Column Science Fiction Film Club The Terminator: The Future Comes to 1980s Los Angeles James Cameron, time travel, slasher films, parent traps, and the making of a sci fi classic… By Kali Wallace | Published on July 29, 2026 Credit: Orion Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Orion Pictures The Terminator (1984) Directed by James Cameron. Written by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first watched The Terminator. It came out on VHS in 1985, but we didn’t own a VCR until 1989 or 1990, so it was sometime after that, but before Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) came out. I do remember that watching The Terminator with my family taught me a valuable lesson about foreshadowing in storytelling. What I remember is my dad explaining why it was so obvious that Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) would be the father of Sarah Connor’s (Linda Hamilton) future son. He was the only other character in the movie, my dad said, and it was all set up to make him important before he died. When I was eleven or twelve years old, this ability to predict where a story was going blew my mind. Due to the unavoidable circumstance of being a tween girl in 1991, I was always more of a T2 fan, so I haven’t rewatched The Terminator as many times over the years. I am happy (but unsurprised) to come away from this viewing reminded once again that it really, really holds up. It’s just as great now as it was in 1984. There has been so much written about The Terminator over the years that it’s impossible to cover it all. It’s one of the most beloved action films ever made, starring one of the most famous men in the world, conceived and directed by one of the most successful directors of all time. It’s legendary, now. But that’s not what anybody expected back in the early ’80s when James Cameron wasn’t, you know, James Cameron yet. He was just a young, new director who wanted to start making his own movies. Cameron, who was born in Canada but moved to California as a teenager, fell in love with movies during the ’60s and ’70s. He got his start in Hollywood working at the studio of legendary B-movie director and producer Roger Corman. Corman’s studio served as a training ground for a number of actors and filmmakers (including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, and so many more); he was also the man responsible for bringing foreign-language films by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini to the United States. So having Corman as a mentor was a good beginning for a would-be filmmaker in the ’70s. Cameron started as a model maker and artist at Corman’s studio and on other productions. (Remember that he did the skyline matte paintings in John Carpenter’s Escape From New York [1981].) But he wanted to direct, and he got his chance at the start of the ’80s. Following the wild success of Jaws (1975), Corman produced the monster film Piranha (1978), which was written by John Sayles (who would go on to write and direct The Brother From Another Planet [1984]) and directed by Joe Dante (who would go on to direct Gremlins [1984]). Everybody up to and including Steven Spielberg knew Piranha was a cheap Jaws rip-off timed to capitalize on the marketing for Jaws 2 (1978), but that didn’t stop it from making a tremendous pile of money. Corman, as the head of New World Pictures, was surprised by the film’s success but had only a single-picture deal, so the sequel rights were in the hands of producers Jeff Schechtman and Chako van Leeuwen. They went looking for funding elsewhere, and they found executive producer and film financier Ovidio Assonitis. Assonitis was no stranger to putting out movies that were thinly-disguised rip-offs of successful films. Warner Bros. had sued him for his film Beyond the Door (1974), an Italian imitation of The Exorcist (1973), and he had already made his own Jaws ripoff with Tentacles (1977). Assonitis wanted to fund the Piranha sequel as an executive producer—but he had no intention of letting the film’s director have any say in the movie. He fired the first director, Miller Drake, before filming began. That’s where James Cameron came in. He was initially hired to work on special effects, but when Assonitis fired Drake, Cameron was promoted to director. According to Cameron, a lot of people warned him against taking the job, but he wasn’t going to turn it down. His first chance at directing didn’t last long. Assonitis still insisted on maintaining full control over the film, so Cameron lasted just over two weeks on set before Assonitis fired him and finished Piranha II: The Spawning (1982) himself. It’s always difficult to tease out the truth in the Hollywood “Who was the bigger asshole?” blame game, especially when one of the players is James Cameron, who is notoriously difficult to work with. But according to most of the cast and crew, Cameron was doing his best with the minimal resources available, while Assonitis was a fussy and controlling nightmare on set. Assonitis did bring Cameron back to work on editing the film during post-production in Rome, and the unconfirmed Hollywood legend is that Cameron would go back and re-edit scenes at night, while Assonitis wasn’t around to interfere. So here was Cameron, not yet thirty years old, already broke and bitter after being fired from his first directing job, possibly guilty of breaking and entering in hopes of either salvaging an incredibly stupid movie about flying piranhas or getting his name removed from the credits, and he gets sick as a dog in his Rome hotel room. In his feverish misery, he had a vivid nightmare about a metal endoskeleton clutching a pair of knives as it crawled out of a fire. He thought, rightfully, that this was a pretty badass image, so he wrote it down and made some sketches. (As somebody who also collects notes on my own and other people’s nightmares to draw or paint, I am charmed by this habit. It’s one of exactly two things I have in common with James Cameron.) When Cameron returned