There are other slasher tropes that The Terminator exhibits, like the famous “sex equals death” trope. An important part of any slasher protagonist’s arc is realizing that there’s a killer after them, and Sarah learns this through the unsettling news of people in her area with her name getting murdered one by one.
So, it looks up every Sarah Connor in the phone book and systematically slaughters them, building up an impressive death count in just the first act.
Since most records have been destroyed in the war-torn future Kyle Reese came from, when the Terminator first arrives in present-day L.A., all it knows about Sarah Connor is her name – not even her full name – and the fact that she’s the mother of the unborn child who will eventually lead the Resistance against the machines. The T-800, on the other hand, is introduced as an unstoppable killing machine effortlessly picking off unsuspecting targets one by one, much like Leatherface, Michael Myers, and Norman Bates before him.
Sarah Connor is a quintessential final girl, introduced as an everywoman at the beginning of the movie who convincingly transforms into a badass by the end of it, much like Laurie Strode, Ellen Ripley, and Sally Hardesty before her. The most obvious way that The Terminator adheres to the expectations of a slasher movie is in its protagonist and villain.
The Terminator hit theaters in 1984 at the height of the post- Halloween slasher craze. And replicate it they did Carpenter’s film was followed by such imitators as Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night – the list goes on.
Halloween laid out a template that any budding horror filmmaker could replicate if they had a small budget, a cast of young, unknown actors, and a serial killer with a franchise-able gimmick. Slashers originated in the ‘60s and early ‘70s with seminal horror masterpieces like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood, but it didn’t make it to the mainstream as a clearly defined subgenre until John Carpenter made Halloween. But it also conforms to all the basic tropes of another beloved genre: the slasher.
With its shadowy back-alleys and useless police, The Terminator fits the noir category perfectly. Film noir has always tackled contemporary fears, and The Terminator goes after the fear of advancing technology one day turning on humanity, as that exact eventuality comes to the present day in a one-way time machine. The T-800 first tracks down Sarah Connor at a nightclub called “Tech Noir.” A tech noir is a traditional film noir – a morally gray crime story about good guys trying and failing to stay one step ahead of bad guys – told through the modern lens of technology (which wasn’t so prevalent in Bogart’s heyday). James Cameron’s movie telegraphs its intended genre during a crucial scene. RELATED: The Terminator Franchise Should've Ended After T2 Thanks to incredible performances by Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael Biehn, The Terminator’s far-fetched sci-fi story rings surprisingly true.
The movie has plenty of action sequences, from the T-800 bursting into the police station in a car to Kyle Reese throwing homemade bombs out the window during a car chase, but it’s primarily an intimate thriller about a man from the future protecting an everywoman in the present from a killer cyborg, also from the future, that wants her head. But the first movie, 1984’s The Terminator, is a much smaller-scale neo-noir produced on a relatively slim $6.4 million budget. The acclaimed second installment in the Terminator franchise, T2: Judgment Day, is an all-out action-packed extravaganza that set a new record for the most expensive movie ever made by blowing up trucks and shooting up police cars and flying helicopters very dangerously.