‘Disaster movies’ were a phenomenon of the early and mid 1970s, and for a time it looked as though they might prove an enduring feature of the world movie market: they had done extremely well at the box office in both the United States and Britain, and a definite cycle of films could be identified. The cycle, however, seems to have terminated early in 1977 with the second sequel, Airport ‘77, to the movie that apparently started it all at the beginning of the decade. Since then, there has been the occasional echo – in, for instance, the ill-fated Cassandra Crossing, some scaled-down TV movies (Flight to the Holocaust, Smash-up on Interstate Five), and a sequence or two in the otherwise straightforward thriller Roller coaster — but it is certainly no longer possible to speak, as it was in 1974—5, of a flourishing cycle of films. Disaster movies, in other words, are now a part of cultural history. Their narrative strategies and devices, on the other hand, are still very much current: they exemplify a trend in popular – or ‘dominant’ – cinema.

The term ‘disaster movie’ needs some definition: though never a true generic label like Western or Horror movie, it was nevertheless in fairly current use and endowed for a time with a definite if imprecise meaning by the cinema-going public. Someone going to see a disaster movie knew by and large what she or he was going to get.