to the U.S., he worked with screenwriter Bill Wisher to develop that image into a proper story. He brought that story to Gale Anne Hurd, who was working as an assistant producer for Corman at the time. Hurd worked with Cameron on further developing screenplay. In order to get the production moving with Cameron as director, he sold the rights to her for $1. That’s part of why the Terminator franchise moved around between companies so much over the years as the rights have been sold and auctioned off. (Under U.S. law, the original authors can regain the rights after thirty-five years. That happened in 2019, and while it was big news at the time I’m having trouble finding details on the current situation. I think Cameron and Skydance have some form of joint control over the Terminator franchise.) Even though The Terminator is unquestionably a sci fi classic, and Cameron was an avowed fan of big, flashy sci fi from an early age, he didn’t set out to make his own 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or his own Star Wars (1977), or even his own Alien (1979) (which would obviously come about a few years later). He had something else in mind. He was going to make his own Halloween (1978). Camera said as much in a 2024 interview with Empire: “To me, Terminator was just a science-fiction version of Halloween.” He idolized John Carpenter (that’s the second thing I have in common with James Cameron) and imagined making a hugely influential slasher-style movie in the quick-and-dirty, low-budget manner he’d learned from Roger Corman. When Cameron and Hurd went looking for a studio to make The Terminator, they found the new-but-already-struggling Orion Pictures. Orion seems to have taken a fairly hands-off approach to the film, but they did insist on casting a major star to anchor the picture. Cameron and Hurd discussed this in a detailed 2014 roundtable interview with EW: they originally wanted Lance Henriksen to play the Terminator, but Orion president Mike Medavoy told them he wanted O.J. Simpson as the Terminator and Arnold Schwarzenegger as “the good guy, whatever his name is.” This is where we separate readers of this column by age, because some of us are old enough to remember when that was a terrible idea because O.J. Simpson’s public and screen persona was that of a beloved football star turned affable actor. He was too nice. As Cameron described it, “This was when everybody loved him, and ironically that was part of the problem—he was this likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy.” So Cameron and Hurd objected, but they didn’t have a high-profile replacement in mind. Cameron also hated the idea of casting Schwarzenegger as Kyle Reese. Conan the Barbarian had just come out, and he was certain nobody would believe Schwarzenegger as the protective good guy in the film. Cameron went into their meeting determined to find a way to refuse to hire Schwarzenegger. But they found themselves talking in depth about the Terminator character, and Cameron wanted Schwarzenegger for that role. Schwarzenegger was hesitant; the whole point of growing beyond his Conan fame was to take roles that weren’t just about being a strong guy perpetrating violence everywhere he goes. But Cameron talked him around to it, and the rest is Hollywood history. (By the time T2 came out and Schwarzenegger did play the protective good guy, he was well-known for his lighter side in acting thanks to films like Twins [1988] and Kindergarten Cop [1990]. But that was in the future.) Amusingly, both Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton have said that Schwarzenegger’s name being attached to the film gave them pause when they were offered their roles. Like everybody else, they were still thinking about Conan the Barbarian and didn’t know if the film—relatively low-budget, from an unknown director—would go anywhere. Rewatching this movie after many years, I find that Hamilton is still perfect, but Biehn is sort of the weak link in the cast. That surprised me, because he’s great in Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989). But he’s really kind of flat in The Terminator. I don’t think the script is doing him any favors, as Reese is the character saddled with all of the exposition, which means he’s got to earnestly try to explain time travel to some unimpressed cops (played by Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen) when we all know it won’t make a difference if they believe him or not. But it also doesn’t matter, because Sarah Connor’s doomed baby daddy is not what’s important in the film’s climax. What’s important is that sick-ass metal skeleton that rises from an inferno in the most delightfully frightening way. For the film’s visual effects, Cameron brought on our old buddy Stan Winston, who had recently worked alongside Rob Bottin on The Thing (1982). This would be the first collaboration between Cameron and Winston; they would become close friends and go on to work together on both Aliens and T2. This was the early ’80s, so everything is practical. The machines we see in the future apocalyptic wasteland are miniatures, which do a brilliant job of establishing, with pretty efficient visual shorthand, a future in which humanity is near extinction. All of the explosions are pyrotechnics, all the crashes and smashes are stunts, and every unsettling scene where the Terminator is losing part of his face or cutting away his skin is makeup. But the real star of the show is the Terminator skeleton. Winston has since passed away, but other members of his team talk about their process in that 2014 EW oral history, and there are some videos online (such as this one) that show clips of the process, which is all quite fascinating. According to John Rosengrant, Cameron and Winston started with Cameron’s initial drawings of the Terminator—the ones he developed out of that original fever dream he had in Italy in 1981—then the two of them went to junkyards to get some ideas for how a mechanical cyborg might look underneath