Horror month, #2: The Terminator, directed by James Cameron

[ceri]

This little low-budget jewel does a lot of things right, and one of them is a matter of semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signs, broadly speaking: anything where there's a signifier (like the words "this leaf") and a signified (like this leaf I want you to see). It's the discipline devoted to symbols and signals. One of the ways horror stories often fail is that there's inconsistency at the semiotic level—what we're told is good, bad, tough, easy, whatever doesn't seem to match up with what the characters actually do or how the world acts around them. Threats get over-sold or under-sold or just plain misrepresented, and so things don't hang together. The real beauty of The Terminator includes this simple fact. When Sgt. Reese says the famous line...

Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

...he's telling the precise truth. That is an accurate description of the Terminator, and we see each clause of that declaration in action, right up until it's literally smashed to pieces. Cameron and co-writer Gail Ann Hurd deliver precisely what they promise. That's fairly rare in film making, and part of what makes the chills in this movie still work, decades and orders of magnitude in budgeting later.