10 Movies Inspired By Things NOBODY Expected
9. A Fever Dream - The Terminator
The Terminator is one of the most ingeniously-premised sci-fi films of all time, and laid the groundwork for James Cameron to later become one of the most successful filmmakers of all time.
Yet Cameron's conception of the film had a most "fortuitous" helping hand when he was in Rome working on Piranha II: The Spawning and suffering from a fever.
Cameron had a fever dream where he imagined a chrome skeleton emerging from fire, which ultimately became one of the most elemental images from the original Terminator.
Never one to waste time, Cameron quickly got to work upon waking up, as he told the BFI in 2021:
"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. 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."
And so, a fever was effectively responsible for Cameron's blockbuster filmmaking career as we know it.