‘I’m So Big’: Ahead of Wuthering Heights, the 20 best movies with horrific weather ranked! | film

20. Frozen (2013)

Pathetic fallacy is a literary device in which the environment reflects the mood of a character. It’s a staple of the classic Disney animated film, about a woman who becomes so disturbed that she literally turns her surroundings into perpetual winter. As such, she is responsible for untold tragedies, not least the fact that her confusion directly caused the invention of Josh Gad’s annoying snowman.

19. The Shining (1980)

It is perhaps the defining film about Seasonal Affective Disorder. In The Shining, Jack Nicholson’s family suffers as he succumbs to the madness of snow-covered isolation. Although the interior scenes are what give the film its terrifying reputation, it’s worth remembering that none of the events would have happened if the Overlook Hotel had been so easy to escape. It’s also a timely reminder that snow really takes the fun out of mazes.

18. Blade Runner (1982)

Ridley Scott’s classic film is a masterpiece of design, with the rain-soaked future cityscape playing as big a role as any of the actual characters. Does the constant rain affect the plot? No, not really, although you have to imagine everyone would be a lot less miserable if the sun came out every now and then.

17. Force Majeure (2014)

Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure was remade in 2020 as Downhill, and is more about how people react to perceived weather than to the weather itself. The fallout follows as a man who, believing an avalanche is about to happen, abandons his family and runs away. Everything is instantly undone, and what follows is painfully difficult to watch.

16. The Thing (1982)

Ultimately, the weather isn’t the first thing you think of when you think of “the thing,” because that would be the thing itself in all its horrific, nightmarish glory. However, try to imagine the film set in a beautiful springtime meadow and it instantly loses all its power. Its setting in Antarctica means that all the characters are isolated and visibility is constantly low. This is what makes the film a claustrophobic classic.

15. Heavy Rain (1998)

Infamous after its release, Hard Rain is a film in which a criminal gang attempts a heist, only to be outdone by – you guessed it – some heavy rain. The film tries so hard to be serious that it ends up being silly and fun, although Morgan Freeman mistook it as a villain, and Minnie Driver complained that she wasn’t allowed to wear a wetsuit because the producers wanted her nipples to be visible.

14. Everest (2015)

Although it is now a park for the rich and reckless, it is important to remember that many people die on Mount Everest every year. “Everest,” a star-studded “Poseidon Adventure”-style ensemble piece, tells the story of a real-life disaster that befell climbers in 1996, when eight of them were caught in a blizzard and died on their descent. The film does a good job of showing how unsurvivable the circumstances are. In fact, just five months before the film was released, 22 people were killed when an avalanche struck the mountain.

13. Take Shelter (2011)

Few partnerships in film are as satisfying as the one between Jeff Nichols and Michael Shannon. Take Shelter is a perfect example. Shannon plays a man who suffers from visions of terrible storms. Are these obsessions or is he mentally ill? It is a premise that allows both parties to work to their strengths; Shannon is tortured and hunted, and the amount of psychological tension that writer-director Nichols can extract from the story is astonishing.

12. Into the Wild (2007)

Sean Penn’s retelling of the story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who ventured to Alaska unprepared, has long inspired a small army of transcribers, many of whom he ended up saving. Which makes you wonder what movie they were watching, since Into the Wild is the story of a man who appears unprepared for all kinds of storms, floods, and ice. It’s beautifully done, but maybe it’s better to stay home.

11. The Impossible (2012)

Those who remember the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami will long be haunted by news footage of its aftermath, as bodies pile up outside hospitals. The Impossible is a dramatic depiction of this event. And while it wasn’t universally well received upon its release – it was only eight years after the disaster, and since its stars were Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, some accused it of whitewashing what really happened – it still remains a deeply disturbing watch.

10. The Revenant (2015)

In 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio was so desperate for an Oscar that he ended up subjecting himself to The Revenant, a film in which an endless series of terrible things happened to his character. And while it can be a bit slapstick at times – occasionally veering into Mr Bean cosplay territory – it ends up being relentlessly beaten by the weather. There are storms. There is rain. It gets so cold that his beard freezes. The whole thing was very annoying, but it did the job, and proved that nothing gets you an Oscar faster than a bit of inclement weather.

