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Predator Films and the Thrill of the Hunt
The Predator franchise is killing it! After decades of uneven sequels, it has finally found its champion. Thanks to Dan Trachtenberg’s sharp direction and a renewed focus on suspense over spectacle, the series feels alive once again.
Let's take a look at the great writing and fresh direction that brought it back.
Predator's New Champion 🎬
The brand has gone through a bit of a revamp thanks to Dan Trachtenberg. If you haven’t seen some of Trachtenberg’s earliest short films, you should. His early short film work on Portal: No Escape and More Than You Can Chew shows a knack for blending sci-fi, horror, and tightly wound suspense.
Prey (2022) was widely credited with revitalizing the Predator franchise after years of disappointing sequels. The film was praised for successfully resetting the franchise by returning to its back-to-basics survival horror roots. I remember watching Prey on Hulu and thinking how they messed up not giving this film a theatrical release. (A mistake they rightly learned from to put Alien: Romulus in theaters).
Predator: Killer of Killers (2025) was an animated installment released this past summer, with many calling it one of the best films in the franchise thanks to its creative animation, brutal action, and expansions to the lore. A great piece of supplemental material for fans but not a prerequisite for this weeks upcoming release.
Surprisingly, Predator: Badlands (2025) is the first PG-13 installment since 2004's Alien vs. Predator. Funnily enough, they got that rating because no human's are hurt in the film. Surely, there will be plenty of blood spilled in the film, it just wont be red.
According to IGN, Ben Rosenblatt shared, “We don't have any humans in the movie and so we don't have any human red blood. So we're hoping that's gonna play to our advantage. We're going to go as hard as we possibly can within those constraints, and we think we'll be able to do some pretty awesomely gruesome stuff. But in colours other than red.”
“We'll see where it ends up, but our hope for it is that it can be a PG-13 that feels like an R,” Rosenblatt said. “That's kind of our hope. And really, what that's about is just being able to broaden out the audience for a movie like this.”
Trachtenberg and company have proven that legacy franchises don’t need to rely on nostalgia to feel relevant. They just need a clear point of view. By grounding sci-fi spectacle in suspense, survival, and character, Predator feels dangerous again.
Scene Study - Prey (2022)
For today's Scene Study, I want to dissect how Prey employs the art of suspense.
Leading up to this sequence, our lead character, Naru, has seen large footprints unlike anything she's seen before. When sharing her findings with her tribe, they argue that they must be a bear's footprints. Unconvinced, Naru begins to track the prints and does come across a bear who then begins to chase her. After putting an arrow firmly in the bear's side to no reaction, she flees to a nearby beaver dam for cover.
What’s brilliant about this sequence is how it weaponizes dramatic irony. We already know the Predator exists. Naru doesn’t. The footprints set up her uncertainty, the bear seems to resolve it and then the film uses the beaver-dam hideout to lock us into her limited POV. The chase suspense flips into surveillance suspense. We’re stuck in the dark with Naru, catching only sounds, splashes, and jagged glimpses of a fight she can’t quite see. Then the reversal lands.
The apex threat we’ve been tracking, the bear, suddenly becomes prey. Its corpse lifted and the blood painting over empty air outlines the Predator. It’s not a twist for the audience. But the visual reveal is recognition for the protagonist. Suspense becomes information. That new information is the scene’s pay off. Naru doesn’t just survive. She learns. She sees the Predator’s strength, stealth, and limitations In this case, invisibility can be betrayed by the environment and that knowledge reroutes her arc. From here, the story shifts from “run” to “study, adapt, hunt.”
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