The Terminator: The Slasher Film Disguised as Sci-Fi

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The reputation of The Terminator has been distorted by its own sequel. Because Terminator 2 arrived in 1991 as a landmark of computer imagery and set-piece spectacle, the 1984 original gets remembered as its rougher prototype, a low-budget sketch of the blockbuster to come. Watch it again cold, though, without the sequel’s gloss laid over it, and a different film appears. James Cameron, working with roughly six million dollars, did not make a small science-fiction epic. He made a horror film, and a very pure one, that happens to be wearing a science-fiction costume.

Aliens: How Cameron Turned Dread Into Warfare

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The smartest thing James Cameron ever did was refuse to remake the film he was hired to follow. In 1979 Ridley Scott’s Alien had been a haunted-house picture in orbit, a slow, dripping horror film about a single unkillable thing stalking a crew through a dark ship. The obvious sequel was more of the same, bigger. When Cameron took the job for 1986’s Aliens, he pitched something that should not have worked: keep the creature and the survivor, throw out the genre, and make a combat film. He even wrote the title on a blackboard as Alien with an s scratched over a dollar sign, or so the studio legend goes. The gamble is the reason the two films sit side by side as equals instead of as an original and its echo.

James Cameron - vo.rs

The Terminator: The Slasher Film Disguised as Sci-Fi

Aliens: How Cameron Turned Dread Into Warfare