Movie sets are often a dangerous place to be, as simulating reality generally entails embracing it. Whether working in a Hollywood studio or on location, there are many potential ways actors and crew can come into contact with danger, contending with natural disasters, unsafe props and set pieces, the tribulations of shooting in remote and isolated locations, and plain old human error.

Sometimes, there is barely a hair’s width between everyone walking away in one piece and the entire production being shut down for good. These are 10 movie shoots that almost ended in disaster but somehow pulled it back from the brink.

Related: 10 Little Known Facts About Popular Disaster Movies

10 Now You See Me (2013)

Rejuvenating magic post-David Blaine, Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me assembled Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson, and Isla Fisher as the Four Horseman, a troupe of magicians who manage impossible feats before braying audiences. And while most of the movie’s so-called magic is achieved by editing, camerawork, and even CGI, some of the stunts were performed for real.

Such is the case for the scene in which Fisher’s Henley Reeves is chained up in a water tank, with 60 seconds to break free before a shoal of hungry piranhas joins her. Given the bare-all nature of the glass tank, a body double couldn’t be used, and Fisher had to do the stunt herself.

While the character struggles and is apparently stuck before somehow breaking free, Fisher herself almost drowned. When it came to shooting the scene, the quick release on the actress’s chains failed to open between her ankles and wrists. As the cameras rolled, the crew assumed her struggle was part of the act and didn’t come to her aid. Thankfully, they figured it out in the nick of time, and she lived to see the movie.^[1]

9 Back to the Future Part III (1990)

The third chapter of the Back to the Future trilogy transplants action to the Wild West, with Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) stuck in the past and his protegee Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) having to come to rescue him.

Far from a quick stroll into town and a sharp exit, Marty—under the alias Clint Eastwood—gets caught up in all manner of shenanigans and winds up fighting for his life against a gang of gunslingers. Despite having the smarts of a 21st-century fella, Marty gets himself caught and strung up by a noose before the Doc manages to save him.

While the on-screen stakes are high from the outset, things were equally as dangerous on set. Even shooting Fox in the noose from the waist up, with him standing on a box, they couldn’t get the swinging motion realistic enough and opted to suspend him from the rope for real. Suspended from the gallows, Fox’s carotid artery was blocked by the noose, and he passed out, swinging unconscious for several seconds before director Robert Zemeckis got him down. Any longer, and Fox would have been out of the game for good.^[2]

8 The Abyss (1989)

Much of The Abyss takes place underwater, and director James Cameron would settle for nothing less than the real thing. He insisted on filming submerged, with safety co-divers and air tanks always a few meters away out of shot. This meant that in an emergency, there would be a delay before they could respond, forcing the actors to push their boundaries.

Unfortunately for Ed Harris, things went a little further than this when filming scenes on his own 45 feet (14 meters) down. During these scenes, he was dragged by a line while having to act, with no oxygen of his own, and relied on his safety diver between takes.

For one especially challenging take, Harris’s safety diver got caught up on one of the underwater lines and was unable to reach him. Thus, when Harris motioned to cut the scene and went looking for his support, he was on his own. Another diver reached him before he passed out but administered the regulator upside down. So Harris breathed in several mouthfuls of water. Thankfully, the cameraman stepped in before things turned fatal, but it was mere seconds’ difference between a good film and a disaster.^[3]

7 Super Mario Bros. (1993)

2023’s animated Super Mario Bros. Movie may have set a new standard for Mario movies, but that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the diabolical 1993 live-action original. Starring a plethora of talent in the form of John Leguizamo, Bob Hoskins, and Dennis Hopper, the ill-fated video game adaptation almost cost the actors involved more than just a dent in their reputation.

Hoskins, in particular, had a rough ride from the word go, signing on after seeing an early, more mature, and ultimately abandoned script by Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais without realizing he would be playing a video game character.

To add injury to insult, throughout the shoot, Hoskins wound up being nearly drowned, electrocuted, and stabbed four times, as well as having his finger broken when it was slammed in the door of a van. Yet somehow, he escaped serious injury, or worse, every time, helping bring in the production without too many delays and completing the movie in one piece.^[4]

6 The Craft (1996)

Gothic horror classic The Craft may not have the savvy script of the likes of Scream, but it still managed to put its indelible stamp on ’90s pop culture. The tale of four Catholic schoolgirls turned witches and fashionistas, the film gave voice to the black eyeliner crowd and helped seed the uber-cool supernatural style that Buffy rode in on.

While the witchcraft and spells conducted on set initially didn’t have anyone reaching for their rabbit’s foot, a series of odd occurrences turned up the heat and made for what was, at times, a dangerous shoot.

Most notably, the scene where the teen witches “call the corners” on the beach generated some unusual natural occurrences. The park ranger advised the film crew on the high tide line, but when filming began, the waves kept rising, chasing them further inland. This culminated in an abnormally violent wave that wiped out the cameras and the entire set. Fortunately, nobody got caught in the water, the crew managed to rebuild the set in time, and the cameras survived to film another scene.^[5]

5 Waterworld (1995)

Often referred to as “Mad Max at sea,” Waterworld envisions a post-apocalyptic future in which the polar ice caps have melted and the ocean has engulfed all natural land. Drifters, rogues, and pirates are left to sail the seas, vying for control of what limited resources remain, including Kevin Costner’s mutated Mariner.

Shot on location off the coast of Hawaii, the film forced the crew to contend with the elements and natural world. A turbulent production from beginning to end, Waterworld hit several near-fatal snags along the way to becoming a finished movie.

While filming, female lead Jeanne Tripplehorn and child actress Tina Majorino almost drowned after the bowsprit of their trimaran (a type of multi-hull sailboat) snapped and plunged them into the ocean. Costner also had a close brush with death when he was caught in a sudden patch of rough weather while lashed to the mast of his own trimaran. The team of around a dozen rescue divers had their work cut out for them but got everyone through the array of physical and technical difficulties without greater incident.^[6]

4 The Exorcist (1973)

On any shoot where the film deals with supernatural beings and possession, there will be a certain amount of superstition. And while it’s usually unfounded, there is a case to be made for the production of The Exorcist having an unusually dark shadow hanging over it.

The movie deals with the exorcism of 12-year-old Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), who is possessed by the demon Pazuzu. Despite the presence of plenty of clergymen (or at least people dressed as clergymen), there were a few nearly disastrous occurrences on set.

While they were shooting the exorcism scene, the set was refrigerated overnight with a bank of air conditioning units so that the camera would pick up the actors’ breath when the camera was rolling, meaning that when the cast and crew arrived in the morning, the entire set was ice cold—not a great place for a fire. Nevertheless, the units caught fire one night and burned down most of the set. Although this shut production down for six weeks, the outcome would have been far worse if it hadn’t happened in the wee hours of the morning.^[7]

3 Apocalypse Now (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola took the filming of his Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now to the Philippines, shooting on location with a large crew and an out-of-control budget. He also dumped his Hollywood actors in the rough to give them a taste of what living and fighting in the jungle was really like.

