The movie, “The Terminator” by James Cameron is considered a classic of the worlds of sci-fi and action, but it is still more of a horror movie than anything else. Although Cameron has since gone become one of the most commercially successful filmmakers in history, his early career was full of classics, if not the ones that made the box office worth billions of dollars.
Cameron’s breakthrough success as a director was “The Terminator” in 1984, which inevitably launched a massive digital empire that even continues today.
Recent times for The Terminator series have been a bit tough though, with the third attempt to launch a new trilogy in 2019, Terminator: Dark Fate – sinking like a stone in theatres.
Yet, there’s just something produced about the universe Cameron that means the series will never really disappear, and that all ties back to the original Terminator film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cybernetic killing machine kills Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, all while Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese attempts to save her existence.
Generally speaking, The Terminator is seen as a sci-fi movie, and there is definitely much justification for that. This involves travel time, killer cyborgs, intelligent machines and the advanced knowledge of a catastrophe to come. Furthermore, when it comes to production, The Terminator openly borrows from the theme of horror and can be categorized as horror itself, arguably.
The Terminator may first and foremost be an action movie, and also a compelling-told science fiction tale about a world in which machines turned the tables on their owners, but it’s also a horror story at its core. The proof is all there in that Terminator sequence clinging to a helpless woman: the lack of compassion, empathy, and suffering of the T-800; a determination to carry out its task without ceasing, no matter how broken it may be. As Cameron once put it, the Terminator is “death rendered in steel.”