It’s impossible to overstate the popularity of disaster films in the mid-to-late-1970s. The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974), The Hindenburg (1975), Black Sunday (1977), the Airport series (1970, 1975, 1977, 1979) and others were huge box office draws, with star-studded casts: Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Dean Martin, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, James Stewart, Gene Hackman, Jacqueline Bisset, Steve McQueen, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Olivia de Havilland — all showed up to have their worlds rocked.

But the wattage mattered little. Audiences were there to see people crushed to death by falling pianos or fall 110 stories from a moving elevators. No matter who was on board, the star of Poseidon was the wave, just as the fire received top billing in Inferno and the blimps took center stage in Hindenburg and Black Sunday. No matter who played the pilot (usually Peter Graves) or the captain (usually Leslie Nielsen), the peril was the point.

If you’re thinking, Wait, these things sound like horror, you’re not wrong. The films, and later fare such as Dante’s Peak (1997), Titanic (1997), Deep Impact (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), and San Andreas (2015) all contain tropes, aspects that would normally have us pointing at the screen, Leo-like, exclaiming, There! Didja see that? Like the kills in slasher films, disaster deaths are expected, and the more spectacular, the better. The body count is the reason we watch disaster films—with the added bonus that they’re bumping off Hollywood royalty.

But tropes do not a horror film make. These films may show extreme peril, extinction level events, bloodletting, and nature as a destructive force, but they’re not about people being acted on by evil forces, or doing evil themselves. Having one’s legs caught in a disintegrating Hoover Dam may feel familiar, but as presented in San Andreas, it’s just another day in sunny CA. Drowning in a storm drain or exploding inside an Earthbound comet may seem like déjà vu, but as seen in The Towering Inferno and Deep Impact, they’re part of the scenery. Horror isn’t the point of disaster films. It’s the by-product.

Society of the Snow is J.A. Bayona’s 2023 film about the October 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes and subsequent, 72-day ordeal of 14 souls on board. It’s a gut-wrenching depiction of what the young men aboard had to do to survive, and while the film filters out some of the more nauseating details, enough is implied to give you a good idea of how it went down. There have been attempts to dramatize the crash and aftermath, namely the 1993 Frank Marshall film Alive, in which English-speaking actors took on the roles of a Montevideo rugby team. Bayona was determined to work with unknown Uruguayan and Argentine actors, in Spanish, and it pays off in a richer, more authentic experience.

Because it portrays characters at the mercy of forces beyond their control, I’m classifying Society as a disaster film; several sequences would rightly be considered horror, such as its visceral crash sequence in which the plane splits apart and passengers are thrown from or sucked out of the cabin. The scene frightens because Bayona puts us there, in the cabin, as the plane bounces off a mountain and skitters across a ridge. It’s so effective, the sequence instantly eclipses the then-cutting edge (and award-winning) effects of the 1970s films. Miniature cruise ships capsizing in stormy seas are quaint next to what Bayona’s team accomplished.

After the crash, the film settles into a groove, of sorts, as the men focus on the job of staying alive in sub-zero temperatures. We learn how the survivors stayed warm, nursed their wounds, and yes, ate. Again, sounds like horror, and some of it is horrific, although that’s not Bayona‘s aim (unlike, say, his 2007 film The Orphanage). Society is, above all, a story about the will to stay alive against all odds. Unlike fictional survival stories like Train to Busan or 28 Days Later, which deliver shocks from start to finish, Society’s primary aim is to inspire and uplift.

Tom Holland and Noami Watts in THE IMPOSSIBLE (2012)

Which brings me to The Impossible, Bayona’s 2012 film about the December 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, which killed almost 228,000 people in 14 countries surrounding the Indian Ocean. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history, inspiring a record amount of giving to the Red Cross and similar organizations around the globe. (FYI, I remember where I was when I heard about this, and how urgently everyone felt the need to help by donating. It was one of those events where you don’t think — you just stop what you’re doing and run to your computer.)