While his motives were true, this royally backfired on the director when his leading man Martin Sheen—who Coppola rode harder than anyone—suffered a heart attack. Seeking to bring out the darkness within Sheen, Coppola encouraged his drinking and did everything within his power to get Sheen to break away from his actor persona and begin portraying the character “honestly.”

This took a physical toll on the actor, and the heart attack nearly did him in for good. Had Sheen been unable to continue, the production would have ended, Coppola would have returned with half a film, and it’s likely we would never have seen Apocalypse Now. Luckily, Sheen recovered over the following weeks and was able to complete his scenes in doctor-recommended non-strenuous conditions.^[8]

2 Scream (1996)

Director Wes Craven set a new precedent for horror with his meta-slasher Scream, simultaneously reaffirming and sending up the tropes audiences had come to expect. Knife-wielding Ghostface descends on Woodsboro to carve up a group of teens, and while there is a lot of stabbing and blood onscreen, there was almost a whole lot more.

During the film’s climax, in which the killer is revealed to be Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) as he launches a final assault on Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her friends, Ulrich took a pretty serious hit for real.

In the film’s DVD commentary, Craven explains that when Campbell’s stunt double stabbed Ulrich with the tip of an umbrella, she missed her mark, going wide of the actor’s protective undervest and lancing him in the precise location where he had open heart surgery as a child. While this could have been a fatal blow, Ulrich walked away (mostly) unscathed, with a whole lot of pain to show for it. Never one to waste good footage, Craven left the shot in the final cut, meaning Billy’s reaction to being stabbed is the real deal.^[9]

1 Cast Away (2000)

The movie that won Tom Hanks his fourth Golden Globe, Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away, challenged the actor to work for the better part of an entire movie by himself. Stranded on a desert island, Hanks’s FedEx analyst Chuck Noland is thrown into survival mode and must fend for himself and try not to go mad while waiting years for rescue.

Filmed on the Fijian island of Monuriki, Hanks was keen to get stuck in with a bit of method acting, clambering around on a real island beach and attempting the things his character was struggling with—building shelter, making fire—by hand. But this didn’t come without consequences.

A cut on his knee led to a staph infection that put Hanks in the hospital for three days and kept him away from shooting for several weeks. No minor thing, staph infections can cause sepsis, with the body’s blood pressure dropping to a life-threateningly low level. Despite coming closer to death and disaster than he or anyone else might have liked, Hanks used the downtime to work with Zemeckis on rewriting certain pages, gaining a rare bit of adjustment and reconfiguration time during a long shoot.^[10]

According to the majority of pilots, takeoff and landing are the most dangerous aspects of a flight.  Still, some conditions are riskier than others—but it seems that all the mountain peaks, cliff faces, crowded beaches, and main roads on our list, haven’t managed to discourage the brave pilots who navigate them every day.

Since the topic of the deadliest airline disasters has been covered before, let’s have a look now at the most extreme and hazardous airports around the world.  Fasten your seatbelts:

Getting to this amazingly beautiful Caribbean island can be a bit distressing, thanks to a mere 1300-foot-long runway—only slightly longer than most aircraft carrier runways. The incredibly short runway is surrounded by tall cliffs, and it comes dangerously close to a steep slope which leads directly to the ocean.

For these reasons, it is one of the most dangerous airports in the world. An incorrect assessment of the pilot during the takeoff may take the airplane straight into the abyss. Large planes avoid this airport for obvious reasons, but even for a very small aircraft such as a Cessna, landing seems to be a difficult mission—especially when the weather conditions are bad. At least everybody knows what’s to blame for the constant decrease of tourism in the island.

Qamdo Bamda Airport is the world’s highest airport, perched more than 14,000 feet above sea level. Even more impressive than the airport’s altitude, however, is the nearly 3.5-mile-long runway.  

Having a runway that’s the length of sixty soccer fields may seem a bit excessive, but apparently long runways are crucial to making safe landings at higher altitudes. At sea level, where the approach speed is about 150mph, it may take five thousand feet of runway to stop. But at more than fourteen thousand feet above sea level, the same approach speed will require around twice as runway to bring a plane to a halt.

Traveling at high altitude can in fact be pretty dangerous all round, and travelers should make themselves aware of conditions before they decide to fly in such places

The small airport of Gustaf III, on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy, provides pilots and passengers alike with some fairly grave dangers. The corridor in which the runway has been built is incredibly narrow, and planes come frighteningly close to hitting the slopes of the adjacent upland area, or plummeting into the ocean, every time they land.

This video on youtube clearly shows what you might have to go through if something goes wrong during the landing. The good thing is that—in this instance at least—no one was even slightly injured.

The dangers of Ice Runway have more to do with the extreme weather conditions that the pilot has to deal with, rather than the design or position of the airport itself. The Ice Runway is one of three major airstrips used to haul supplies and researchers to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station. As its name implies, there’s no tarmac in sight—just long stretches of meticulously groomed ice and snow.

There is no shortage of space on the Ice Runway, so super-sized aircraft can land with relative ease. The real challenge is making sure that the weight of the aircraft and cargo doesn’t bust the ice or get the plane stuck in soft snow. As the ice of the runway begins to break up, planes are redirected to Pegasus Field or Williams Field, the two other airstrips servicing the station.

The city of Courchevel in the French Alps is one of the most famous ski resorts in Europe, but it seems like the city owes much of its fame to its airport, which is located inside the mountains. Courchevel Airport is not only famous for its incredible height and bizarre location, but also for the fact that it has had a leading role in a James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies, which depicted Mr. Bond landing a plane successfully in the extremely dangerous airport.

This is quite possibly the only airport in the world that also serves as a beach. Takeoffs and landings at Barra Airport occur on the same sand that people can stroll along during airport off-hours. And that’s just the beginning: during high tide in the evening, the illumination from the lights of all the cars passing by assist the pilot with his landing. For those who simply want to enjoy a romantic walk along the beach, there are warning signs informing them of all expected upcoming flight arrivals.

Believe it or not, Barra is still an officially recognized international airport by the Air Traffic Organization, and it seems like any kind of logical or critical suggestion would be deemed irrelevant by the authorities. We can only hope that they know better than us!

In Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, we can fly into one of the most dangerous and notorious airports in the world. It has been the subject of scrutiny following several accidents, including a 2008 crash that caused the deaths of five passengers. The airport opened back in 1934, an era when planes were less powerful and didn’t require such lengthy runways.

Toncontin’s runway is just over seven thousand feet long, and it’s situated in a valley surrounded by mountains. What’s even harder to believe—and by far the most hazardous aspect of this airport—is that there’s only one way in and one way out for the planes, which increases the risk dramatically. Despite all these high-risk factors, planes as large as Boeing 757’s land at the airport on a daily basis.

Lukla Airport, as it was called originally, was later renamed Tenzing-Hillary Airport to honor the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Located in Lukla, Nepal, the airport serves thousands of climbers hoping to “conquer” Mount Everest, as well as trekkers wishing to explore the Everest region.

