It might be fair to say that once modern trends in horror become joke fodder in a Scream film, they’ve reached their nadir. Such is the case with the 2022 “requel” Scream, which bears the same title as the franchise’s 1996 progenitor, a convention that may have begun in earnest with the 2011 film The Thing, simultaneously a remake and prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter classic. Scream of course lampoons this title twinning with the series’ signature self-awareness: Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), the niece of film nerd Randy Meeks from the original, and Scream 2, specifically name-checks Halloween (2018), a direct sequel to (and in many ways, remake of) Halloween (1978) (from Carpenter again, alongside Debra Hill).
Mindy lays out the rules of the “requel” AKA “legacyquel” as such:
See, you can’t just reboot a franchise from scratch anymore. The fans won’t stand for it… But you can’t just do a straight sequel, either. You need to build something new. But not too new or the Internet goes bug-fucking-nuts. It has to be part of an ongoing storyline, even if that story should never have been going on in the first place. New main characters, yes, but supported by, and related to, legacy characters. Not quite a reboot, not quite a sequel…
Indeed, nearly every recent entry into stalwart horror franchises follows this model, many also bearing the name (and baggage) of its first predecessor – in addition to Scream and Halloween, you have The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976/2014), Candyman (1992/2021), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974/2022), just to name a few. Other requels bear slight variations of the original’s titles, most often with the dropping or adding of “the,” a la The Evil Dead (1981)/Evil Dead (2013) and Final Destination (2000)/The Final Destination (2009). Every single one of these movies features strikingly similar plot lines and direct callbacks to previous franchise entries and at times even exact replicas of famous scenes. (To be fair, pretty much every installment in the Final Destination series is a remake of its predecessor, as the basic plot is effectively a device to showcase increasingly complex “Rube Goldberg” death sequences – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.)
The 2018 film The Predator also presents itself as a “return to form” by adding a determiner to the title of its great-grandfather Predator (1987), though it otherwise isn’t a proper requel in either plot or casting. On the other hand, Prey (2022) actually achieves the “back to basics” approach of so many requels while simultaneously carving its own path and often times distancing itself from the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring action juggernaut in its lineage – so much so that, in fact, director Dan Trachtenberg didn’t even want to market it as a Predator movie, at least initially.
The film’s major success lies in its handling of the Predator lore, now seven entries deep and cross-pollinated with the Alien franchise, to say nothing of the tie-in novels, comics, and video games. How do Trachtenberg and co-writer Patrick Aison approach this complex (read: complicated) world of aliens?
They don’t.
Why? Because they don’t need to.
Consider briefly Batman, AKA Bruce Wayne. Ask any person to name three things about the character, and even the most casual of media digesters will probably tell you:
- He’s a guy that dresses up as a bat and fights crime.
- He often fights another guy who dresses up as a clown and commits crimes.
- He’s an orphan.
And yet, despite this widespread cultural knowledge, nearly every reboot of the franchise sees fit to include a flashback scene showing Thomas and Martha Wayne getting gunned down in an alleyway – minus, mercifully, The Batman (2022), Matt Reeves’s determiner-affixed retelling of the Caped Crusader saga, though it still grapples with Bruce’s orphanage in ways somewhat integral to the plot.
Prey, on the other hand, acknowledges no backstory for the alien character whatsoever. Much like the 1987 movie that started it all, all we know of the (non) titular antagonist is that “it lives to hunt.” That’s all Schwarzenegger and Co. ever figure out about the villain, and that’s really all we need to know too. This de-emphasis on the Predator makes room for greater focus on the protagonist Naru (Amber Midthunder) and her desire to be taken seriously as a great hunter and warrior. We spend a great deal of time with Naru and her family before getting into the meat of the action, raising the life and death stakes substantially – the audience, in this case, actively roots for her to win, rather than merely assuming she will because that’s how these movies usually tend to go.
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Aiding further on this front are significant changes to the Predator’s design and weaponry. Though still more technologically advanced than his targets (the film takes place in 1719), this is a far more primitive iteration of the character, with devices that aren’t quite as deadly as his 1987, 1990, 2004, 2007, 2010, and 2018 counterparts. This means that not only do the characters have no idea what dangers lurk in the woods beyond their camp, the audience doesn’t exactly know either – and indeed, several times throughout the narrative, weapons and Predator actions we think we know subvert our expectations. More importantly, this strategy ensures that any brand new viewers entering the film blindly, with no previous knowledge of the franchise, will be completely surprised at the Predator’s actions and Naru’s response. Sure, there are callbacks to previous entries in the series, but they’re subtle enough that eagle-eyed fans will catch them while the uninitiated and semi-uninitiated alike won’t feel like a bystander awkwardly lost in someone else’s inside joke.
There’s so much to love about Prey – the fact it sheds a lot of the series’s machismo bloat with a woman in the lead, its wonderful Indigenous representation (even including a separate version spoken entirely in Comanche), and its disturbingly gory action sequences, among numerous other factors. But while its ability to genuinely reinvigorate what has become a well-worn franchise might not be its most important aspect, for fans of Predator and its predecessors, it is a most welcome achievement. Perhaps we’ll even get a full Prey franchise one day.
Now if only other horror series could take note and follow suit; not even the requel Scream could get away with not rehashing the backstory of Ghostface and Sydney Prescott. Perhaps one day the spectral masked killer will just show up in, say, Wichita, Kansas and start slashing without explanation, terrifying characters and viewers alike. After all, as a certain bigoted horror author once said in so many words, there’s nothing scarier than the unknown.
