Oh for crying out loud

I see what you mean, however if I cast my mind back to being a small boy when I must have first seen this when it came out then I realise the chrome stop-motion robot skeleton with red eyes in that skull at the end really gave me the creeps! It still is a bit unsettling with the way it moves.

Maybe not horror, but I'd say it qualifies as a thriller.

Anyway, why are you so upset about this? Who are these stupid people adamantly insisting The Terminator is a horror film?

Definitions of movie genres matter.. why?

What does it matter what anyone defines things, as long as those things full their intended purpose? If a movie is entertaining and good, what difference does it make what anyone defines it?

Technically, it's not even 'action science fiction' (what kind of genre definition is that anyway, why use a slash, why not use hyphen and so on?).

According to the movie itself AND the filmmakers, this movie is supposed to be 'Tech-Noir'.

So not only are you JUST as wrong (or more) as the people you are accusing of being wrong, you don't even understand what you are talking about.

Also, why isn't this a horror movie? WHAT defines a horror movie? How big a percentage of a movie has to be 'scary' (which is an opinion anyway) for it to be horror? What if people find naked Arnold scary?

I mean, you are on a very thin ice of bad opinions here that you are trying to peddle as actual facts, someone HAD to set you straight.

I don't really even know how to define a 'horror movie'. I don't see why this movie couldn't be defined as such, as it IS supposed to be scary, and to a young audience, it definitely IS stuff of nightmares. Think about the premise; an unkillable enemy that's only reason to exist and function is to KILL YOU, constantly stalking and stalking you until it murders you, possibly painfully and brutally.

Can YOU think of a scarier situation?

People will take any one detail and really play it up for whatever purpose. Like when Lifetime, "Television for Women," did reruns of Frasier. Okay, I guess yeah, Daphne and Roz are there... Or how since Harry Potter generally spans a year, they have various holidays, so whether it be summer, back to school, Halloween, Christmas, winter, Easter, end of school, it's time for a Harry Potter marathon!

Of course its a horror movie. There is an unstoppable killer out there looking for Sarah Connor. Its a horror/action/sci fi movie, in the same genre as Jason X

You have to remember this came out at a time slasher movies were big in 84 actually came out around the time Nightmare on elm st did. the whole 'have sex before you are killed' trope was in this one too. all those movies were sci fi supernatural unstoppable forces when you think about it what is the difference? he is a robot where the others can get you in other ways

There's just a sci fi sounding bullshit excuse for an unstoppable, inhuman killer chasing someone instead of some bullshit supernatural excuse for an unstoppable, inhuman killer chasing someone. That's basically what the slasher wave of the horror genre amounted to for most of the eighties. Cameron WAS influenced by Halloween.