Gotta say, in the new Netflix streaming movie “Prey,” they did a lot of things right. It is a horror movie genre gem. (If you eschew spoilers, read no further). I’m going to defer to professional movie reviewers to tell you how good the casting, pacing, plot, premise and such, is.
The thing though, the writers, producers and director got right that impressed me the most was, they did not kill Sarii, the dog (Sarii is a ‘Carolina’ hound traced back to a genuine Native American canine blood line, part and parcel of the wonderful authenticity of this movie). In a lesser movie the first time the hero has a battle with the evil Protagonist, the director would have had the dog fling herself at the monster in an end-of-life blaze of glory.
I have a hard and fast rule; kill the dog, kill the movie. I will watch no further.
Sadly, unless the dog is the hero, in a lot of B-grade action and horror movies the dog is sacrificial. If a pooch is introduced in the first scene, they will find some horrible way, mostly with guns, to kill it before the second or third scene. I maintain it is a careless and stupid attempt to focus or reset the action. It’s a lazy way of upping the stakes by creating tension and life-threatening danger without removing the lead characters.
I few years ago I watched a movie promotional blurb of writers and directors and the moderator asked, “Why did you kill the dog?” One director said with an air of disdain, “Dogs don’t do dialogue.”
I think most Hollywood writers and directors don’t have a clue to just how attached their audiences are to their canines. We will not abide turning our dogs into canine cannon fodder. That’s a roll best left to humans (since we are mostly responsible for the messes we are in) and this movie, Prey, understands that.
The movie makers did something else with Sarii that was so refreshing: they didn’t anthropomorphize her—make her into a human caricature on four legs with sharp teeth. Early in the movie the hero, Naru, tells her mother, “Sarii is smart.” That’s usually a cue to depict how ‘like a human’ clever the dog is but in this movie they show that Sarii is dog smart. For example, at the first encounter from overwhelming danger, the grizzly bear, Sarii helps Naru save herself, and then quickly exit’s stage left to fight another day. Sarii knew she was way outmatched by that aggressive grizzly. I say again, dog smart.
Sarii helps Naru survive and vice-versa. They help each other, one can surmise, in the same manner dogs and humans have been helping each other survive for the last twenty thousand years. I saw, in this movie, twenty thousand years of human/canine companionship, condensed into an hour and a half—no mean feat).
In short, this violent movie has a subtext, adding an unexpected dimension to its appeal, about cross-species love. Without being maudlin or sappy, it celebrates the long-standing tough love between humankind and canine.
By the way, they also got ‘mud’ right, but that’s another story.