The heroine of PreyNaru, played by Amber Midthunder.
David Bukach / Hulu
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David Bukach / Hulu
The heroine of PreyNaru, played by Amber Midthunder.
David Bukach / Hulu
There is a lot of franchise and mythology built around the 1987 action movie, Predator – where Arnold Schwarzenegger and other he-men take on a vicious space game hunter with thermal vision, a cloaking device and big, nasty jaws.
Preya new movie streaming on Hulu removed most of that plaque and went back in time for an origin story, pushing the predator into the rural world of the Comanche people 300 years ago before the real invasion of alien settlers from Europe.
PreyDirector Dan Trachtenberg and producer Jhane Myers – himself a Comanche and Blackfeet Indian – filled the cast with native actors and even recorded a Comanche dub. But Trachtenberg is also a gamer, and for the film score he sought a non-native video game composer he admired.
“He was playing” Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla while they were in production for the film, and he really liked what he heard,” said composer Sarah Schachner.
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Schachner specializes in finding old, unusual instruments and weaving them into a modern action tapestry. She plays most of the stringed instruments herself, including a horse-head cello from Mongolia and a primitive violin from Kazakhstan.
“I find that with sci-fi projects there are no limits,” she says. ‘You can do anything you want. And, I mean, who wouldn’t want to write cool music for a new, wild predator?’
For Schachner it was important to collaborate on the score with a native musician. “Like everything in the movie,” Myers says, “I wanted it to be infused with authenticity.” The producer listed native musicians she knew, and Schachner was especially drawn to Grammy-winning Robert Mirabal after seeing him play the flute in a YouTube video.
Mirabal lives in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, and although he was not a Comanche himself, he had no qualms about contributing to the film. (“It’s irrelevant to me,” he says.) He’s a composer in his own right and has worked on films before — he scored the 2010 documentary Wild horses and renegadesand even acted in projects such as Walker, Texas Ranger.
He was intrigued by the story of Preyand saw something more in it than just a high-end Hollywood concept: “Living on a traditional Pueblo, with old stories and old philosophy, we have stories like this – from the star people,” he says, “or the people of heaven. So it was just something we grew up with.”
Mirabal draws from native idioms and instruments, as well as modern jazz, hard rock and hip hop. His specialty is flute, including a double barrel flute that he invented himself. “It looks like a bassoon, and it sounds really unique because it’s made from the traditional size of the native flutes, but then it’s much bigger than that,” he explains. “It has a unique sound, especially if you start doing circular breathing with it, and then you start pulsating your breath into it.”
With minimal cues and a lot of freedom, Schachner worked remotely with Mirabal in a studio—because he was in the midst of a pandemic, he was in New Mexico, she was in Los Angeles—to improvise a library of free-varying notes and notes.
“He has his own twist,” says Schachner. “He has his own way of playing things. I think we both share that love of music that can be beautiful and disturbing at the same time. And everything he played… I was just impressed.”
Schachner took those numbers and incorporated them into her score for Preysometimes obvious but often with the manipulation and distortion she applies to all the other elements in her music.
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At the end of their one-day remote recording session, she asked Mirabal if he sang too.
“And he said, ‘Yeah, I sing’ — and he just sang something so honest and pure,” she says. “It hit me when he sang it, and it was so unplanned. And it really helped at certain points in the film, to give that kind of extra layer of depth.”
“It’s almost like whispering the story,” Mirabal says of making music for film. “There’s a visual aspect to it, but then there’s another mystical side of the story that is whispered to you through music.”
So in this movie about a high-tech humanoid who cuts his victims to pieces, listen to that whisper. In between all the screaming.
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