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Professor Scott McClintock
Film Studies 104
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The Lure of Disaster: The Iliad to Modern Blockbusters
Humans have always been fascinated by stories about terrible things happening to other
humans. One of the oldest stories in Western civilization, The Iliad, describes the destruction of
Troy by its enemies, the Greeks. But of course, before Troy is destroyed, the story introduces us
to the people inside the city. Thus, when we finally reach the violent climax, we are swept up in
the personal cost of the Trojan War.
To judge by the enormous box office earnings for movies like 2012, the same basic
formula is still effective today. In this paper I will present a brief history of disaster movies,
starting with the silent film era and continuing on through some more recent movies.
Throughout, I hope to illustrate the way directors get us to care about the characters, and then
unleash the forces of disaster against them. In the hands of a true artist, this formula can create
exciting, interesting drama.
Disasters in Silent Films
Disaster movies have been popular since the beginning of cinema. Directors of the silent
film era readily understood the value of good disaster. Such works tend to fall into two
categories, personal dramas and epics.
Personal dramas focus on an individual working out a private problem against a
backdrop of impending catastrophe. The Last Days of Pompeii, for example, capitalizes on the
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excitement inherent in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the devastation that we, the
modern viewers, know will follow this cataclysmic event. Because the majority of the movie
focuses on the people of Pompeii, living their lives unaware of the impending eruption, the
disaster, when it finally comes, is all the more overwhelming.
The main character is a girl named Nidia, who struggles to gain the attention of her
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contrast between Nidia’s lowly state in society and the destruction that is about to be caused
by the legendary volcano (Sobel 45). Film historian Lee Kinsela argues that a movie about the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius has dramatic interest, but a movie about a lovelorn girl The
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Epics also featured destruction on a large scale. For example, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten
Commandments is famous for stupendous scenes, such as the parting of the Red Sea, followed
by the death of the soldiers who rush into the opening, only to be drowned by huge, crashing
waves.
World War II Cinema
American movies of the World War II Era focused, understandably, on a very real type of
disaster: war. While earlier movies tended to use disasters as a way to thrill the audience,
movies of this period used the devastation of warfare to inspire patriotism and courage on the
home front.
The First Modern Disaster Movies
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In the 1950’s and early 1960’s, American audiences flocked to movies about alien
invasions and rampaging creatures. These movies played on widespread fears that communists
were attempting to undermine democracy.
The 1956 thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers dramatizes the dehumanization that
occurs when conformity is imposed on a community. Like all good disaster movies, it focuses on
a likeable character, a small-town doctor. Aliens begin to take over the bodies of his fellow
citizens, turning them into mindless alien soldiers. As the doctor struggles to combat the deadly
threat, he struggles to distinguish between his real friends and those who have been taken over
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Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds takes creatures we normally think of as cute and harmless,
and transforms them into deadly agents of destruction. This represents a completely new type
of disaster film (Kinsela). In earlier movies, the reason for the disaster generally made sense.
After all, the eruption of a volcano is a geological necessity. Invading aliens, although strange
and frightening, are doing what invading armies have always done—attempting to conquer the
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bibliography
In The Birds we see otherwise harmless creatures working together deviously to attack
humans. The fact that the threat does not really make sense makes it even more frightening.
The movie suggests that, if something so strange and random can happen, perhaps anything
can happen.
The Seventies and Beyond
Advances in cinema technology made the 1970s the beginning of a huge array of
disaster movies. Suddenly, filming disasters become easier, the results more realistic. The
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looming threats in these movies included out-of-control computers, biological mutants,
crashing airliners, and an amazing variety of rampaging creatures, including frogs, bees, fish,
and, mutant flesh-eating rabbits, just to name a few. Unlike some earlier disaster films, most of
these works were intended to be amusing entertainment, with very little attempt at real
seriousness.
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Works Cited
Kinsela, Lee. "Love in the Midst of Disaster: A Study of Romance in Modern Horror Films."
Journal of Cinema Studies International 30.5 (2008): 122-145. Print.
Sobel, Alexander. Five Essential Silent Films for Modern Students of Cinema. New York: Silverton
Academy Press, 2005. Print.
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