More than 30 years after the birth of "Predator", how was the monster that is still enthusiastically supported even now created?

The Predator design was completely different when it was first filmed.

John McTiernan, a new director at the time, said he had a lot of trouble designing the Predator. "When I think of aliens, only Giger's Alien stands out in terms of how plausible they are. It stands out among all the terrifying aliens. I'm not going to be able to surpass it anytime soon. If I was going to make a movie about aliens, I absolutely had to have something completely original."

The director wanted to differentiate the Predator from the Alien, and the first Predator he designed after much effort had a long, grasshopper-like face. Even now, the design is hard to follow, but McTiernan liked it and gave the go-ahead, and actually built a monster suit. He brought it to the filming location in Mexico and began test shooting, but he soon gave up on it.

The completed suit was far removed from McTiernan's image and did not look good (although looking at the test shots, it seems to have reproduced the design drawings quite accurately...). Incidentally, the suit actor at the time was Jean-Claude Van Damme. He was supposed to fight Schwarzenegger using his martial arts skills, but he dropped out when that plan fell through.

If things continued like this, the movie itself would be thwarted. The Alien suit was quickly redesigned from scratch. The person in charge was Stan Winston, the SFX creator who designed the cyborg in " The Terminator ". Winston first looked closely at the storyboards, then spent about two weeks trying out different designs. The result was a "Predator" with dreadlocks and a creepy chin on the front of its face. McTiernan says,

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"I also liked that just because he has dreadlocks doesn't mean he's African-American. We didn't want to allow the Predator to have anything racially specific. The creators were thrilled with Stan's design. It exceeded our expectations."

However, this Alien wore a helmet in most scenes in the movie. This was to reduce the number of scenes in which the mouth moved. It took as many as 10 staff members to move each muscle in the Predator's face, each with a remote control to control each part of the face, creating the Predator's facial expressions. They didn't have the budget or time to go to such trouble every time the Predator appeared. However, it could be said that it was because of that helmet that the Predator was able to acquire a unique character as a monster. The rugged helmet, with its dull leaden shine, succeeded in simultaneously expressing the intelligence of advanced technology and the beastliness of Jason from the " Friday the 13th " series.

Monster personalities that develop and deepen in the “Predator” series