You know the story of “The Terminator” by now, right? Action star Arnold Schwarzenegger was the titular time-traveling assassin sent back from the future to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a woman who will unknowingly give birth to the leader of a resistance movement that is on the brink of exterminating an evil artificial intelligence. From the get-go, that game-changing vision introduced us to a dark, bleak world of tomorrow filled with lasers and horrifying robots resembling chrome-coated skeletons. It was the stuff of nightmares. That’s also precisely how it came about.
The legend goes that Cameron’s entire concept of what was hiding under Arnie’s marble-cut cheekbones was bred out of a bad dream — and a really bad case of food poisoning. In a 2021 interview with BFI, Cameron recalled how a stomach bug and a fever dream brought this horrifying world of tomorrow and its villains to life.
“‘The Terminator’ came from a dream that I had while I was sick with a fever in a cheap pensione in Rome in 1981,” the director recalled. “It was the image of a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire. When I woke up, I began sketching on the hotel stationery.” It was from these sketches that some of the most memorable visuals from the franchise were born, and that led to James Cameron becoming one of the most successful movie makers of all time.
James Cameron’s original concept of The Terminator looked like a futuristic slasher
If that startling image of a robot engulfed in flames sounds familiar, it’s because it became the opening shot of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Another design, however, made it into the final act of Cameron’s first tussle with “The Terminator.” Once again, depicting an evil killer robot on the hunt, the draft of the cyborg was shown using “Halloween’s” Michael Myers’ weapon of choice, before switching to the firearm-wielding horror it would become.
“The first sketch I did showed a metal skeleton cut in half at the waist, crawling over a tile floor, using a large kitchen knife to pull itself forward while reaching out with the other hand,” Cameron explained. “In a second drawing, the character is threatening a crawling woman. Minus the kitchen knife, these images became the finale of ‘The Terminator’ almost exactly.” Through these films, Cameron created a terrifying depiction of artificial intelligence that would remain a foreboding prediction of the tech in the real world. As for the franchise itself, “The Terminator” and “Judgment Day” became somewhat tainted by questionable prequels and alternate timelines (we do, however, recommend the Netflix anime, “Terminator: Zero”). Nevertheless, the legacy, much like the Terminator himself, absolutely will not stop.
