Horror, mutilation, girl power, and the whitewashing of bloody conquest
FILM REVIEW: Prey
I’ve often wondered how people through the ages have coped with the stress of raising children in perilous environments where natural hazards — like being mauled and eaten by wildlife — are part and parcel of everyday existence. I was reminded of this while watching Prey, a new film set in the northern part of the American Great Plains in the year 1719, prior to the ascent of both the Comanche empire and the United States as a world power. One of Prey’s first shots, in fact, shows a mother carrying a baby on her back in a cradleboard.
As we find out early in the film, the small band of Comanche hunter-gatherers at the center of the story must contend with the ever-present threat of bears, big cats, wolves, and snakes while hunting to survive. Their troubles, of course, don’t end there. Unbeknownst to anyone in their party, a group of French fur trappers has set up camp in the area, setting the stage for the violent collision of peoples that will continue to define the pattern for the entire continent for centuries to come. Of more grave concern to all involved, however, is the heavily-armed extraterrestrial that’s stalking and killing both groups.
A prequel to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Predator, Prey delivers pulse-pounding suspense in a way that the original film couldn’t. Where Schwarzenegger's punchlines and invincible-strongman presence made it impossible for the viewer to experience fear on his behalf, Prey is super-charged with a sense of raw vulnerability. Much of the film is spent watching lead actress Amber Midthunder’s character Naru traversing woods and open terrain by herself.
Nearly every shot is fraught with the possibility that the monster might be nearby. The excruciating dread — exactly what one looks for in a horror thriller — doesn’t let up when Naru is in the company of the warriors in her clan. In fact, most of the male figures in the film are depicted as adolescents with bows and arrows, a puzzling (though not entirely inaccurate) choice from director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Alison. Skilled in the use of these weapons, they still stand little chance against a creature with vastly superior technology at its disposal.
Enjoy my work? You can buy me a coffee — or donate via Venmo.
Subscribing to this newsletter also helps. Your support means everything, thank you!
Here, some historical context is important:
Though set in the northern Great Plains, Prey takes place just as the Comanche were expanding into what we now refer to as the American Southwest. It’s a snapshot of a time before they adopted guns en route to becoming the most powerful — and feared — indigenous people in North American history. (Read more here, here, here, or here; listen here, here, and here.) Their path to conquest was notable for its violence, with the Comanche displacing and/or exterminating the Ute and the Apache but also establishing a robust trade infrastructure with Europeans while also holding ground against both the Spanish and the French.
As author Pekka Hämäläinen explains in his 2009 book The Comanche Empire: “The Comanche invasion of the southern plains was, quite simply, the longest and bloodiest conquering campaign the American West had witnessed.”
Just to put this in perspective, Hämäläinen points out that the US-Mexico border was drawn where it was drawn — and Texas exists as we know it today — because of the Comanche’s dominance over the Southwest for the hundred-year period from 1750 to 1850. Hämäläinen describes them as “an extraordinarily adaptive people who aggressively embraced innovations, subjecting themselves to continuous self-reinvention.” Or, as YouTuber James Hancock says in his Prey review, “[these were] not teddy bears [but] some of the baddest motherfuckers who ever lived.”
Hancock, who strongly recommends journalist-historian S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon (excerpt here), offers that the Comanche were “the greatest light cavalry in the world” during their reign — “the perfect warriors,” he observes, “to go up against the predator.” Hancock describes Naru as a “bad motherfucker” and praises Midthunder for what he felt was a convincing portrayal of a badass character. No less an authority than Jesse “ain’t got time to bleed” Ventura — former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler who starred in the original Predator — felt the same way.
Of course, since the film establishes Naru’s limitations as a hunter early on, the central question becomes: how in the hell is this person going to defeat this creature when she’s so thoroughly out-matched? To make matters more complicated, Naru is driven by an unshakeable conviction that she can hunt. Discouraged by male hunters as well as her own mother, Naru stubbornly defies the societal norms of her world. And though she possesses skills that her male counterparts lack, she repeatedly puts herself in harm’s way by under-estimating her quarry.
I’m not sure how Naru’s insistence on hunting would’ve been handled in real life, but I feel uneasy about imposing modern, progressive gender standards on the past. Hunter-gatherer societies enforce strict gender codes because their survival depends on a division of labor. That's not something we can just choose to ignore because it doesn’t align with contemporary values. It goes without saying that the world was a vastly differently place in 1719 than it is now. Being respectful of that difference means facing things that might look unattractive to us today.
Ignoring that difference is its own form of imperialism. Prey left me scratching my head, unsure whether an American-style individualist mentality was imposed onto another culture in the name of inclusiveness — the same queasy feeling I had after watching Disney’s animated children’s film Turning Red. Several of Naru’s decisions in Prey could, under normal circumstances, be viewed as selfish and even reckless in a way that endangers others. In this circumstance, however, it’s her refusal to give-in that ultimately saves her community.
At first, no one believes Naru when she implores them to trust her suspicions that something large and powerful has been prowling the wilderness around them. And, though Naru’s death-defying feats stretch credulity as the action builds to a climax, Prey at least acknowledges that she can’t rely on exactly the same qualities that come more readily to the men around her. Her hopes of surviving the monster, in fact, hinge on her guile and sharp powers of observation, not overpowering strength. Then again, so did Arnold Schwarzenegger’s.
If you find yourself rolling your eyes as you watch Naru take-on five men who are trying to kill her, or pull a monster off its feet that’s strong enough to lift a bear with its hands, Schwarzenegger’s durability in the original movie was no less ridiculous. An inventory of the things that Arnold’s character survived includes: a blast from the alien’s gun that blew the limbs off and the chest cavities out of other people, an absurd hand-to-hand fistfight with the creature, and — no exaggeration — a small-scale nuclear explosion at close range. In the end, both Schwarzenegger and Midthunder’s characters end up surviving largely due to the monster’s hubris.
