While alone they easily stand as one of the greatest examples of cosmic horror, Alien’s Xenomorphs don’t reach their full potential of being the ultimate Sci-Fi monsters until they are merged with Terminators. Both the Xenomorphs and Terminators are terrifying antagonists in their own unique ways. The Xenomorph induces body horror fears while the Terminator represents hopelessness and the fear of losing the world to something so cold, uncaring, and murderous. In one limited comic book series, the two monstrous Sci-Fi villains are merged into one ultimately horrible creature.
In Aliens vs Predator vs Terminator by Mark Schultz and Mel Rubi, the main character of the Alien franchise, Ellen Ripley, finds herself joining forces with the Predators against a horde of Xenomorphs and the resurgence of Skynet and their Terminator androids. To create the ultimate robot killing machine, Skynet takes samples of Xenomorphs and uses their biological makeup to create biomechanical monsters that are the perfect mixture of Terminator and Xenomorph.
These Xeno-Terminators have the basic appearance of a Terminator skeleton but with the claws, fangs, and chitinous skin of the Xenomorphs. The overly muscular Sci-Fi amalgam proves to live up to their intimidating look as it takes a team of Predators to take down just one of them. Skynet truly created the perfect killing machine by taking advantage of the Xenomorph’s incredibly malleable and adaptable genetic makeup to enhance their already-deadly Terminators. While Ripley and the Predators are eventually successful in defeating them, the struggle they go through proves that if the highly advanced Predators weren’t there, no team of humans would stand a chance.
While this comic series marks the first time Xenomorph DNA is used to enhance killing machines, it isn’t the first time Xenomorphs and androids have been merged into one. In the limited comic series Aliens: Stronghold by John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke, fans are introduced to a synthetic that was designed to look just like a Xenomorph named Jeri. Jeri is used by a scientific facility to infiltrate Xenomorph hives without alerting the alien creatures to human presence.
There isn’t much in common between Jeri and the Xeno-Terminators as Jeri is a fun-loving helpful synthetic and the Terminator hybrids are emotionless killing machines, the two are both creative variations of Xenomorphs that merge the creatures with technology. Where the Xenomorph-Terminators stand alone, however, is that they proved to be the ultimate Sci-Fi monsters that no human would have any hope of defeating alone, making them all the more terrifying.