Horror Movie Predators' Hunting Techniques: Chasing, Stalking, Ambushing, and Using Teamwork

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman, Author

“Predator Facts” lays out four of the techniques many predators use to attack prey. Not surprisingly, human predators use these same methods, in both horror movies and in actual situations.

Many predators chase prey in an effort to capture or exhaust them. This technique has been used to good effect in many horror movies, one of which, I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), contains a scene in which antagonist Ben Willis pursues Helen Shivers.

After Willis kills the police officer who's arrested Shivers, she seeks refuge in her sister's department store, evading the pursuing predator and leaping from a third-story widow, into a Dumpster, only to be killed, not far from the safety of a nearby crowd.

Since the audience identifies with the damsel in distress, rather than with the killer, moviegoers root for her; vicariously, her fear becomes that of the audience, who shares it. Her gruesome death shocks and saddens her well-wishers. Through her, the audience experiences the flight and fright of the prey that the ruthless killer's pursuit creates for Shivers—and for them.

Pursuing prey takes both “time and effort” and can require a good deal of energy. For predatory animals, the nutritional value of the prey must warrant the time, effort, and energy the predator must expend in pursuing its would-be meal. “This is one reason why the hawk tends to eat more rodents and birds than grasshoppers. Grasshoppers just don't provide enough food value to justify the effort it takes to catch them.”

Unless the pursuer is a cannibal (some are, but Willis is not among them), the “nutritional value” of the prey is apt to be emotional, rather than physical. The act of chasing and killing the victim must deliver emotional satisfaction superior to the time, effort, and energy, the killer uses to accomplish these tasks. (Wills must really have wanted Helen dead.) Otherwise, the antagonist is apt to use another means of attack, one requiring less time, effort, and energy.

Some predators stalk, rather than pursue, prey. By following prey at a distance or by remaining motionless and observing prey, a predator can lunge, at the right moment, and capture or kill its quarry. A stalker can also make do with smaller prey than a pursuer needs. Stalking has the advantage of conserving energy, but it requires time to effect.

Stalkers populate thrillers more often than horror films per se, as their appearances in such movies as Fatal Attraction (1987), The Crush (1993), The Fan (1996), and The Boy Next Door (2015), among others, show. However, stalkers also appear in full-fledged horror movies. Halloween (1978), Scream (1981), and Cyberstalker (2012) come to mind.

In Halloween, on October 31, 1963, twenty-one-year-old Michael Myers escapes from Smith's Grove Sanitarium in Warren County, Illinois, where he's been confined since killing his older sister Judith when he was six years old. Now, he returns to his hometown, Haddonfield, to stalk a high school student, Laurie Strode.

Scream combines a murder mystery of sorts with horror, as a stalker murders one victim after another and police seek to discover the murderer's identity. Is it Billy Loomis? Neil Prescott? Stu Macher? Randy Meeks? Cotton Weary? All of the above? None of the above?

As the audience is kept in the dark as to the question of the stalker's identity, which makes the situation all the more tense, the number of the gruesome murders continues to rise, along with the movie's suspense.

Cyberstalker capitalizes on a relatively new twist to stalking: the use of the Internet to hunt victims. Animals, of course, lack the capability of using technology to develop and extend their natural hunting abilities and must rely upon the physical senses and weapons, such as claws and teeth, with which God or nature has equipped them. (As William Blake's “Tyger” suggests, such weapons are formidable, indeed.) However, were lions and tigers and bears able to enhance their powers to hunt through technology, they'd be using the Internet to stalk their victims, too.

Human beings' ability to do this is another reason that we are the deadliest species by far. It is the increased ability to watch and follow his quarry, courtesy of the the Internet, that makes the stalker in this movie potentially deadly as well as highly disturbing.

Other predators rely upon their ability to ambush their prey. In the animal world, the alligator is one example of such predators. Ambush is the technique of choice in such movies as Wrong Turn (2003) and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007).

In the first movie (in which stalking also occurs), college students Rick Stoker and Halley Smith are ambushed as they reach the top of a rock they're climbing.

In the sequel, a series of ambushes occur, as the family of cannibals who live in the West Virginia forest attack contestants during the live filming of a survivalist reality television show.

According to “Predator Facts,”

This method of hunting requires little effort, but chances of getting food are low. The cold-blooded alligator has minimal energy requirements. It can get by with infrequent meals.

Presumably, this technique works well for the cannibal family because, when they're not hunting, they seem to lie about their cabin much of the time, thereby conserving their energy. It appears that, like the alligator, they can get by on “infrequent meals.”

The fourth technique that predators use to hunt their prey, that of teamwork, is frequently used by human marauders in horror films as well. In the Wrong Turn movies, The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, cannibal families work together to locate, attack, and subdue or kill the victims they devour as their food. Hillbilly families also slay together in Mother's Day (1980), Just Before Dawn (1981), Backwoods (2008), House of 1,000 Corpses (2003), and others.

Although more food is needed to sustain those who routinely hunt in groups, this technique provides such benefits to the team as allowing them to “pursue larger and sometimes faster prey” while protecting their offspring “from other large predators.” Being hunted by a pack—or by a family—of merciless or crazed hunters with a need to feed or a simple taste for blood or human flesh makes a horror movie all the more horrific—and terrifying.

A Tunnel of Trees and Me

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Imagining that one is a location scout or a cameraman while taking a stroll may not put money in the bank, but it does enliven one’s promenade. Things take on a sinister and ominous look as one imagines camera angles, the types of shots to be shot, the characters and objects to be emphasized or deemphasized, the lighting to be used, and the music that would accompany the images upon the film.

One can, quite easily, scare the hell out of oneself.

Perhaps, as a result of such a stroll--a walk that takes place in the imagination as much as it does through any particular landscape--one may even conceive of a story that will set other people’s nerves on edge.

Some landscapes or landscape features are natural symbols of emotional states. Once, while searching for my brother’s place--he and his lovely wife live in a remote canyon in the southern part of California--I somehow entered what was, in effect, a tunnel of trees. They stood thick along either side of the narrow, unpaved, rutted road, their branches interweaved, both side by side, throughout their impenetrable stand, and overhead. It was night, but, by shutting out even the ambient illumination of the stars and the moon, the tunnel of trees made the night darker than it would have been otherwise. My headlights were the only source of light, and all this relatively faint illumination disclosed was the dirt road ahead and the thick green foliage on either side of me and overhead. The emotion that this seemingly unnatural growth of trees and foliage created--or seemed to create, for, obviously, the sentiment was my own, and not the earth’s--was anxiety akin to panic at the sense of being trapped. Claustrophobia produces, I must say, an alarm like no other type of fear, one that is as pervasive as it is evasive and as overwhelming as it is engulfing.

Fortunately, in a mile or so, I exited this tunnel of greenery as abruptly as, having made another in a series of wrong turns, I had entered it. I was even fortunate enough to find my brother’s house. I related the strange experience, and his and his wife’s insistence that neither of them knew of such a road anywhere near their domicile further enhanced the eeriness of the experience. Wouldn’t a story--or a film--that included a scene of a protagonist or a lesser character entering such a corridor as the one I had chanced to enter be a scary tale?

Probably. Certainly, handled with adroitness, it could be.

But this is only one of the many such possibilities that a walk in the park--or, better yet, a walk in the dark--viewed from the perspective of the monster, the serial killer, the madman, or their victim, could inspire.