9. Twister (1996)

Twister – and to a lesser extent its sequel Twisters – speaks to a deep American fascination with storms. While other movies depict tornadoes as things to hide from at all costs, Twister turns them into a spectacle. All the characters here are determined to chase them no matter what, shouting and screaming as they go. It respects the intensity of the storms that demolish homes and vehicles, but it’s a mid-’90s blockbuster in which only the villains and side characters die. It’s a good hurricane movie, but is it the best hurricane movie? No, thanks…

8. Sharknado (2013)

Because even though Twister is fun, it has to lose points so that twisters aren’t filled to the gills with armies of killer sharks. That’s not an accusation you can level against Sharknado, a straight-up movie about a tornado stuffed with killer sharks. Made on the cheap, in order to maximize the ridiculous trend of copycat creature features that started with Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, Sharknado is highly implausible from start to finish. While it’s worth watching, the same probably can’t be said for all of its parts, especially the part starring Jedward.

7. Magnolia (1999)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is the director’s attempt to address his father’s death, but it’s so ambitious and sprawling that it basically ends up taking up everything. This includes strange weather events. The emotional climax of the film comes in the form of millions of frogs falling from the sky. At first it’s ridiculous. Then, when the frogs thump, smash windows and cause car accidents, it becomes terrifying, then disturbing, then amazing. It’s also a lot more of a logistical nightmare than many of the films on this list, since a city-wide deluge of ankle-deep frogs is much harder to shake off than some snow.

6. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

It would be surprisingly easy to fill this entire list with films directed by Roland Emmerich, a man who has dedicated his entire career to making films in which a lot of people are punished by incredibly bad weather. However, The Day After Tomorrow is perhaps the best miniature of his oeuvre. There is a hail storm. There is a hurricane. There is wind and rain. There is a sudden appearance of a new ice age. There is a group of loose wolves, which do not traditionally belong to meteorology but are worth mentioning. It’s Emmerich’s climate crisis film. A big warning that unless we change our ways, we will either freeze to death or be eaten by wolves.

5. The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Fair warning: From this point on, the list starts to skew heavily toward people having a bad time on a boat. With this in mind, it would be a mistake to ignore the text about people having a rough time on a boat. The film, about a luxury cruise ship destroyed by a tsunami, features a killer lineup of performers, including Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters, Carol Lynley, and Roddy McDowell. The disaster film that other disaster films aspire to be, it was the highest-grossing film of 1973 and won two Oscars. It’s a bit strange to describe a movie about mass death as an adventure.

4. Noah (2014)

Darren Aronofsky has made a career of depicting terrible things that happen to people, so it makes sense that he would eventually make a film about something incredibly terrible that happened to everyone at once. Noah, his retelling of the story of Noah’s Ark, is his highest-grossing film to date, but also probably his least remembered. Did you know Ray Winstone is in it? Did you know Emma Watson is in it? Did you know that many countries have banned it for religious reasons? Either way, you have to agree that it’s a movie about some pretty horrific weather.

3. The Fog (2007)

This is going to be controversial, because when it comes to movies about water droplets in the air, some people get pretty angry. In one corner are fans of John Carpenter’s The Fog (about some creepy things hiding in some fog), and in the other corner are fans of Frank Darabont’s The Mist (about some creepy things hiding in some fog). There’s only one of those on this list, and for me, The Mist is almost on the edge of it. That’s partly because it’s based on a Stephen King novel, and partly because it has one of the funniest endings of any film in history. I welcome your emails.

2. The Perfect Storm (2000)

You know a movie has struck a chord when it becomes part of the lexicon. We live in an age where almost everything is described as a perfect storm, and it’s all because of this movie: the story of some fishermen off the coast of Massachusetts who found themselves tragically caught up in a terrifying combination of high pressure, a cold front, and a hurricane. It’s a good movie, with strong performances from George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, but knowing that this actually happened (in 1991) makes it even sadder.

1. All is Lost (2013)

Anything of this beauty. The only actor in All Is Lost is Robert Redford, and only 51 words are spoken out loud in the entire film. All Is Lost is the story of a sailor who realizes there is a hole in his boat, as a storm approaches. The boat capsizes. He was thrown into the sea. He gets in a raft. There’s another storm. Things aren’t going quite right. This may be Redford’s best film, as his face gradually transforms into a gritty monument to stoicism as he calmly accepts his fate. It may not be a perfect storm, but it is a perfect movie.