Dangers at this airport include high winds and extreme cloud cover—but these are by no means the scariest aspects. Like Gustaf III Airport, one end of the runway is preceded by high terrain; but instead of a beautiful sandy beach on the other end, there is a two-thousand-foot drop.

There have been several accidents at Lukla airport, most recently on October 12, 2010.

The two main runways at Madeira Airport were just 5,250 feet long when the airport was first opened back in 1964.

After a horrifying crash in 1977, in which an incoming Boeing 727 smashed through a stone bridge and ended up on the beach, one of the runways was extended by 655 feet. In the early 2000s, the runway was further lengthened by extending it across the beach, supported by columns.

Lengthened or not, the basic approach to Madeira Airport remains tricky to this day, even for the most experienced pilots. Against their better instincts, pilots must first aim the aircraft directly at a looming mountain peak, and then quickly bank to the right in order to avoid crashing into the mountain, in order to put themselves on course for the runway.

Gibraltar airport is not only one of the most dangerous airports in the world, but one of the busier ones as well (especially compared to the other risky airports included in this list). No matter how unbelievable this might sound, the corridor of this airport actually passes through the main street of the city.

Vehicles are made to stop every time an aircraft lands or takes off. It’s amazing that there has never been a major accident—and we can only hope it stays that way.

Theodoros II is a budding author and a law graduate. He loves History, Sci-Fi culture, European politics, and exploring the worlds of hidden knowledge. His ideal trip in an ideal world would be to the lost city of Atlantis.

Festivals—a hectic schedule of your favorite bands playing live, a pilgrimage into the great outdoors, a chance to meet like-minded new friends, and a lifetime of memories. At least, that’s what promoters would have you believe. So what happens when these expectations are not a reality and the event is plunged into chaos?

SEE ALSO: 10 Frozen Timepieces That Marked Death And Disaster

These following disasters have left furious ticket holders demanding their money back and event organizers red-faced. What was supposed to be the time of their lives became a weekend of hell.

10 Fyre Festival
2017

Anyone who has had access to the Internet in the past couple of years would have heard about the disaster that was Fyre Festival. Located in the Bahamas, it was billed as the most luxurious festival in the world and promoted by the most elite models around the globe.

After paying between $1,200 and $100,000 each, ticket holders were promised flights from Miami, luxury accommodation on yachts, kayaking on the crystal clear waters, and performances from Major Lazer and Blink-182.

When attendees landed on the island, they soon found all they were promised was not coming to them. The accommodations were recycled refugee tents, the food was prepackaged sandwiches instead of gourmet meals, and no medical or event staff was on hand. There was also no cell phone or Internet service and no running water. The festival became the subject of a Netflix documentary, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.

Organizer Billy McFarland, then 26, pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to six years behind bars.^[1]

9 Woodstock
1999

To see headliners like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and Joe Cocker, half a million people attended the Woodstock festival in 1969. Fast-forward 30 years, and it was a completely different scene as organizers tried to emulate the hippie era. Woodstock ’99, which took place in Rome, New York, was attended by 220,000 people and went wrong from the very beginning.

Organizers had failed to advise attendees to bring enough water, and the dehydrated crowds were met with a $4 charge for a single bottle. The Baltimore Sun reported, “More than 700 had been treated for heat exhaustion and dehydration.”

Crowd control was also a serious issue. Volunteer security was recruited from New York City. But as things became hostile, they ditched their posts and left the police dangerously outnumbered.

Then there was the problem with overcrowding as many were using fake passes to get through the gates. The Syracuse Post-Standard reported, “Security guards said they were confiscating fake passes at the rate of 50 an hour at just one gate.” Far from “peace, love, and happiness,” that was the final Woodstock event.^[2]

8 TomorrowWorld
2015

In 2015, international music festival TomorrowWorld in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia, devolved into near-riots. Heavy rain turned the fields into a sinking mud pit, and organizers decided to limit transport services back to the surrounding areas which left thousands stranded.

Festivalgoers had two choices: either hike for about 8 kilometers (5 mi) or pay for an Uber that charged a surge price of five times the normal rate. Instead, many decided to sleep on the side of the road. They were not supplied with any food or water.

One attendee told Vice News that he managed to leave the event by sneaking onto a shuttle bus for event staff. He recalled, “By the time we flagged down that bus, we were up to over $100 pooled together to try to buy our way out. The rich and the lucky rode, the poor walked, and the poor and tired stopped wherever they could find open ground.”^[3]

The Belgium-founded festival will always be remembered for this post-apocalyptic atmosphere.

7 Bloc Festival
2012

To call Bloc Festival in 2012 “chaotic” might be an understatement. One of the largest electronic dance music festivals in the UK was shut down due to serious safety fears with overcrowding.

Police were sent to help safely evacuate the attendees at the Royal Victoria Docks venue. Many people still stood in the same queue they had been in for hours as they waited to get in. Disgruntled ticket holders had paid upward of $100 each to watch acts like Snoop Dogg and Orbital perform.

Bloc then began trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. People posted photos of attendees stuck behind crowd control barriers and held back by a huge police presence.

One tweet read, “Bloc is um a disaster right now. We’re in the middle of a car crash.” Another tweeted, “Scary, and very nearly led to injuries; all we were told was ‘move back’—where to exactly?”^[4]

After 2016, the founders shut down the annual festival and focused on building their own “super club” instead.

6 Glastonbury
1990 And 2005

It’s a wonder that organizers would allow the Glastonbury festival to descend into chaos after two decades of hosting it. But that’s exactly what happened in 1990. That year, the crowds should have remembered the event for headliners Sinead O’Connor and The Cure, but the risk of “near-asphyxiation” made the headlines instead.^[5]

More than 75,000 people were in attendance at the famous Pyramid Stage, causing a huge crush in the crowd. Bands even had to stop their sets as helicopters landed nearby to tend to the injured.

In 2005, people were at risk again. This time, it was due to 1.2 meters (4 ft) of water flooding the camping sites and performance area. Even the Acoustic Stage wasn’t safe as it was struck by lightning.

The flooding disaster led organizers to eventually fork out millions on a new drainage system before they returned two years later. Despite these bad experiences, Glastonbury is still considered one of the greatest music festivals in the world.

5 Isle Of Wight
2012

In 2011, the Isle of Wight festival promised an epic lineup featuring Tom Petty, Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, Biffy Clyro, and more. Then came the heavy rain, which forced 600 people to sleep in their cars overnight as boats transporting them to the island could not dock due to the severe weather. Others were left gridlocked in traffic for more than 15 hours. Police even opened a local football club for people to take shelter through the night.

The following day, organizers told attendees that they should ditch their cars if they wanted a chance to make it to the festival. Speaking of the experience, one festivalgoer told Sky News, “We’ve gone through some highs and some lows, it’s been 14 hours, and we’re sleep-deprived. Fortunately, we’ve took a lot of food with us, but there were people there that had no food.”^[6]

She added, “There were people with kids, people with dogs, so we tried to remain in high spirits, but it’s been a long slog.”

