The First Omen Sets Up A Major Retcon That’ll Improve The Franchise

The First Omen will explore the birth of The Omen‘s Damien, and the trailer shows a huge retcon that will improve the franchise. The horror genre continues to ride the wave of reboots, sequels, and prequels, and among the latest additions to these trends is The Omen franchise. After a failed remake of the first movie in 2006, The Omen franchise is now going back to before the events of the 1976 movie with a prequel. Titled The First Omen, the project is directed by Arkasha Stevenson and will explore the origins of Damien, who in the 1976 movie was revealed to be the Antichrist.

The First Omen will take the audience to Rome to meet Margaret Daino (Nell Tiger Free), an American woman sent to Rome to work at an orphanage. There she meets Carlita Skianna (Nicole Sorace), one of the oldest girls at the orphanage who Margaret feels needs more attention, but she soon learns that strange things happen around Carlita and there’s a terrifying conspiracy to bring about the birth of the Antichrist. As such, The First Omen will answer the biggest questions about Damien’s birth and mother, and it’s already setting up a major retcon about the latter.

The First Omen Shows Damien’s Mother Is A Nun, Not A Jackal

Richard Donner’s The Omen left many questions about Damien and his origins, but The First Omen is already retconning the most confusing and weirdest part of his backstory. In The Omen, Damien was adopted by Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) after his biological child died during childbirth. In order for his wife, Kathy (Lee Remick), to not learn about her baby’s death, Robert was convinced by Father Spiletto to adopt a baby that was born at the same time as his deceased child and whose mother had died during childbirth.

Robert was told the child had no family left, but once he discovered Damien wasn’t a normal child, he decided to investigate. Robert ended up at the grave of “Maria Scianna”, Damien’s supposed mother, but when he and Keith Jennings (David Warner) opened it, they found the carcass of a jackal inside. Jennings had already found a biblical passage about the birth of the Antichrist and a jackal birthing the child, and this only confirmed their fears. However, The First Omen has shown that Damien’s mother was a nun who went through an inverted immaculate conception.

The introduction of a human element in The First Omen makes it more terrifying than if a jackal was really Damien’s mother, as it makes it more real and believable. The jackal’s presence wasn’t even properly explained and thus became the weirdest part of Damien’s story, so changing this and introducing a human mother is a big improvement for The Omen franchise.

How The First Omen Can Still Continue The Franchise’s Weirdest Element

If The First Omen doesn’t want to mess with The Omen’s canon and wants to keep the jackal as part of Damien’s conception, it can do so in ways that will be a lot more believable than the jackal literally being his mother. Instead of going on a supernatural and unbelievable path of the nun somehow turning into a jackal, The First Omen can make the jackal part of the ritual of Damien’s conception and/or birth, or it could have simply been placed in Damien’s mother’s grave to feed the belief of the Antichrist being born from a jackal.

The First Omen is the best chance there is to retcon or explain why and how a jackal is related to Damien (and any other incarnation of the Antichrist), but the prequel would benefit more from focusing on a human element rather than a supernatural one that, no matter what, won’t be believable or scary.