen

The First Omen is set before the original movie, which immediately distinguishes it from The Omen. Furthermore, the plot concerns a young woman rather than a middle-aged father, and the Antichrist isn’t her child. Even if this unfortunate heroine does end up being used to bring about the devil’s birth, The First Omen’s synopsis has already clarified that the movie begins before the Antichrist is born. In The Omen, Damien was already a young boy by the time the action began in earnest. These differences all mean that The First Omen is guaranteed to feel less like its predecessor.

What The First Omen Can Learn From The Exorcist: Believer

The prequel needs to prioritize serious scares unlike The Exorcist’s reboot

Among the most vital lessons that The First Omen must learn from The Exorcist: Believer is to focus on scares over the franchise’s lore. While The Exorcist: Believer introduced a cross-faith council to take on its demonic presence, none of this was particularly effective when the demon itself couldn’t hold a black candle to the original Exorcist’s Pazuzu. The First Omen does admittedly have a major advantage here, since The Exorcist’s nastiest moments are still shocking by contemporary standards while, in comparison, The Omen looks fairly staid and anodyne in 2024. Despite some claims that The Exorcist isn’t as scary as it once was, the original movie still packs a wallop.

The sight of the preteen Regan mutilating herself with a crucifix remains one of the most legitimately shocking moments in a mainstream Hollywood movie, and The Exorcist: Believer recreating this scene, let alone attempting a more extreme horror set piece, would still have prompted protests in 2023. In contrast, The Omen is nowhere near as upsetting. Outside of one memorably slick death scene, The Omen is mostly a patiently paced procedural with precious few scares and almost no boundary-pushing content. As such, The First Omen outdoing the original movie in terms of scare factor will be a lot more feasible than The Exorcist: Believer beating its predecessor.