4 Bestival
2008

Turning up to a festival, you can always expect some mud. But no one at Bestival in 2008 could have predicted how severe the conditions would become. The weather was so bad that year as thunder, lightning, rain, and gale-force winds ripped through the camping grounds.

Many had their tents submerged in the mud. The less fortunate had their camps completely blown away with their belongings. Even the main stages for the performances began to sink into the ground.

Despite the ongoing battle with a furious Mother Nature, Bestival attendees were looking forward to seeing headliner Amy Winehouse perform. That didn’t quite go as planned, either.

Arriving onstage 40 minutes late, Winehouse—who was battling drug and alcohol addiction at the time—staggered around the stage, swilled her drink, and cut the set short by performing for only 30 minutes. The soul singer was met with boos from the crowd.^[7]

Sadly in 2011, she died at age 27 due to alcohol poisoning.

3 Electric Daisy Carnival
2010

During the 1990s, Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) attracted many festivalgoers thanks to the rise in popular electronic dance music. The event began as a warehouse party held in Austin, San Bernardino, New York City, Los Angeles, and Puerto Rico.

Attendees depended on handouts, which would announce the exact location of the raves until it blew up into something much bigger. Word had leaked out that EDC was the hottest party in town. Unfortunately, that also attracted a lot of minors.

In 2010, the event at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was overwhelmed by the number of attendees under 18 years old. Heavy drugs were in use among the minors, and tragically, a 15-year-old girl died during the event.

Los Angeles forced EDC out of the area. The organizers stated, “Without an executed contract in place at this time, it has become impossible to guarantee to all of the fans and talent that EDC can be produced at this venue this year.” The event eventually found a new home in Las Vegas, and they hit a record attendance of 700,000 people in 2014.^[8]

2 Sled Island
2013

Sled Island festival in Calgary, Canada, has recovered well from its disastrous attempt in 2013. Acts including The Jesus and Mary Chain, Explosions in the Sky, Divine Fits, and Mac DeMarco were scheduled to appear alongside more than 250 other bands over the four-day weekend in June. That was until severe weather shut down the entire event.

On the second day of the festival, director Maud Salvi received mandatory evacuation orders due to rising floodwaters. The permits for the festival had been revoked, and the event organizers posted on their website: “In light of the current emergency situation, and in line with our commitment to the safety of festivalgoers, all remaining Sled Island festival events are canceled.”

Sled Island festival lost a fortune due to the cancellation. Ticket holders were offered refunds, which amounted to around $200,000. The festival came back the following year, proving that previous severe flooding wasn’t going to dampen their mood.^[9]

1 Powder Ridge Rock Festival
1970

Powder Ridge Rock Festival has become known as “the greatest rock concert that never happened.” Following the success of Woodstock, promoters were hoping to be the next big rock festival that people would flock to in the thousands. In 1970, more than 50,000 people were expected to arrive at Powder Ridge Rock Festival in Middlefield, Connecticut, to see rock royalty Fleetwood Mac and Janis Joplin.

Then, just one month before, the town of Middlefield rejected the application for the festival as local residents took legal action. In a time before the Internet, word did not get back to all attendees that the festival was canceled and 30,000 individuals showed up anyway.^[10]

There was no food, no music, and no water supply. But there were a lot of drug dealers. Doctors volunteered their services to help with the “drug crisis” that took place over the next few days as heavy hallucinogens were being used. By the end of the weekend and many bad drug trips later, the attendees eventually left Powder Ridge.

Cheish Merryweather is the founder of Crime Viral. A true crime and oddities fanatic. Twitter: @thecheish.

As human beings, we love to feel superior and that we are one of the good guys. Throw in a dose of helplessness at the state of the world today, add social media into the mix – and you have a recipe for disaster.

SEE ALSO: 10 Decisions With Bizarrely Unexpected Consequences

Virtue signalling is a term that has evolved to describe empty gestures with no real commitment—think throwaway comments designed to generate “likes” and to appear virtuous.

Celebrities have been called out for hypocrisy when their moral posturing has turned out to be of little substance. Members of the public have also tripped up when trying to change the world. Perhaps the point to remember is – it’s OK to care, just do your research.

10 Rough Justice

In January 2019, the Spice Girls were back in the news when their eagerly awaited comeback tour was sold out in minutes. They announced they were to join forces with the charity Comic Relief to front a campaign called “Gender Justice”. The group designed an exclusive T-shirt bearing the words “IWannaBeASpiceGirl” with “Gender Justice” emblazoned across the back. The T-shirt went on sale for £19.40, (approx. US $25) with £11.40 (approx. US $14.65) being donated to the charity Comic Relief. In turn, the charity promised to use the funds to help “champion equality for women”.

The Guardian newspaper decided to trace the origins of the T-shirt and uncovered a story distinctly lacking in equality and justice.

They discovered that the garment had been produced in a factory in Bangladesh. There, the mostly female workforce toiled for up to 16 hours a day in stifling heat and inhuman conditions. They earned less than the local living wage. Workers told the reporters how they suffered daily abuse and threats if they failed to meet production quotas, even being called “daughters of prostitutes” by the managers. Many suffered neck and back injuries after spending hours bent over sewing machines.

A spokesperson for the Spice Girls said it was “heart-breaking to hear about the treatment that these women receive.” They had believed that the online retailer who sold the clothing was ethical. The group offered a full refund to anyone who had bought the tainted T-shirt.^[1]

9 Out of Order

In April 2018, two black men arrived at a Starbucks in Philadelphia to wait for a friend. Trouble brewed when one asked to use the restroom and a worker refused, saying that they were for paying customers only. After an argument, the manager called police and the men were handcuffed and arrested for “trespass”. They were later released without charge. A video of the incident was posted online, and crowds of people began to protest outside the store. Stuck in a PR nightmare, Starbucks announced that they were to close all 8000 stores for half a day to hold staff training classes on racial bias.

Chairman Howard Schultz then declared that its toilets would be open to all – no purchase necessary. The toilets became very popular and staff soon reported finding alcohol, drugs, dirty needles, blood and condoms in the cubicles. Some had to take anti-viral drugs after handling used needles.

Although the policy still stands, customers are finding many stores’ toilets are locked, barred or “Under Maintenance” as baristas take back control.^[2]

8They Suck

In an attempt to become eco-friendlier, McDonald’s announced that they were to phase out single use plastic straws in all its UK restaurants. By 2019, they had introduced new sustainably sourced paper straws and 1.8 million a day were issued. Customers soon began to complain that the straws dissolved in drinks. McDonald’s claimed that the new straws were designed to hold liquid for one hour. An online petition was launched to bring back the plastic straws and gained 50,000 signatures. Some enterprising customers tracked down the old plastic straws and began to sell them online. Others shared their trick of using a plastic cup lid as a scoop for their shakes.