its human skin. Winston and his artists had to make a full-body cast of Schwarzenegger, including his head, and Shane Mahan then sculpted the head to be a mechanical approximation of Schwarzenegger’s rather striking features. The skeleton was made from silicone and given its shiny chrome look using a process called vacuum metalizing, where an extremely thin layer of metal is deposited on a plastic surface in a vacuum. Tom Woodruff Jr. talks about sculpting the spine and pelvis so he could use those pieces to maneuver the Terminator’s torso as a puppet; he notes that when Biehn was whaling on the Terminator with a metal pipe, he was also whaling on Woodruff’s hand. Any time we see only the torso and head of the Terminator, it’s a puppet with glowing electronic eyes mounted on a crew member, moving around a Kern Foods fruit packing plant. It’s an incredibly clever mechanical and artistic creation, and it’s used to marvelous effect to make that machine feel like a real threat. The vast majority of effects were done in-camera—that is, what we see on the screen is what was actually happening, with puppeteers and strings and such cleverly hidden. The notable exceptions are, of course, the scenes in which the full-body skeletal Terminator is shown walking. Those clips are obviously stop-motion animation, with that slightly jerky, unnatural movement, but even that works in the film’s favor. The Terminator is a machine that has been battered and blown up and set on fire by this point, and that’s how it moves, and it’s terrifying. It all works together so beautifully. The Terminator is quite dark movie, and the action is often very chaotic and overwhelming, but we can always follow what’s going on. More than that, it comes together into what I would argue are some of the best action sequences ever put to film. The final third of the film in particular is phenomenal. There are clunky parts leading up to that, but once we get to that final stretch everything is phenomenal. The breakneck pacing, the unrelenting danger, the ruthless violence—I’ve seen this movie several times, and every time I’m still on the edge of my seat by the end. It’s that good. I keep thinking about Cameron’s stated goal of making a sci fi version of Halloween. For all the action and explosions and machines, for all the lore that has come up in the sequels, for all the iterations of the story that have followed, that’s exactly what he did, and that’s what makes it brilliant. It is, after all, a very simple story: A young woman has to survive an unstoppable monster. Like Halloween, it has relatively little dialogue beyond what is needed for exposition; whole stretches of the movie pass with little to no conversation. Also like Halloween, it’s filmed and takes place almost entirely at night; Cameron and Hurd specifically sought out locations in Los Angeles with mercury-vapor streetlights so they could film without having to build and light sets. The villain has unmatched presence but no personality or humanity. The tension ratchets up throughout the entire film with no relief. And, in the end, the final girl makes it out alive, but her survival is bittersweet. Sure, there’s timey-wimey stuff about the apocalyptic future and artificial intelligence and robots taking over the world, and it all hinges on the world’s weirdest Parent Trap plot in which humanity’s future savior has to get his subordinate to fall in love with his mom so he can send him back in time to effect his own conception. (The more you think about that, the weirder it gets.) Although T2 digs into it much more deeply, The Terminator only briefly touches on how the nuclear apocalypse comes about; we learn that humans built a defense system, and that system somehow came alive and tried to exterminate us, but the details are left vague. I love all of the sci fi elements—including that iconically grimdark vision of humanity’s future with the machines rolling over piles of human skulls—but the heart of The Terminator is a classic slasher flick with guns instead of knives and a cyborg assassin instead of a masked lunatic. And like a classic slasher, it is driven by fear. Fear of the strange man on the street. Fear of being in danger and nobody coming to help. Fear of enemies that can’t be reasoned with. Fear of humanity’s capacity for destroying itself. Fear of monsters made in our own image. Fear of what the future looks like when we value human life so little. It’s all in there, and it’s every bit as compelling now as it was when it became a surprise smash hit four decades ago. What do you think of The Terminator? How does it hold up compared to the whole franchise that followed? I’ve seen T2 and most of the third one, but I’ve never watched the television show (shows? are there two now?) or any of the other movies.[end-mark] The Dino Days of Summer Let’s make like it’s the Mesozoic and watch some dinosaur movies. Why? Because I want to watch dinosaur movies. August 5 — The Lost World (1925), directed by Harry O. Hoyt An early adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, with dinosaurs made by stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien. Find it online. View the trailer. August 12 — Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), directed by Karel Zeman Classic Czechoslovak film about some boys who find a trilobite and go on a river journey through time. Find it online. (Check the usual unofficial places too.) View the trailer. August 19 — The Land Before Time (1988), directed by Don Bluth Would you believe that I’ve never seen this movie? I feel like that can’t possibly be true, as I was an American child of the appropriate age when it came out, but I have no memory of ever watching it. Find it online. View the trailer. August 26 — Jurassic Park (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg This one I have seen. It’s great. Let’s watch it again. Find it online. View the trailer. The post <i>The Terminator</i>: The Future Comes to 1980s Los Angeles appeared first on Reactor.