zinfamous
No Lifer
- Jul 12, 2006
- 110,598
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i'll agree to disagree. i'll stick with halloween, poltergeist, nightmare on elmstreet, and friday the 13th as old school horror movies, not terminator
even imdb doesn't think T1 is horror, and imdb is everything!
http://ilovethatfilm.blogspot.com/2012/10/genre-analysis-of-terminator.html
http://classic-horror.com/reviews/terminator_1984
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-terminator/31391/why-the-terminator-is-a-horror-classic
https://cinephilefix.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/film-analysis-terminator-and-t2-judgment-day/
etc.
IMDB...Ha! notioursly thinks that Shawshank, maybe a top 200, top 500 at best film is number 1 overall. But well, anyway.
I think it is easy to confuse Terminator 1, now, with everything that the story became after. It's easy to forget that when there was only Terminator 1 and nothing else, you had a horror film that spent about 2 minutes of screen time dealing with Skynet/the future/robot armies, etc. The film really wasn't about any of that: it was about surviving a vicious, relentless killer. There was never any concern for the future or doing anything about the future. Indeed: the future wasn't even part of the story and is what made those first Terminator films so great--this horrible thing that we never see. An unseen horror.
Only in T2 did the focus turn towards Judgement Day and actively engaging in the social/military/technology issues that lead to our own destruction, and trying to prevent that.
"Robots and the future" does not make science fiction--not by a longshot. You can't just toss a space ship into a movie and call it sci fi. You ahve to address these themes and explicitly deal with their relevance in relation to our current situation. There is no real science fiction film or novel that is recognized as such and has nothing to say about the contemporary world.
A robot and time travel is the only whisper of sci fi elements that we get with Terminator. Had it never been successful and lead to T2, I promise you that you would recall it as only a horror flick with an angry robot standing in for Jason--because that is all it is.
People now always see T1 under the light of T2, which are two very different films.
and why isn't Poltergiest a fantasy movie for you? it is about ghosts/angry spirits. It has as much thematic relationship to fantasy as T1 has to Sci Fi, by your own standard, yet you consider it horror but not T1. weird.
...and those are most accurately called slasher flicks--certainly horror, but a specific and relatively simple sub-genre.
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