In Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller, a budding romance between Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor is interrupted when the birds — all the birds — start gathering in huge groups and attacking the humans.

It’s a family psychodrama and a killer gator flick and a disaster movie all rolled into one. Remember: Without the stunning moment when the boat kisses that frozen hulk, this Best Picture winner is just another Romeo and Juliet knockoff. Vesuvius blows its top. From earthquakes to volcanoes to shipwrecks to viruses, there’s no shortage of thrilling and chilling material for disaster movies. Independence Day occasionally strays into the megalo-melodramatic, and never more so than when a dog makes a slowmotion leap into a doorway just milliseconds before a wall of flames nearly engulfs him. This is the kind of disaster that might be scary but interesting if it really happened. Charlton Heston is the engineer who finds himself rushing through a collapsing Los Angeles to save his mistress (Geneviève Bujold) and her son. While the whole nation is in a state of panic, Jae-hyeok and his colleagues return to the plant to prevent another nuclear disaster. Clearly they weren't ready for Tom Cruise and CGI. Rain splashes all over the Indian city of Ranchipur, knocking down entire buildings, causing the ground to collapse, and creating a flood that destroys everything in its path.

The story follows Jae-hyeok (Kim Nam-gil) who works in a local nuclear power plant. —Tyler Aquilina, Heck, if we weren't interested in mixing things up a bit, George Kennedy, the undisputed King of Disaster Movies, could easily fill out this whole list. What makes the film even more disturbing is it is a fictionalized account of the very real Great Chicago Fire of 1871. —Tyler Aquilina, The tornado tale doesn't fit the traditional models established by Poseidon (a disaster's occurred and we've gotta escape!) While that really isn’t saying much, at least Deep Impact sends a team of astronauts (led by Robert Duvall) rather than drillers to deal with the comet hurtling toward Earth, deflecting Ben Affleck’s famous critique of Armageddon. Does this really count as a disaster movie? Which is hard to do while maintaining six feet of social distance, but he does it.

Jeff Bridges Reveals He’s Been Diagnosed With Lymphoma: ‘the Prognosis Is Good’, “As the Dude would say.. New S**T has come to light.”. The film even throws in a massive San Francisco tsunami for good measure.

But I still find it hard not to think of these two asteroid-headed-for-the-Earth films, which opened within a few weeks of each other in 1998, as partners in crime on some level. Meanwhile, Richard Widmark is at peak grizzled hard-ass as a general mortified at the thought of being the first American officer to lose a war to a bunch of insects. If you are not a big fan of natural disaster movies, don’t worry the category is more than just that.

It’s magnificent, and terrifying.

Perhaps that’s why the genre has been a constant presence throughout cinema history, going all the way back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, on through the disaster-movie craze of the 1970s and into the present day. When she's not writing, you can find her in a studio taking belly dance classes, hiking up a hill or browsing through Pinterest.

Starring disaster stalwart Charlton Heston (The Naked Jungle, Airport 1975), the movie won an Oscar for the then-groundbreaking effects it displayed when a massive rumbler topples L.A. Of course, now that such realistic-looking flicks as 2012 have come along, what was once state-of-the-art looks like some dude was just shaking a table holding a scale model of Hollywood. Here’s the premise: Fears of the sun’s demise prompt the earthlings of the future to set aside their differences and launch our planet (using giant earth engines as thrusters) into the cosmos in search of a new solar system. One of the great, most underrated films of the 1980s. Check out more great lists like the Best End of the World Movies, New Disaster Movies, Worst Game of Thrones Characters, Best Horror Anime, and Celebrities With Allergies. It concerns a team that has to... 20 Pretty Cool Movie Details We Found This Week That Made Us Say, 'That's Awesome'. The movie stars Cha Seung-won, Kim Sung-kyun and Running Man’s Lee Kwang-soo. In Dante’s Peak, Pierce Brosnan is a haunted geologist who comes to a small town to investigate seismic activity in a long-dormant volcano, and winds up romancing mayor and single mother Linda Hamilton as they desperately flee deadly clouds of ash. Some of the effects may have become dated, but the suspense definitely has not. James Cameron’s doomed love story/disaster epic is an ideal combination of teen romance and state-of-the-art action filmmaking.
Titanic is a 1997 American epic romance and disaster film directed by James Cameron. And come they did.

In fact, most people probably hated it. We also excluded superhero movies (so, no Superman or The Dark Knight Rises) or tales of the supernatural.