Let’s be clear, I love Predator. It’s one of my favourite movies and the Predator (as in the alien) is one of my all time favourite movie creatures to the point where whenever I imagine my ideal team of sci fi characters Predator is always there.

That said one thing I can’t get behind, can never get behind, is the concept of the Predator being an honourable warrior. That they supposedly have strict rules and tribal loyalty and unbreakable cultural norms and pride themselves on fighting with honour and nobility… because that’s just not the vibe you get in the original movie. Plus i feel like giving the predator ‘lore’ in the first place kind of ruins it.

So I’m going to go through this point by point.

1. The predator is not noble or honourable, he’s an asshole.

Let’s get this out of the way this whole idea that predator fights with honour and nobility is completely undermined by the first movie. The predator is a guy who came to a vastly technologically inferior planet and used his advanced tech to hunt and slaughter what to him might as well be primitive apes. And it’s not like he does it in an ‘honourable’ way, he kills his first two victims before they even know he’s there. He uses camouflage to disguise himself and ends up killing a wounded man with a broken leg from up high in a tree.

Tell me if you heard that a trophy Hunter shot a wounded antelope while hiding in a tree would you think “wow what a badass noble warrior” or would you think “wow that guy is an asshole”?

The predator is a jerk, that’s the whole point.

2. The predator being a jerk is the source of the horror.

The horror of Predator is two fold, first it works on a level of juxtaposition. The predator treats humans the way humans treat animals.

It skins bodies and strings them up. It takes skulls as trophies, it baits and hunts and seemingly is doing this just for fun.

The second way it works is as a matter of disempowerment. Predator is actually pretty subversive, it’s the story of a bunch of burly macho 80’s action hero archetypes who start the movie powerful and intimidating but gradually it all falls apart once something way bigger and stronger finds them.

The predator looks at all these tough guys and he doesn’t see them as any more than trophies. He’s looking at Arnie like “that skull would look good in my rec room”. And he humbles the commandos by killing them one by one, their bravado counts for nothing and we even see them start to come apart.

The best example of this is Billy, hyped up the whole time as a kind of spiritual warrior with it building up that he’s going to have an epic last stand against the predator and we don’t even see it, just hear his scream and later see the predator desecrate his corpse, take what it wants (skull and spine) and throw away the rest like trash.

This is great for a chilling narrative and frankly the idea that the predator is a noble warrior who picked these guys because they were worthy game to prove himself undermines the horror in my opinion. The scariest thing about the predator is that the toughest human soldiers mean nothing to him.

3. Knowing the monster makes it less scary.

Do you think Cecil the lion could comprehend why he got shot? Or any other animal for that matter?

Of course not. They were killed by some alien invader that they weren’t prepared for and had no defence against for reasons they couldn’t possibly comprehend.

So it is with predator, the more lore gets published explaining them abd their sacred rules of hunting the less interesting they become because they lose that essential element of fear.

To be clear I am okay with fleshing out individual predators but I feel like ‘good’ predators should be the exception not the rule. I also think that again trying to act like what these guys do is honourable is really missing the mark.

4. Prey got it right.

Prey got the predator right, his motivations aren’t explained. We aren’t meant to think of him as a noble warrior or even understand him. He’s just a monster killing peoples and being a jerk about it. He represents many horrors not just the alien itself but also the effect of colonialism but that’s all subtext.

The important thing is the predator in that movie is just an evil alien hunter, the humans don’t understand him and they don’t have to. By tossing out all the convoluted lore we have a much better movie than most other offerings.

So yeah that’s my two cents, there’s nothing honourable about turning yourself invisible to snipe technologically inferior people for fun and the less we understand the predator the better it is.