I actually disagree with Hancock’s assessment that Prey makes the most of its “perfect warriors.” In one scene, one of the hunters in Naru’s clan is killed in front of her in such a vicious way that it actually hurt to watch the expression of shock and horror in his face as he realized he was helpless to prevent what was happening to him. In this fatal encounter, we might as well be watching the creature mutilate a bunch of defenseless high school boys. And while I welcome a horror film that triggers empathy, Prey suffers somewhat from its manipulation of the audience.
No surprise, Prey doesn’t elicit any sympathy when we watch the monster tear through the French fur traders with even more extreme brutality. It’s clear that we’re supposed to relish those kills, which are so over-the-top they verge on slapstick. Gorehounds should expect to be disappointed. If a faint-hearted, gore-averse viewer like me can watch a scene like this without flinching, then don’t expect Prey to tickle your fancy. Further, how much more rich could this film have been if Trachtenberg and Alison had opted to show the Comanche as they really were?
In his video, Hancock mentions Empire of the Summer Moon’s accounts of the Comanche castrating their enemies and stuffing their severed genitals down their throats. The truth is that they were ruthless conquerors in their own right, engaging in torture, rape, slavery, and the murder and kidnapping of small children. I wouldn’t expect a film like Prey to offer quite that level of realism, but I think the experience could’ve elicited a more profound emotional response if the audience were forced to grapple with our collective human savagery.
To be fair, the Comanche often adopted child captives and integrated them into their society. But we can’t overlook the scale or extent of the cruelty that was simply a fact of life on the Plains. If Prey had drawn parallels between the monster’s predilection for violence and the behavior of all its human subjects, we’d walk away from it with an additional layer of unease, the kind that’s harder to shake than the gnawing sense of fright left by the monster. But by setting Prey in a period prior to the rise of the Comanche as one of North America’s pre-eminent subjugators, the filmmakers sidestep putting us in a moral quandary by luring us into sympathizing with people capable of great viciousness.
Had anyone had the nerve to make that kind of film, it would have left us with a sticky feeling of discomfort — precisely the kind that ends up being most rewarding after we’ve engaged with art that dares to make us feel conflicted. If we imagine a film like Prey populated by complicated Native characters drawn in shades of gray — i.e: living, breathing, real people — we’d still feel bad watching them get butchered, but we’d be left sitting with mixed feelings about those characters. The messy ambiguity of that experience would be well worth it, even within the flow of action-horror popcorn fare.
Admittedly, films like Prey are supposed to function more like amusement park rides than grueling research sessions for a term paper. But why can’t we have a little protein with our popcorn? And how much does it serve modern people of Comanche heritage to view their ancestors through such a sanitized lens? Further, would non-Native Americans be better equipped to reconcile with their own ancestors’ sins if they could relate to those sins via the actions of people onscreen who don’t look like them?
All these considerations aside, we can’t overstate the triumph that Prey represents. You can watch a Comanche dub where all of the actors dubbed their own lines — a monumental and historic achievement by any measure. Producer Jhane Myers, herself of Comanche/Blackfeet descent, hits the nail on the head when she says that Prey “shifts the paradigm.” Because when you consider how many viewers will walk away with the desire to learn more about Native cultures, Prey is worth its weight in gold.
And when it comes to the more ghastly aspects of Comanche history, we have to keep in mind that societies whitewash their histories all the time. In the “cowboys and Indians” films of old, the Natives were portrayed as “savages.” Here, the script is reversed. In truth, there was plenty of atrocity to go around. When NPR host Terry Gross spoke to Summer Moon author S. C. Gwynne in 2010, she asked him point-blank if we aren’t over-compensating by portraying Native Americans in such a flattering light. It’s a fair — even necessary — question.
But is it fair to fault Prey any more than the self-aggrandizing, amnesia-ridden myths Americans trot out every year on Independence Day? Neither the inaccuracy of those myths nor the pervasive denial that feeds them prevent the Fourth of July from being one of my favorite holidays. That’s because I’m able to reconcile the gap between my culture’s idealization of itself — the things it needs to tell itself — and the demons of its past. For obvious reasons, people who’ve been pushed to the brink of extinction need to find value in their past. But could the truth actually set us free?
No matter what kind of ugliness lurks in the cobwebs of Comanche history, their modern-day descendents have every reason to be proud of their heritage. Even if Prey stretches the truth, the film opens the door for all Americans to celebrate this fierce, remarkable people and re-integrate them into the broader fabric of how we view ourselves. There’s a lot of blood that’s been spilled on this continent. Ironically, the fantasy of a bloodthirsty, trophy-hunting monster might be just the salve we all needed to help us come to terms with that bloodshed.
At the end of the day, even after repeated viewings reveal plot inconsistencies, Prey does everything a film of this type is supposed to do — which is to keep you teetering between suspense, primal terror, and adrenaline-pumping excitement. It moves along at a brisk pace, with not a single wasted moment. Finally, within all the horror and action, the sibling dynamic between Naru and her brother Taabe gives the film its human heartbeat.
There’s a brief moment where Naru interrupts her brother by making a loud snoring sound, as if to say your story’s putting me to sleep. The tone of this interaction beautifully captures a kind of familiarity that anyone who has a sibling will recognize right away. A single dose of realistic intimacy and charm goes a long way in bringing depth to an otherwise wall-to-wall, edge-of-your seat thrill ride. All things considered, Prey puts a welcome fresh twist not just on the horror/sci-fi genre, but on film as a whole.
Alas, “the people” have spoken:
If you enjoyed this piece, I address some parallel themes in this article:
<3 SRK
Just watched Prey last night. Very interesting review.