If there were no such thing as disasters, they would have been created by the movies. No other medium—not fine art, not the theater, not even literature—can capture both the spectacle and the personal horror of a disaster the way a movie can. The huge, ever-changing canvas of the movie screen gives the audience a vicarious sense of danger and tragedy on a massive scale, whether by a volcano burying a city in ashes (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1935), an earthquake destroying Los Angeles (Earthquake, 1974), or a fire consuming a high-rise building (Towering Inferno, 1974). At the same time, in the hands of a skilled writer and director, a disaster film can also capture the human side of what otherwise might be a numbing experience.

With the aid of special effects, Hollywood has been ableto recreate the sinking of the Titanic, the burning of Chicago, and the destruction of San Francisco. Most disaster movies have a moralistic element in them, at least in that some sort of corruption or hubris usually leads to the disaster. But in the ever-hopeful endings of Hollywood’s disaster movies, as in The Hurricane (1937), good people always seem to survive to begin anew.