It then emerged that the new paper straws were too thick to be recycled – and staff were being instructed to throw them out with the trash. The old plastic straws had been fully recyclable.^[3]

7 Turned Off

Stacey Dooley is a British TV presenter and a documentary maker. In 2019, she travelled to Africa to make a film for the charity “Comic Relief”. It was to be used as part of their TV fundraiser, an event where viewers pledge donations to the charity after seeing the work they do. Dooley was filmed at a village in Uganda meeting the locals and later shared a photo of herself hugging a young boy. British politician David Lammy shared his thoughts on Twitter stating:

“The world does not need any more white saviours.”

He wrote that the photo “perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes.”

Stacey described his comments as “farcical”. The row opened up a media debate about race.

Comic Relief announced that they were to stop celebrity visits to third world countries when an aid charity described it as “poverty tourism”.

After the TV show aired, it raised £63m in donations. This was £8m less than the previous campaign in 2017, and the lowest amount of cash raised for more than a decade.^[4]

6 Painful Protest

A duck farm in Petaluma, CA caught the attention of an animal rights group called Direct Action Everywhere. They believed the animals were being kept in cruelty before being slaughtered. The group organized an early morning raid and demonstration to expose conditions on the Reichardt Duck Farm. Busloads of protestors pulled into the farm at 6am and set free hundreds of ducks. But this wasn’t far enough for some of the protestors.

Thomas Chiang and others broke into an area which housed the slaughter line – a metal conveyor belt where the ducks would dangle by the neck and be moved along to their death. Chiang decided to attach himself to the highly dangerous machine and even fixed a U-lock around his neck – just like one of the doomed ducks. A few minutes into his protest and unable to escape, the processing line unexpectedly began to move forward. An unknown person had pressed the start button. Chiang was dragged forwards by his neck and repeatedly smashed into a metal pole as the lock began to choke him. Chiang was minutes away from death and losing consciousness when the machine was suddenly turned off. He made a full recovery in hospital.

Reichardt Farm told the police that it was an accident, and the machine operator had no idea that there were people chained to the machine at the time.^[5]

5 Green Party

Every year, tech giant Google host a conference to discuss global issues. They invite experts, business leaders and A-listers to debate and share ideas in a private setting. In 2019, the 7th Annual Google Camp was held in Palermo, Sicily and the theme was climate change.

Google hired out the luxury Verdura Resort. Hotel staff were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements and all social media was banned. The tiny airport in Palermo was told to prepare for the arrival of 114 private jets carrying VIP guests from around the world.

Conference guests included Prince Harry, Leonardo di Caprio, Bradley Cooper and Katy Perry. Super yachts began to arrive, including producer David Geffen’s $400m vessel named Rising Sun.

Entertainment was courtesy of Coldplay, who performed with an extravagant light show at the Valley of Temples in Agrigento, an ancient Greek site which costs $100k to hire.

Guests were whisked around the island by Maserati and SUV. Prince Harry reportedly gave a heartfelt speech about global warming, pacing on stage barefoot.

Observers began to calculate the environmental cost of the climate change conference.

Each of the 114 first class flights from LA to Palermo generated 12.3 tonnes of CO2 per guest. If Prince Harry flew on a private jet from London, this would have used 1.3 tonnes of CO2. An environmental group called Trees For The Future estimate that 190 trees should be planted to off-set this journey alone.

The total cost of the 3-day jaunt is estimated at $20 million.^[6]

4 Hot Air

Extinction Rebellion is an international network which uses direct action to bring about ecological changes. The group get their message across by using civil disobedience, often causing major disruption to cities. One of their demands is that the UK government reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, so London is often the place where many of their mass demonstrations take place.

In April 2019, they set up camp near Oxford Street in central London and brought traffic to a standstill for more than 11 days. The non-violent group spent their time dancing and practising yoga in the occupied streets until a guest speaker arrived. Oscar winning actress Emma Thompson climbed aboard a pink boat with “Tell the Truth” painted on the side and spoke to the crowds through a loudspeaker. Thompson later said she “absolutely wanted to be arrested on my 60th birthday.”

However, Thompson’s good deed was ridiculed when a photograph emerged, taken the day before. She was pictured at Heathrow airport—after flying in from LA to attend the protest.

It is estimated that a single 5,456-mile flight from LA to Heathrow can create a three-tonne carbon footprint.

As a Greenpeace supporter, Thompson had once helped to buy land near Heathrow in order to stop a third runway being built.

A spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said:

“…it seems counter-productive in the short term, but we are looking at the bigger picture.”^[7]

3 Car Crash

In October 2019, Extinction Rebellion were again protesting in London. This time, they were occupying Trafalgar Square along with a hearse containing a coffin which read “Our future”.

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch was photographed as he visited the activists and spent around two hours sitting and talking with them.

However, after his meeting it emerged that he is the brand ambassador for MG cars in India and the face of MG India’s Hector SUV range. He stars in an Indian commercial for MG cars, where he is seen whizzing around in an MG GS with a 1.5 turbocharged petrol engine. The commercial was filmed in Trafalgar Square, the place that he had met with the protestors who hope to reduce carbon emissions.

Over one million people in India died from air pollution in 2017.^[8]

2 In Plane Sight

Passengers on a flight from Heathrow to Istanbul watched as a man in handcuffs was escorted onto the plane by four security guards. Soon, a crowd gathered around the prisoner who was shouting for help. People power sprang into action, as the passengers began to film the episode and attempted to question the man and his security team. The prisoner managed to call out that he was being taken away from his family and the outraged passengers staged a protest, chanting:

“Take him off the plane!”

Under pressure, the security guards reluctantly led the prisoner off the flight as the triumphant crowd cheered and clapped. The prisoner called out to thank the group as he was taken away.

What they didn’t know, was that the prisoner was a convicted rapist and his captors were employed by the Government to escort him back to Somalia, his country of birth. Yaqub Ahmed, 29, was jailed in 2007 and upon release the Home Office ordered his immediate deportation.

After the plane revolt, he was taken to an Immigration Centre and later released on bail. He has since been taken back into custody and will be deported, this time by a direct charter flight.^[9]

1 Do Not Disturb

North Sentinel is a tiny island in the Indian region of the Bay of Bengal. The islanders have lived in total isolation for 30,000 years and they are one of the last uncontacted tribes left in the world today. All trespassers are met with violence.

American John Allen Chau, aged 27, was a Christian missionary and adventurer who dreamed of traveling to the island. This is a trip deemed so dangerous that all travel to North Sentinel is illegal under Indian law.

An indigenous rights group, Survival International also believe that by contacting the tribe, outsiders risk passing on harmful pathogens and causing a deadly epidemic of flu. This could potentially wipe out the entire population of 50 to 100 people.

Undeterred, Chau paid local fishermen to take him to the island. They only agreed to take him at night and to stay at a safe distance. In 2006, the islanders had killed fishermen who had sailed too close, leaving their bodies on bamboo stakes.

