The landscape of disaster film, 2000–20

Abstract

The general public's understanding of disasters is influenced by the portrayal of such events in popular culture. Disaster films have remained a core attraction in this regard. A systematic assessment of the most recent disaster film cycle (that is, from January 2000–December 2019) is warranted, therefore, to gain insights into the current landscape of the genre and to comprehend better the imagery that people encounter onscreen. This study evaluated 173 disaster films and found that most depict natural hazards and global catastrophes despite films about monsters and smaller‐scale disasters being the most popular. It provides a foundation for future research on the relevance of disaster films to disaster scholarship and emergency management practice. And it offers a starting point to analyse the role of disaster films in shaping the meaning and experience of disasters, generally, and the layperson's understanding of disasters and emergency management, including expectations of responder agencies and organisations.

Flow, Fear, and Classroom Modality: Student Experiences in a University Environmental and Sustainability Film Course

“…Instruction where fear-inducing events occur on a consistent basis has proven to be a valuable source of information about student learning (Everett et al, 2023;Montano & Carr, 2021). According to descriptive results, inducing fear as a form of motivation in learning may be an approach underutilized in undergraduate classroom instruction.…”

“…In today's society fear is a behavior that seems to be consistent with topics related to war (Kurapov et al, 2023), climate change (Ballet et al, 2023), or other dramatic and often contentious human-induced events (Boddez et al, 2021). As such, communicating fear is a critical aspect of information consumption and delivery of content today (Ahorsu et al, 2022;Lin et al, 2020;Montano & Carr, 2021). Recent examples include the fear of contracting COVID-19 made prominent in social media posts (Lin et al, 2020), natural disaster related fears (Montano & Carr, 2021), and fears related to films about the climate crisis and unsustainable energy production (Everett et al, 2023).…”

“…As such, communicating fear is a critical aspect of information consumption and delivery of content today (Ahorsu et al, 2022;Lin et al, 2020;Montano & Carr, 2021). Recent examples include the fear of contracting COVID-19 made prominent in social media posts (Lin et al, 2020), natural disaster related fears (Montano & Carr, 2021), and fears related to films about the climate crisis and unsustainable energy production (Everett et al, 2023). As such, narratives and storylines using the medium of film have the potential to not only educate students through fear in communication, but also increase potential for flow experiences (Everett et al, 2023).…”

Aesthetic Comparison of Chinese and Western Disaster Films

“…The disaster film is a film genre whose central plot is a large-scale disaster caused by nature, humans, or imaginary extra-terrestrial beings to human society, including natural disasters, accidents, terrorist attacks, or global disasters [1]. Disaster film, with its exciting plot, thrilling scenes, incisively and vividly disaster landscape, profound and profound cultural expression, has become a type of commercial film and art film, is one of the most popular film types of the majority of audiences, The disaster film, as a natural disaster film, should reflect the conflict between nature and human beings [2]. Thomas Schatz, a genre researcher, says that the narrative framework of any genre is rooted in a predetermined system [3].…”

The writing of the disaster poem: Knowing oil through global apocalypse movies

“…i reheat curry that's spent several months in the freezer, pulling a constant stream of energy I wrote "Perpetual Cataclysm Machine" over several months at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, a period in which I watched (or subjected myself to, if we're being dramatic) numerous disaster movies such as Deep Impact (Leder, 1998), 2012 (Emmerich, 2009), Dante's Peak (Donaldson, 1997), On the Beach (Kramer, 1959) and Geostorm (Devlin, 2017). Although not following formal criteria for selecting which films would be included, I mainly (with some exceptions) focused my attention on what Montano and Carr (2022) categorise as "Global Catastrophe" films, or films in which human life on Earth faces an existential threata subset of the disaster genre which, despite seemingly not existing in the 1970s, have now become "so commonplace recently that we're now expected to take the most horrific scenarios for granted" (Barber, 2014). I also largely sourced films that were of Hollywood in origin, in part because, following Buell, I was particularly interested in US-centric representations of risk and catastrophe in particular, even as these fictional catastrophe's were often meant to be global in nature.…”