While hundreds of thousands of locals died in the tsunami and its aftermath, The Impossible focuses on a family of white British tourists, the Bennetts: mother Maria, a doctor (Naomi Watts), father Henry (Ewan MacGregor), and sons Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast), and Thomas (Samuel Joslin). The film is based on the real-life story of María Belón, a Spanish physician who was on vacation in Thailand with her husband Enrique Álvarez and sons Lucas, Simón, and Tomás.

We open on title cards that recount the wave’s devastation and impact on families, followed by the line, “This is the true story of one of those families.” The words “true story” hold for a few seconds as the rest of the line fades away. Cut to the interior of a plane, with the Bennetts on their way to Thailand. Soon, they’re settling in at a posh resort lousy with tourists from around the world. The family celebrates Christmas. They go SCUBA diving. Maria and Henry bicker. The boys play-fight by the pool. Idyllic scenes, unless you know what’s coming.

Soon enough, the breeze picks up, birds scatter, a ball rolls out of the pool, Maria’s hair is touseled, and a single, loose page from a book floats towards a window pane — where it stops, flattened by the wind. Then come the waves, toppling trees, sweeping into the resort, carrying everything and everyone, including the Bennetts, inland. Just as he did with the plane crash, Bayona puts you in the thick of it. This is what it feels like to be sucked underwater, your body tumbling, stabbed by tree limbs and gouged by objects torn up from the ground.

The waves arrive in THE IMPOSSIBLE (2012)

By the time Maria surfaces, somehow near Lucas, her leg is raw meat, with flaps of skin hanging off and blood gushing. Lucas’s back is checkered with abrasions. We’ve gone from foreboding and dread to body horror in the space of about twenty minutes. Upon arriving at a hospital, Maria is examined by doctors who decide she needs an operation to save her leg. As Lucas is kindly assisting other patients, Maria is removed from the ward, and, due to a mixup, not returned to her original location. Alone and terrified, Lucas is moved to an area for lost and abandoned children.

Like Society, The Impossible doesn’t sustain its level of intensity, because the real story didn’t play out that way. Whereas the shocks in horror ramp up and build to a crescendo, films like The Impossible rely on the director’s ability to hold your interest, regardless of how the story resolves. The Impossible details one family‘s determination to reunite in a land ravaged by disaster. The horror, such as it is, dissipates in service of relating the details as they actually happened.

It would be unsportsmanlike of me to reveal how things turn out in the films — any of them. I’ll just say that, despite an abundance of cold, heat, water, snow, and fire, the characters find themselves in a better place, free to move on with their lives. The only demons trailing behind are the ones in their own minds, the only spectral presence the memory of fallen friends. Are Society of the Snow and The Impossible horror? No. The horror elements may be harrowing, but they’re brief. As with most stories in which our heroes live to tell the tale, there’s got to be a morning after.

Note:

The reason I chose to focus on the Bayona films instead of the 70s disaster films is because the latter group is objectively terrible. On the “trash scale,” as Bobby Frederick Tilley calls it, they’re winners. But as anyone who’s listened to Scare U knows, I don’t judge films on that scale.

To wit: Shelley Winters was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in The Poseidon Adventure for her role as Belle Rosen, a woman on her way to Israel with her husband (Jack Albertson) to meet their grandson. The role is juicy, if maligned and outdated: Belle mocks herself, and is ridiculed throughout the film for her weight, which becomes a liability as the survivors makes their way through the overturned cruise ship. I won’t spoil what becomes of Belle; suffice it to say she redeems herself (not that she needs to), and her character is at least given some agency beyond simply being a nuisance.

Incredibly, the film was also nominated in the following categories: cinematography, editing, costumes, art direction, music (John Williams), and F/X, winning for Best Song: “The Morning After,” or, as it’s known in the end credits, “The Song from The Poseidon Adventure.” Producer Irwin Allen repeated the feat two years later with The Towering Inferno, which won for editing, cinematography, and song, and was nominated for Best Picture. (Like I said, it’s hard to overestimate how big these films were.)

Eric Winick