The First Omen isn’t very scary. At least, not as a horror film typically is. It is basically not suspenseful and the scenes that are supposed to elicit horror and disgust are hamfisted and borderline pornographic. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of how the horror genre works, I look (reluctantly) to Stephen King’s work in Danse Macabre. In this work of nonfiction on fiction, King makes a useful distinction between terror, horror, and disgust. Terror is knowing that the Thing is there. It is the most elegant way of making the audience scared and you don’t have to show a whole lot of anything as an author or filmmaker; the mere suggestion can be enough. Horror is a less refined tool. It shows the Thing in glimpses but allows the imagination to fill in enough blanks that what we don’t actually see or read is still the worst part of the whole thing. When these two fail, and if the creator is either depraved or dilettantish enough, we fall back on disgust, the pornographic approach of simply showing the fucked up thing and letting everyone feel grossed out and uncomfortable.

The First Omen deals almost exclusively in the latter two, although its engagement with Satanism might elicit some terror if the film could only get out of its own way. What makes the film interesting to me, however, is how it marries science (scientism) and religion in ways that speak volumes about our present, even though the film is set decades ago.

For centuries the Catholic Church was the epicenter of learning in most disciplines in the West, and this is epitomized in the figure of Gregor Mendel, who used his little pea plants to invent Mendelian genetics from whole cloth. Actually, he had a breakthrough that was based on long traditions of selective breeding of other organisms over millenia, which culminated in his discovery that was intended to convert his city into a major player in the textile industry, but whether you like the Great Man middle school version of the story or the materialist history of contingency and circumstance, it was Mendel – and the Church – that were mucking around with genetics.

But heredity and the Church have mostly found themselves at odds. Evolution doesn’t play nicely with Genesis. We don’t even have to go into reproductive health, education, rights, etc. Which is why I found it peculiar rather than terrifying when the film revealed that it was the project of the mysterious cloister of The First Omen to use a sort of astrology-based selective breeding program to genetically engineer the Antichrist to drum up support for the church’s flagging attendance. Suddenly, human reproduction is the domain of the scientific method, even if it is in the service of an evil which is in the service of the good. And while there is a fucked up demon thing doing some of the inseminating here, and while the homologue for a certain genetic trait is a certain time of birth, this movie manages to steer itself straight from a theological essentialism of good versus evil into a scientistic one: all are born in Original Sin, but we can also find the most sinful and crossbreed them to create a super sinner. It’s fascist eugenics in stereo. But since it features a dewey beast copulating with the victims and a truly bizarre shot of demon birth, its attempts at disgust land somewhere between off-color and comical.

This is striking also because of the contemporary resurgence of various versions of nationalism, (racial and gender-based) essentialism, and the parading of family values as a surrogate for collective or societal intervention on the part of the very young, the very old, the very sick, and the very poor. JD Vance, the Hillbilly Elohist himself, has laid out a plan for universal childcare in the US under the incoming Trump administration sequel: take care of your own kids. Fair enough, since that’s what his mother did, and after Vance got done studying at Yale he wrote a whole book about how much she fucking sucks. But I digress…

Behavior is neither socially nor biologically determined, according to some excellent scholarship on the topic by biologists with a deep Marxist streak. And notions of good and evil are accountable to a morality that is contingent and historically determined. So to create a world in which these are doubly essentialized is politically disturbing and theatrically oafish. Perhaps the most important thing that this movie says is that religiosity and scientific dogmatism are two sides of the same fascist coin and that the real terror comes from gazing at the society that the film’s sensibilities reflects.