These Tornado Movies Deliver All the Best Twists and Turns (IYKYK)
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If you were to rank extreme weather events by romantic movie potential, tornadoes would be somewhere near the bottom. Think about it: you'd never ask someone to go on a tornado date with you. A rainy day date, however, sounds lovely. It's the same with movies. Watching The Notebook is romantic. Watching Geostorm? Not so much, probably because tornadoes are, in a word, terrifying. And yet, this fact hasn't stopped Hollywood from making tornado movies time and time again. From Twister to Sharknado, films have put these natural disasters on the big screen for people who love the suspense/drama/storm-chasing adventure, much to my personal angst.
I have never witnessed a tornado (aside from some scary dreams about tornadoes), and TBH, it's not exactly on my to-do list to watch a house get pulled up from its foundation by a giant, whirling tower of uncontrollable wind. But! If you want an action-packed movie that combines national disaster with equally powerful twisting and turning plotlines, a really good tornado movie will give you exactly that. Everything I know about tornadoes, I've learned from the movies, these 9 best tornado movies, to be exact. If you want to learn about the embellished dangers of tornadoes, you should watch 'em too. It's for your education, after all.
Into the Storm
New high school graduates, teachers, storm trackers, and scientists are caught in the middle of an extremely dangerous and destructive tornado in Into the Storm. This movie is your average adventure survival flick, full of deaths, terrifying near misses, and more than a few implausible but gripping action sequences.
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Twister
Meteorologist Jo (Helen Hunt) and her estranged husband (and storm chaser) Bill (Bill Paxton) reunite to go after the biggest tornado they've ever seen. They hope to use this epic tornado to test their tornado sensor device, but with competing storm chasers closing in on their own device and an increasingly volatile weather event, Jo and Bill end up fighting for their lives instead.
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The Wizard of Oz
Yes, The Wizard of Oz is a fantastical musical about a teenage girl who is transported into the magical world of Oz, where she meets a talking lion, scarecrow, and Tin Man. It's also a tornado movie. Without that natural disaster, Dorothy would never have made her trip to Oz at all, and the movie would have lasted about 5 minutes. I never thought I'd say this, but thank god for tornadoes in Kansas.
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Places in the Heart
Places in the Heart was nominated for seven Academy Awards and took home the win for Best Actress thanks to Sally Field's work as a widow with two children, fighting to save her family farm in 1930s Texas. The film is more of a historical drama than disaster movie, but that doesn't make the threat of a tornado any less nerve wracking.
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Sharknado
When the TV movie Sharknado premiered in 2013, we all learned a very important lesson: Tornado + sharks = instant classic. To say the film is good would be a lie, but it gets points for being a cultural phenomenon that inspired multiple sequels. It's one of the definitive tornado movies of our time.
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The Day After Tomorrow
Most of the weather-related destruction seen in The Day After Tomorrow comes courtesy of flash floods and extreme cold, but given the fact that the movie includes pretty much every natural disaster imaginable, it falls under the tornado movie umbrella. Come for the tornadoes, stay for Jake Gyllenhaal as a hot, nerdy, awkward teen!
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Take Shelter
The Venn diagram of tornado movies and psychological thrillers only has one overlap: Take Shelter. In the film, Michael Shannon plays Curtis, a family man who starts being plagued with visions of apocalyptic storms. He soon becomes obsessed with building an elaborate—and expensive—storm shelter, causing his wife to worry he's having a mental health problem. But could he be right?
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Geostorm
In a world where satellites control the weather (lol), all that stands between an expert hacker and world-ending natural disasters is one man, and one man only: Gerard Butler. OK, that's not entirely true. Butler, who is plays an astronaut, also has help from a secret service agent, the President, and a crew of tech/science nerds with the skills to help save the world.
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The Hurricane Heist
Yes, I know a hurricane isn't exactly the same thing as a tornado, but this movie is just too fantastically absurd to ignore. It's a hurricane. It's a heist. It's a hurricane heist. Natural disasters have never been so exciting, or potentially profitable. Is this another absurd tornado scenario? Yes. But, it actually manages to make the terrifying weather...kinda fun.
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