Where Was ‘The First Omen’ Filmed? Discover the Italy Filming Locations for the New ‘Omen’ Movie

The First Omen, now streaming on Hulu, is all about the horrors of the Catholic Church. And so, like many religious horror movies, it takes place in Italy. That is where the Pope lives, after all!

The First Omen is a prequel to the 1976 classic horror film The Omen, and the sixth overall film in The Omen franchise. Directed by Arkasha Stevenson in her feature film debut, The First Omen stars Nell Tiger Free as a young American nun-in-training named Margaret, who is sent to complete her training at an orphanage in Rome. While there, Margaret uncovers a conspiracy in the Church to breed an antichrist child. Classic evil nun behavior!

The First Omen originally opened in theaters in April, and is now available to buy on digital platforms, and streaming on Hulu. (It also comes to Blu-ray and DVD on July 30.) Quite a few more people will be watching the movie now that it’s available to stream at home, which means there will no doubt be people wondering where The First Omen was filmed. Just because a movie takes place somewhere doesn’t mean it was filmed there!

Read on to learn about The First Omen filming locations.

Where was The First Omen filmed?

The First Omen was filmed on location in Rome, Italy and the surrounding area. Interior shots were also filmed on sound stages at Rome’s Lumina Studios.

The orphanage you see in the film was actually a mash-up of several different buildings. The Villa Parisi, a villa just outside of Rome built in the early 1600s, doubled as the orphanage, as did a farm in Procoio. In an interview for The First Omen production notes, production designer Eve Stewart explained, “We wanted [the orphanage] to be a very unique and beautiful building, and since we couldn’t find everything within one building, we put three buildings together and made sure that they all linked well with one another.”

The dungeon-like basement where Margaret gives, on the other hand, was a set built from scratch on a sound stage. “The basement set was a tricky one because we wanted to make it the main body of the building,” Stewart said. “So we had to work with the well in the courtyard so that we then could look down into the basement through it.”

In another interview for The First Omen production notes, producer Keith Levine said, “Usually, you set a movie somewhere and then you go shoot it in a completely different place, and you spend a lot of time and energy trying to make it look like some iconic location. So, to be in Rome, which, in some places, still feels like it did in the 1970s when the movie is set, was quite fortunate.”

In a previous interview with Decider, star Nell Tiger Free reflected on the sometimes eerie experience of filming in the ancient city.

“It’s so beautiful to be able to tell the story, where the story is set, with the real architecture around you,” Free said. “There’s these foreboding historical buildings enveloping you in the story. It’s cool, because there is so much religious iconography all over Rome—so many statues, and they all of these eyes that are watching you, following you. You can get paranoid there! But it’s a fantastic place to make a movie, that’s for sure.”