It’s right up there with music, poetry and love — since the dawn of time, mankind has heeded a primal calling to construct unstoppable, unmanned killing machines. So, today, during this Terminator week, let’s take a look back at some of those triumphs of ingenuity, the human spirit, and our inborn urge to breathe the words “Hasta la vista, baby” into the Pygmalion-warmed lips of our creations (as well as our misplaced belief they will never turn on us for our hubris).

So I’m reading this film studies article by Linda Williams called “Film Bodies,” which explores the connection between horror films, pornography, and tear-jerkers. She actually makes a pretty persuasive case. Each genre shows us actors experiencing the things we as audience members are supposed to be experiencing (whether it’s terror, horniness, or grief), each displays an excess (of violence, of sex, of emotion), and each focuses on the body engaged in a kind of fit (death throes, orgasm, sobbing) accompanied by inarticulate vocalizations (”NOOO!” “YEEES!” “WAAAH!”) and the fetishized release of bodily fluids (blood, semen, tears). I was a little skeptical about the inclusion of tears in that last one until I remembered this scene from Garden State, which is an emo money shot if I ever saw one. (The salient part appears right at the start of the video*, after the jump.)