Chau waited for morning then paddled a kayak to the island. He called out:

“My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you.”

Chau sang worship songs as an arrow hit the Bible he was holding. He hastily left the beach.

The following day he travelled back to the island. The watching fishermen said they saw the tribe drag John’s lifeless body along the beach, before burying him in the sand.

Indian authorities confirmed they were not planning to retrieve his body. A local anthropologist said:

“We have decided not to disturb the Sentinelese”.^[10]

About The Author: I am a true crime enthusiast and lover of words. Always looking at the darker side of the news to make new lists with.

On April 26, 1986, an explosion occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the northern part of Soviet Ukraine, an event which today is widely known as the Chernobyl disaster.

During the evening of April 25, engineers made several fatal mistakes, including disconnecting Reactor No. 4’s emergency safety systems and its power-regulating system. At 1:23 AM, the reactor’s power levels surged, and the events that followed led to an explosion which released more than 50 tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere.^[1]

In the days that followed, 32 people died at Chernobyl, and many more suffered radiation burns. Nearly 8.4 million residents of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia were exposed to the radioactive cloud that was released. The calamity is considered the most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history, and the area itself is still suffering in its aftermath.

10 Radiation After The Explosion Was Off The Scale

Hours after the explosion, helicopters were flown over Reactor No. 4 to evaluate radiation levels. Experts were unable to make an exact reading, as 200 meters (656 ft) above the reactor, radiation levels had reached 1,500 rems, but the counters were not capable of reading any higher than 500 rems.

In an attempt to contain the disaster, helicopters dumped lead slabs weighing 40 kilograms (88 lb) each on the reactor, followed by several tons of radiation absorbing-sand. However, the operation was flawed, as the scale of the disaster was like nothing ever seen before. Pilot Alexander Petrov, who responded to the scene, recalled, “It took us more than 24 hours to get things going. [ . . . ] At first, our commanders didn’t know what to do. We flew out to see what was happening, then returned and flew back in the morning.”^[2]

9 A Late Evacuation

The amount of radiation the Chernobyl disaster released into the atmosphere was 50 million curies—equivalent to around 500 Hiroshima bombs. Police roamed the streets wearing gas masks, but the residents were kept in the dark and only heard rumors. Armen Abagian, who was the director of one of the Moscow nuclear power research institutes at the time, advised the Soviet government to evacuate Pripyat immediately. Abagian recalled, “Children were running in the streets; people were hanging laundered linen out to dry. And the atmosphere was radioactive.”^[3]

Residents started to panic when there was a “metallic smell” in the air, and the atmosphere appeared different. It was close to midnight at the end of April 26 when an evacuation was ordered; 1,200 buses and 200 trucks relocated 47,000 residents of Pripyat. The locals thought they would later be returning to their homes, but this was never the case.

8 Contamination Spreads To Other Countries

The buses which escorted the residents out of Pripyat spread the radiation to wider areas. It took 3.5 hours to evacuate. One resident recalled, “Queues of jammed buses left the city. One after the other, like giant beetles, kilometre after kilometre. The traffic was insane. Only a Second World War survivor can imagine a similar scene.”^[4]

Just days after the initial disaster, the wind changed direction and began blowing high levels of radiation in the direction of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The city held its annual May Day parades as the government assured citizens everything was normal. Finally, 11 days after the disaster, officials warned the residents of Kiev that they should avoid eating leafy vegetables and to stay indoors.

Later in May, the Russian first deputy health minister also issued a warning that vodka and red wine were not a cure for radiation exposure—despite popular belief. More than 500,000 residents in Ukraine were ultimately forced to leave their homes.

7 Military Reserves Made Their Own Protective Clothing

More than 600,000 civil and military personnel have been given the honorary status of “Chernobyl liquidators” since the cleanup began in 1986. Originally, robots from West Germany, Japan, and Russia were used to help clean the debris, but they could not operate due to the high levels of radiation. Instead, the job was handed over to humans, who could not be exposed for any longer than 40 seconds.

Most of the liquidators were military reserves, and the army did not have enough uniforms suitable for working in radioactive conditions. Instead, reserves made their own protective clothing using lead sheets up to 4 millimeters thick as aprons to help protect the spine and bone marrow. Photographer Igor Kostin recalled, “The clever ones also added a vine leaf for extra comfort.”^[5]

Many of the liquidators have since suffered from severe health problems—some of which were fatal.

6 Doctors Facing Mortality

Dr. Robert Peter Gale, known as “the Chernobyl Doctor,” was one of the many physicians and scientists brought in from 15 nations to help with the aftermath of the disaster. Dr. Gale treated patients who had suffered such a high exposure to radiation that even a bone marrow transplant could not save them. Without functioning bone marrow in the body, a patient will usually die within four weeks. It was also difficult to assess how much radiation patients had been exposed to, as the gradual loss of hair and some darkening of the skin were the only visible signs.

In 1986, Dr. Gale and the director of the Soviet Union’s Central Institute for Advanced Medical Studies signed an agreement to monitor the 100,000 people who were residents in the “danger zone”—a 30-kilometer (18.7 mi) radius surrounding the site which ultimately became the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. He said, “A physician deals with life and death every day. Yet, with us, death is a biological event. We don’t think of our own death. The events of Chernobyl made me focus on my own mortality—on all our mortality. Unfortunately, it takes these tragic events to impress this on us.”^[6]

5 The Buried Villages

The village of Kopachi lies 7 kilometers (4.3 mi) from the site of the Chernobyl disaster. This is an eerie and deserted location, as the homes of Kopachi were completely bulldozed and buried by the Soviet Army. However, this plan only did more harm than good.

Chernobyl guide Yuri Tatarchuk explained, “Kopachi was very badly contaminated and so it was decided to bury it, house by house. It seemed a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t. The digging only pushed radioactive material deeper into the soil and closer to the water table, so that contamination spread even further.”

Today, only two buildings are left standing, one of which is the former kindergarten, where children were not evacuated until 36 hours of exposure. Tatarchuk said of the aftermath, “It was criminal. [ . . . ] At least 5,000 people were badly affected at the time, while women who were pregnant were simply told to have abortions. It was a cruel time.”^[7]

4 Puppies Of Chernobyl

There is a myth that no life can survive in Chernobyl, which is simply not true. It’s estimated that more than 900 stray dogs live in the Exclusion Zone. Many can be found playing inside the abandoned cooling tower at the former power plant. The puppies are believed to be descendants of the pet dogs that were left behind by their owners; residents were granted only a few hours’ notice before they were evacuated and advised to only take vital personal belongings and a certain amount of food.

