Strong performances from Julia Garner and Dianne Wiest can’t add enough weight to a pointless horror that fills in gaps we didn’t need filling in

There wasn’t any urgent necessity to this April’s horror prequel The First Omen, a film that took us back to tell a tale we mostly knew already. Filling in the specifics of Damien’s backstory, before he was adopted by a couple unaware of his satanic conception, was not something even the most impassioned Omen fans were thirsting for but it came to be because of Disney’s Fox purchase and a greedy desire to stuff its streamer Hulu with content associated with known IP, the common contemporary reasoning that forces existence: could over should.

But a strike-impacted release schedule, and I would imagine some enthused test screenings, pushed it into cinemas instead and while it wasn’t without its problems, it was made with such visual flair and frightening inventiveness that it ultimately felt like a worthwhile revisit. Months later, the same cannot be said about Paramount’s similarly conceived Apartment 7A, a prequel to another landmark horror, but one that’s never able to explain why it needs to exist or why we should spend any of our precious streaming time on it.