The Terminator has long been one of the most iconic franchises to hit movie theaters, but the recent growing pains that the films have experienced could perhaps be solved by returning to what made the original movie such a success: its horror roots.
The Terminator is a masterpiece of the ‘80s and it helped show the world just how accomplished James Cameron is as a director. The movie brilliantly paired together the ambitious director with action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger to tell an engaging story about an assassin sent from the future to eliminate its target. The Terminator tells such an efficient and addictive story that it’s easy to see why it was given a number of sequels and supplementary material to explore the rich universe that Cameron creates.
Cameron returned to direct time travel and a future dystopia. However, Cameron’s original Terminator movie owes a lot more to the horror genre than it does to science fiction.
Terminator’s Sequels Reject Their Horror Roots And Fail As A Result
When audiences hear things like time travel and robot uprisings it’s hard not to instantly think of the science fiction genre. There’s no debating that the Terminator films are deeply entrenched in sci-fi, but before Cameron had any plans for a larger series he made the first film much more in the model of a low-budget slasher film. The Terminator came out in 1984, hot on the heels of other formative slashers like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street; it channels that same energy. The way in which Cameron shoots and directs the movie plays into the more mysterious and terrifying aspects of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. Even the movie’s score feels reminiscent of the earlier works of John Carpenter.
James Cameron treats the Terminator like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, and there are still glimpses of abject terror with how Cameron handles Robert Patrick’s T-1000 in Judgment Day. Unfortunately, as the Terminator series grows larger it loses this level of intimacy between the film’s predator and its prey. The Terminators are no longer shrouded in mystery and are instead shown off as special effects marvels. The films also continually try to bite off more than they can chew with needlessly complex time travel stunts or continually creating scenarios that cater to widespread action, like a war against humans and robots.
Ironically, slasher movies tend to go on and have long franchises, much like the Terminator series has experienced. Perhaps that initial blueprint made it easier to picture The Terminator as something with sequel potential. Audiences continue to cite the series not returning to “the basics” as the reason for the failure of sequels, but this is usually interpreted in of characters, and not other areas like tone. If the Terminator movies truly went back to their basics then that would also include its horror DNA. With how big the series has gotten, a one-on-one cat and mouse Terminator film sounds incredibly refreshing.