The dogs have been driven out of the woods by the wild wolves that habitat the area. Now, volunteers, including veterinarians and radiation experts, have formed the nonprofit charity Dogs of Chernobyl. The dogs are tagged and their radiation exposure studied. They are also used for research on diseases including rabies. Some dogs have been fitted with radiation sensors and GPS receivers, which help to map the radiation levels across the exclusion zone.^[8]

3 Birth Defects Among The Children Of Chernobyl

Following the disaster, citizens in the city of Kiev were advised by authorities to take regular warm showers, keep their windows closed, and regularly wash their furniture. The precautions were not enough, as, since 1986, physicians have reported a rise in birth defects. Belarus shares a border with Ukraine, and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is quite close to said border; in 2010, UNICEF reported that 20 percent of adolescents in Belarus suffer from chronic illnesses or disabilities caused by birth defects.

There are many charities that support facilities which help babies who were born with severe birth defects, including neurological difficulties and heart conditions. Another common birth defect in this region is microcephaly, in which a baby’s head is smaller and not in proportion with the rest of their body.

In 2014, Michael Donnelly, chairman of Chernobyl Children’s Appeal, said, “These children are forced to suffer through no fault of their own. [ . . . ] It’s no better now than it was 28 years ago. The level of radiation in the Chernobyl zone is still the same today as it was in 1986.”^[9]

2 Contaminated Wildlife

Months after the Chernobyl disaster, the radioactivity had spread to Galsjo Forest in Sweden. Elk were contaminated, and the moment their bodies were thrown in a quarry after being stripped of their heads and fur was captured on camera.

A 10-square-kilometer (4 mi²) area of forest that surrounds the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant has become known as the “Red Forest” after the contamination caused the trees to die and their leaves to turn a deep red color. After the humans evacuated, wildlife grew rapidly with limited predators to hunt them down—wild boar multiplied eightfold in the two years following the disaster. Radioecologist Sergey Gaschak explained, “Animals don’t seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition.”^[10]

The Red Forest is now one of the most contaminated sites in the world, with more than 90 percent of the radioactivity found in the soil. Mice embryos used for research have dissolved in the conditions, and horses left that lived within 6 kilometers (3.7 mi) of the power plant died due to their thyroid glands disintegrating.

1 Chernobyl Directors Sentenced To Labor Camp

In July 1987, Chernobyl’s plant director Viktor P. Bryukhanov, chief engineer Nikolai M. Fomin, and deputy Anatoly S. Dyatlov were sentenced to two to ten years at a labor camp.^[11] They were found guilty of gross violation of safety regulations which led to an explosion. Judge Raimond Brize declared in the courtroom, “There was an atmosphere of lack of control and lack of responsibility at the plant.” The plant officials were also heavily criticized for not evacuating the town of Pripyat sooner.

Nowadays, an old sarcophagus covers the damaged fourth reactor at the nuclear power plant, and the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure sits above that. Although it has been more than three decades since the Chernobyl disaster, there are many still suffering the consequences today.

Cheish Merryweather is a true crime fan and an oddities fanatic. Can either be found at house parties telling everyone Charles Manson was only 5’2″ or at home reading true crime magazines.
Twitter: @thecheish

There are lots of films that celebrate money. People finding money, making money, even stealing money. Films about losing money are less popular, for obvious reasons. Who wants to think about that, right?

10 Fascinating Economic Collapses Through History

There have been many documentaries about economics. From those serious documentaries with lots of graphs showing downward trajectories and long tracking shots of silent streets, to reality TV shows like The Queen of Versailles, following the building of a mansion by a spendaholic wife and a husband whose business is on the brink of disaster, which makes compulsive viewing. Like a car crash in slow motion.

Great movies about losing money are much rarer. But here are 10 movies that we think are worth a watch.

10 Rollover

Perhaps not one of the greatest movies in the world, after all Kris Kristofferson did win a Razzie for Worst Actor for his role as the president of a bank. Jane Fonda co-stars as the widow of a chemical company owner, whose husband died suddenly after discovering a secret slush fund with the ‘sinister’ account number 21214.

Kristofferson’s bank is doing badly. So badly, in fact, that if he cannot find a single customer with a lot of money to invest, they will go broke. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that they could achieve the same end from a lot of customers investing a small amount, but hey.

In walks Fonda. If only they can get their hands on the secret slush fund, they will both be saved. There’s a lot of guff about finders fees, and other pseudo-financial rubbish that makes us think that maybe the screenwriter wasn’t that clued up on the world of finance.

When the pair traveled to the Sahara Desert in order to negotiate with some Bedouin financial investors, our suspicions were confirmed. Even back in 1981, millionaire sheikhs had phones and held meetings in offices.

The film’s real interest is in gold. The secret slush fund is actually a massive big pile of gold, hoarded against the possibility of financial collapse. When its existence is made public, people around the world begin to riot when they discover their money is now worthless (OK this link is not very clear in the film and most countries’ currencies are not, in fact, tied to gold). But the scenes of the breakdown of civilization are interesting.

The final scenes make it worth the effort. We see Fonda’s chemical factory standing idle, its workers laid off, and Kristofferson’s bank is the same. And this is mirrored around the world as the catastrophe of financial collapse rolls over the world like a sandstorm in the Sahara.

9 Rogue Trader

13 years before the global financial meltdown, 1 single trader gave the financial world a foretaste of what was to come, and, as with all disasters, the story was made into a movie. Rogue Trader starred Ewan McGregor as Nick Leeson, a derivatives trader for one of the world’s oldest banks.

Leeson is the manager of their Singapore arm, where no one actually checked what he was doing.

Or how much he was losing. Which was a lot.

He viewed the stock market as ‘one giant casino’. After an initial winning streak, Leeson began to lose money, and hid the losses in a secret account.

And no one noticed. Until the bank was down £830 million and the bank went bust, almost bringing down the London Stock Exchange with it. The story was gold dust, but the movie was not so well received, and, like its subject, lost a lot of money.

8 Boiler Room

“Anyone who tells you money is the root of all evil doesn’t have any”. So says Ben Affleck, who runs his own brokerage firm, JT Marlin. Really?

Giovanni Ribisi is the inexperienced new trader sucked in by the promise of easy money.

The brokers are all young and ambitious. They can all quote lines from Wall St, and see Gordon Gekko as a role model. After some time selling shares, and enjoying the spoils, Ribisi begins to feel that something is not quite right at JT Marlin. Apart from the name.

The firm employs sharp practices to inflate demand for penny stocks. They even create fake companies and sell shares in them too at inflated prices.

Ribisi finally realizes that real people are being hurt by their scams when he persuades one of them to invest his meager savings in stocks which then tank. He begins to work with the FBI to bring Affleck and his company down, copying all their files, and in a small act of atonement, he persuades his boss to repay the investor who Ribisi had conned.

The film showed just how exciting the world of finance can be when everyone is making money.

And why, when there is so little control over what they do, some people don’t know where to draw the line.

This film is the original “Wolf of Wall Street” with both movies being loosely based on the life of Jordan Belfort.

7 Margin Call

Margin Call tries to put a human face to Wall St. It’s probably fair to say the final film doesn’t quite meet the brief. It follows a fictional firm over the course of a single day, and shows how their actions in dumping their stock precipitated the crash.

