Besides forcing people to question their own spelling issues, the release of Terminator Genisys is also providing an excuse for people to revisit the Terminator franchise. This is leading to discovery of some elements of the films that may otherwise go unnoticed. For example, despite all the sturm und drang of the later entries, the first film in the series is really just a horror film with action beats peppered throughout (something director James Cameron would later do again to great effect with Aliens). While wielding a shotgun isn’t as spine chilling as a butcher knife, there are a lot of similarities between Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 stalking Sarah Connor and the activities of many slasher flicks from around the same time in the early ’80s.
Couch Tomato has provided 24 reasons why Cameron’s Terminator is the same movie as John Carpenter’s Halloween. There are obvious differences and the moods between the two are strikingly dissimilar (with one being more of cyberpunk thriller in an urban setting than its suburban slasher counterpart), but they do share many of the same plot beats and archetypal characters peppered throughout to make them at least distant cousins. With the sequels descending into convoluted nonsense, the silent/monosyllabic boogeyman’s terror that was watered down in later entries, and the fact that both come from visionary filmmakers that later abandoned the franchises they spawned after the second film, there are even more avenues to explore the common ground between Michael Myers and T-800. Watch the video below to see all the ways the films overlap—some superficial, some critical—and wonder just how much influence the slasher genre might have had on one of the biggest action sci-fi franchises in history.