Why The First Omen's full-frontal childbirth scene is so important
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The First Omen mild spoilers follow.
The First Omen earns its female body-horror badge with a hyper-graphic childbirth scene, reopening the debate on onscreen nudity only being controversial when it's not titillating.
Co-writer and director Arkasha Stevenson didn't hold back when approaching the Omen franchise, helming a new chapter on Damien's conception with confidence and some bold ideas. So much so, in fact, that she had to fight to keep one of her movie's most powerful sequences, a vagina splitting open in an excruciating delivery.
It's a play on L'Origine du Monde by Gustave Courbet, a full-frontal flip on what's touted as one of the most fulfilling events in a woman's life, which commands the screen in the first act of the movie.
Set in Rome in 1971 – five years before the events of Richard Donner's 1976 cult classic – The First Omen follows Margaret Daino, an American novitiate travelling to the Italian capital to take the veil. There, she realises the orphanage she volunteers at ticks all the boxes on the "suspicious" checklist, as a younger Father Brennan urges her to notice.
Run by Sister Silva with the blessing of Margaret's mentor, the affable Cardinal Lawrence, Vizzardeli Orphanage homes young girls while also supporting women who've got pregnant out of wedlock.
Judging by the desperate looks on one of these patients' faces, turning to the Church feels more like a last resort than a choice. It will take seven more years for abortion to be decriminalised in Italy, and the movie's period reconstruction does a good job of capturing the repressive atmosphere of that turbulent decade.
When witnessing one of the Vizzardeli women giving birth, Margaret starts questioning her sanity. This unnamed woman is strapped to the table with her legs splayed out in a spectacle of obstetric cruelty, but what crowns out of her isn't a baby's head. Margaret watches on as a set of scrawny, ashen fingers crawls out of that stretched canal – or at least that's what she sees before blacking out.
The realistic vagina prosthetic that made the Motion Picture Association blush was built by makeup effects artists Adrien Morot and Kathy Tse.
Backed by Disney's 20th Century Studios, Stevenson and her writing partners Tim Smith and Keith Thomas were forced to shorten the sequence to avoid the dreaded NC-17 and settle on a more inclusive R-rating in the US (the film is rated 15 in the UK).
It should hardly come as a shock that a body horror about a demonic birth includes a childbirth scene or two. Especially as Stevenson adapts the legend about Damien's mum being a jackal to feature human blood and flesh, making an ever-valid point on bodily autonomy.
Similarly to 2024's other scary nun flick Immaculate, The First Omen opens interesting possibilities by reframing gender-based violence within the context of a religious horror, with the Church's institutional structure mirroring the patriarchal foundations of society.
Rape culture is so prevalent that religious horrors centred on breeding women to give birth are expected to elicit terror because of the monstrous product of that violation rather than because of the violation itself.
With varying results, The First Omen and Immaculate aim to subvert this assumption and focus on the systemic control of women's bodies reduced to vessels. Stemming from such a premise, it'd be a miss not to show the extent of that abuse.
"This has been my life for a year and a half, fighting for the shot. It's the theme of our film. It's the female body being violated from the inside outwards," Stevenson told Fangoria about the contentious shot.
"If we were going to talk about female body horror, we were going to talk about forced reproduction, and we have to be able to show the female body in a non-sexualised light. I'm very proud of this shot."
Full-frontal female nudity still feels more familiar, and therefore acceptable, when it can be sexualised, as Stevenson suggests. Meanwhile, the mystic of childbirth as a pure, almost out-of-body experience too often leaves the goriest bits out – let alone detailing them in a closeup – putting more pressure on women to "perform" to fit that narrative of effortlessness.
Weighing in on freeing women's bodies on screen in a chat with Digital Spy, The First Omen star Nell Tiger Free praised Stevenson's "ballsy" shot.
"It's important to desexualise women's bodies sometimes in the name of art. That's totally fine. It doesn't always have to have some sort of sexual undertone," she explained. "I thought that that was just brilliant, and kind of ground-breaking and ballsy, and only Arkasha could pull that off, in my opinion."
And she may be right. Stevenson is no stranger to bizarre, female-focused body horror stories, having directed an unusual "birth" scene in the first episode of Netflix's under-appreciated Brand New Cherry Flavor, now having a resurgence by way of TikTokers' reviews.
Like the 2021 Netflix show, The First Omen maintains darkly humorous touches despite its heavy, skin-crawling subject. The vaginal birth is foreboded in the movie's cold open, winking to The Omen fans when Father Harris gets injured by a pole and leaving him with a vulva-like slit on the back of his head.
Those same hardcore fans of the original movie will be pleased with the prequel's shoehorned nudges to what's ahead, though less so with the tweaking of Damien's genesis.
The jackal mother was arguably one of the most intriguing elements of the 1976 movie. The First Omen honours that through subtle nods, visions and a one-take homage to Andrzej Żuławski's Possession, where one female character goes fully feral, though slightly departing from that lore allows Stevenson to anchor her story in reality.
Sadly, it's a grim one to behold for those with a uterus.
The film was shot in 2022, right as the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, enabling several states to restrict reproductive freedom and setting a dangerous precedent for other countries.
Even The Omen is at fault when it comes to women's right to decide, casually having Gregory Peck's Robert Thorn dismiss his wife Kathy's wish to get an abortion in a chilling scene.
The First Omen works better when it stands its ground on this crucial battlefield than when it crams in references to Donner's seminal movie, with the body horror themes confirming Stevenson as one of the most exciting filmmakers to watch today.
If she managed to have a vagina prosthetic, complete with hair follicles and cellulite marks, in a Disney-funded prequel, wondering what she may be able to push on a less scrutinised project is the truly exhilarating part.
The First Omen is out now in cinemas.
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