The Terminator kills Sarah's mother and impersonates her when Sarah, unaware of the Terminator's ability to mimic voices, attempts to contact her via telephone.

In the future, John Connor leads the Resistance to victory, only to discover Skynet has invented a means of time travel and sent an android killer back in time to kill his mother before he can be born--so he sends back a trusted sergeant, Kyle Reese, to protect her.

During their brief time together, Sarah falls in love with Kyle. They consummate their relationship, resulting in John's conception.

A barking dog tips them off. While humans may not be able to detect living tissue draped over a metallic endoskeleton, dogs aren't so easily fooled.

Kyle valiantly sacrifices himself, trying to blow up the cyborg up with a pipe bomb, but the Terminator's upper torso survives. It crawls after an injured Sarah, who manages to lure it into a hydraulic press and crush it for good.

In Rome, during the release of Piranha II: The Spawning, Cameron fell ill and had a dream about a solid chrome torso crawling out of an explosion and dragging itself across the floor. The director quickly cooked up the story of a robot assassin sent back in time to kill the woman whose son would become the savior of humankind, and The Terminator was born.

Orion Picturs originally envisioned Schwarzenegger as Kyle Reese, the human fighter sent back in time. They wanted former NFL star O.J. Simpson to play the cyborg killer.

Paxton would go on to much bigger roles in movies like Aliens, Apollo 13, Titanic, and Twister.

Cameron sold the rights to Hurd for one dollar on the condition that she would produce it only if he was allowed to direct.

After more than a year of preparation, Cameron was finally ready to start filming in the spring of 1983 when the producer of Conan the Barbarian, Dino De Laurentiis, exercised an option in Schwarzenegger's contract to force him to appear in the Conan sequel, Conan the Destroyer, despite his previous commitment to Cameron. The entire filming schedule for The Terminator had to be scrapped and delayed for nine months while Schwarzenegger went off to film the other movie in Mexico.