Prey, the fifth movie in the Predator franchise, is set to pay off the "demon" tease of the 1987 original. Set in 1719, Prey follows a female Comanche warrior named Naru (Amber Midthunder), who is forced to battle a Predator that has arrived to hunt her and her people. With a setting hundreds of years before the original Predator takes place, Prey is building on the myth of the alien hunter that was established in that first movie.
In Predator, as an American paramilitary unit prepares for battle against their invisible enemy, guerilla fighter Anna (Elpidia Carillo) imparts the legend of the alien to Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger). She reveals that in Latin American folklore an unseen killer arriving during hot years to claim human heads is ominously known as "The Demon who makes trophies of man." Prey is equipped to give viewers a more direct and in-the-moment look at how the arrival of the Predator has been interpreted by humans.
As the first installment in the Predator movie franchise not set in modern times, Prey will show the Predator in a setting where its advanced technology, camouflaging cloak, and monstrous appearance will seem even more unexplainable to the humans being hunted. As the main human protagonist of Prey, Naru could be the one to impart her knowledge of the Predator among the Comanche, with the story then spreading among other Native American tribes. Of course, without the full context of the Predator being an alien from another world, what Naru and her fellow Comanches hypothesize about the hunter's origins is going to have some degree of interpretation along with it. Going all the way back to Anna's story, that lore has always been one of the most fun elements of the Predator franchise.
Because the Predators are so clandestine about their hunting activities on Earth, with characters like Dutch forming countering strategies on the fly, humans over the centuries have only had so much information about them to work with. This often left the Predator to be interpreted in demonic and supernatural terms through the beliefs of different cultures. Predator 2 showed the Predator had also been interpreted as an otherworldly beast in Jamaican folklore. Alien vs. Predator established that ancient humans regarded the Predators as gods. Prey is in a unique position to show the Native American legend as it actually develops in real-time.
In battling the Predator, Naru will be facing an enemy unlike any Comanche has seen before — to the extent she's even able to see it at all with the creature's invisibility tech. Surely, the story of an opponent like the Predator is bound to take on a legendary quality similar to the various tales about the hunter that have been told throughout the franchise. In addition to other beneficiary Predator franchise changes, Prey can show its human characters putting together the pieces about the Predator. This can give a Native American interpreation of the nature of the Predator, developed in the heat of battle.
The Predator series has hit some bumps in the road, but one of its consistent best features is the legend of the Predator itself. Before humans had the technology to gain a real understanding of what the Predator is, the ideas different cultures developed about it made the Predator a movie monster steeped in shared but varied human mythologies. Prey can continue that tradition while actually showing the creation of the long legacy of the Predator by one of the many human cultures that encountered it in the past.