The original Predator has the scariest moment in the whole franchise, and the upcoming Prey can replicate it. The Prey movie story is set in 1719, with a young Comanche woman named Naru (Amber Midthunder) rising up to defend her people when they find themselves being hunted by the invisible Predator. Prey’s marketing showcases the movie as a throwback to the spine-tingling, suspenseful tone of the original Predator, which wrapped up on a moment of genuinely chilling terror.
In Predator, after Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has mortally wounded the Predator under a falling log trap, the alien hunter activates a self-destruct device on its wrist. As Dutch begins to put together the countdown to an explosion that is unfolding, the Predator lets out a maniacal villain laugh. Though Dutch manages to flee to safety before the bomb explodes, the almost supervillain-style laugh of the Predator is the movie’s most thoroughly scary moment.
Prey, with its apparent blood-curdling tone and return to the fear of the unknown that the Predator embodies, can deliver its own pay-off on this moment. With Prey set hundreds of years before modern technology, Naru and her people will have very little to help put the nature of their Predator enemy into context. Adding a Predator villain laugh to Prey, whether mid-hunt or closer to the film’s end, could really drive up the horror factor of that scenario.
The Predator franchise, as a blend of sci-fi, action, and horror, has delivered great scares throughout its run. 2010’s Predators did the best job of equaling the nail-biting fright of Predator in moving the hunt to another planet used as a game-preserve by the Predators, along with introducing the even more fearsome Super Predators. Still, the Predator’s terrifying laugh at the end of Predator remains the franchise’s peak moment of true horror, and one that Prey has the perfect setting and story basis to capitalize on itself.
Until the 1997-set Predator 2 with government agent Peter Keyes (Gary Busey), even modern humans struggled for years to determine what the Predator is or where it came from, with numerous legends about it arising in different cultures. The fact of the Predators always seeming to be one step ahead of the humans they hunt is part of what makes the ending of Predator so scary. The Predator, in its mind, is literally getting the last laugh on a human who thinks he has won, with Dutch’s survival of the bomb’s explosion a narrow one.
With Prey moving the Predator franchise back into a setting similar to that of the original, the movie is set to do something really different in being set centuries in the past with the Predator hunting the Comanche tribe. Having those kinds of tools by its side and even obscuring the Predator in the Prey trailer suggests the new movie could well turn out to be the most out-and-out scary Predator movie since the 1987 original. Cashing in on the disturbing, villainous cackle of the Predator can only add to Prey’s horror quotient that much more.