Stanley Tucci, a risk management guy, is made redundant and passes on his concerns about the impending financial crisis on his way out the door. Jeremy Irons plays the CEO of the bank, who decides to cut and run.

At the emergency board meeting, Irons says, “There are 3 ways to make a living in this business. Be first, be smarter or cheat.” Being bankers, not criminals, they decide to go with option 1. Irons orders his staff to sell off their shares, thus precipitating the stock market crash.

Kevin Spacey, as the COO, makes a big speech to his brokers that is just a little hard to swallow. He says he is ‘very proud’ of the work of his brokers, who have “dedicated a portion of their lives” to making themselves lots of money. Or, as Spacey put it ,“our talents have been used for the greater good”

In fairness, his trader’s did look devastated at the thought of the impending worldwide financial collapse, at least until he promised them a million-dollar bonus if they managed to off-load their worthless shares onto unsuspecting schmucks before the markets caught on.

Heroes, all of them.

Stanley Tucci heroically returns for the final day’s trading, in order to say, ‘I told you so’ and negotiate hard over his severance package. Kevin Spacey is disgusted with the behavior of his firm, and devastated by the effects of Corporate Greed, but, in a touching moment of genuine pathos, he is eventually persuaded to stay in his very well-paid job, because, ‘I need the money’.

That’s OK then

6 99 Homes

Most movies about the financial crash are centered on Wall St, and the money makers, which is understandable. 99 Homes looked at the situation from the other end – all those people whose homes were repossessed when the housing bubble burst.

While the Wall St films were all frenetic energy, champagne and billion-dollar deals, 99 Homes looks at what desperate people will do to put food on the table and keep a roof over the heads of their kids. Andrew Garfield stars as a first-time buyer who loses his home after he is made redundant.

The real-estate developer who evicted him, played with chilling coldness by Michael Shannon, offers Garfield a job evicting 99 other people from their homes.

And Garfield sold his soul to the devil, and evicted his neighbors, until one of the neighbors fought back.

99 Homes is not a feel-good movie, but does put a human face to the sub-prime mortgage scandal.

10 Famous Props And The Actors Who Stole Them

5 Too Big to Fail

What would government do when banks fail? This was the premise of Too Big to Fail, the story of the US Treasury’s response to the financial collapse of 2008.

Starring William Hurt as the Treasury Secretary and Paul Giamatti as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve trying to save the world in a Gucci suit.

(Spoiler: They failed)

If Hurt and Giamatti are the superheroes, who are the villains? Well, there’s James Woods, who plays the CEO of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, who refused to acknowledge the end of the world was nigh, and kept right on hustling until the collapse. In one excruciating scene, the Lehman brothers staff maneuver to keep Fuld away from the negotiating table as they work with a Korean consortium to fund a buyout, only for Fuld to crash the meeting and try to drive up the price.

The Korean’s walked, and Lehman’s folded.

The film had a good go at making the difficult subject of finance interesting. It’s not easy to inject drama into what is, essentially, an endless round of meetings, and there are an awful lot of shots of men in suits striding purposefully down corridors, but the film does manage to convey the seriousness of the financial situation, even if it doesn’t quite manage to explain how we got there.

The film’s end carries a note of warning, when William Hurt points out that the billions of dollars in bail out funds is simply being handed to the same people who caused the crash, without any restrictions on how they will use it. Which is disturbing.

Even more disturbing, the film said, is that as a result of mergers following the crash, the top 10 financial institutions in America now hold 77% of US banking assets, making them, once again, too big to fail.

And don’t even get me started on the massive bailout bill that just got passed by Congress and the Senate under the cover of saving us from the Coronavirus.

4 Wall St (1 and 2)

Gordon Gekko made finance sexy in Wall St. The Oliver Stone film captured the 1980’s zeitgeist of ‘Greed is Good’. Starring Michael Douglas as seasoned financier, Gekko, and Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox, a newly qualified stockbroker not yet wise in the ways of the stock exchange, the film examines the way Wall St often blurred lines and traded off inside information in order to line their own pockets.

In a ridiculously naïve move, Bud persuades Gekko to buy an airline, and hopes that the famed destroyer of companies will expand this company, and make Bud its new CEO.

Gekko breaks it up and sells it for parts. Which is kind of awkward for Bud, given that his dad works there.

Although both Gekko and Bud are arrested for insider trading at the end of the film, the enduring message of the film was, indeed, that Greed is Good, and many stockbrokers subsequently credited the film as the reason they went into finance.

Oliver Stone took another look at Wall St almost 25 years later, and focused on the stock market crash. Gekko, now released from prison, is making a living by warning of an impending economic disaster. He is a changed man.

And Shia LeBeouf is the newbie stockbroker. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

The sequel didn’t capture the spirit of Wall St in the crash quite so well as it had done during the champagne and cocaine years, perhaps because a repentant
Gordon Gekko just didn’t play well, but no list of films about Wall St would be complete without Wall St, so we’ve included the sequel, just so we can include the original.

3 The Damned

La Caduta Degli Dei (The Fall of the Gods), also released under the title The Damned, was a pretty strange 1969 Italian-German made movie, in English, about a rich industrialist family who start doing business with the Nazis, despite their opposition to the Nazi ideology. After a murder and an arrest, the family business is passed to relatives with even fewer scruples.

The film demonstrates the incestuous relationship between business and politics, as well as quite a few other types of incestuous relationships, and how control over one can affect the other.

It also shows how narrow is the void between success and disaster. In only a few months the family go from lavish, not to say excessive, living, to losing their home, business and even their lives.

Better than no other, this film depicts the transition from life under a failed bankrupt Weimar Republic to the powerful Nazi state. Director Luchino Visconti illustrates this masterfully through the central character, Martin, who starts out dressed in drag performing burlesque, and ends in a full Nazi uniform giving the Heil Hitler salute.

If you ask yourself where our current society sits on the scale of Weimar to Nazidom, the answer may frighten you.

2 The Big Short

Hands down the best film about the financial collapse, The Big Short concentrated not so much on what was done to try to prevent the collapse, but how we got there. It manages to explain complicated, and rather dull, financial concepts in ingenious ways. Such as Margot Robbie sipping champagne in a bubble bath, while explaining what a sub-prime mortgage is. “Basically, whenever you hear ‘sub-prime’, think ‘shit’.”

There are a lot of bad guys in this movie, but very few good guys. Steve Carrell plays Mark Baum, a fictional character based on Steve Eisman, the man who shorted Collateralized Debt Obligations (see Selina Gomez at the blackjack table for explanation) or Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale, who recognized early on that the market was unsustainable, and bought Credit Default Swaps as a result.

But they both profited from the collapse, so hard to picture them as actual superheroes.

The movie is pretty entertaining, for a finance movie, and has cameo appearances by the dozen, including Brad Pitt as a bearded trader-guru passing on his ancient financial wisdom to the young bloods. It won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor, for Christian Bale.

Which is not bad for a film about mortgages.

1 The Grapes of Wrath

Long before the 2008 banking collapse, there was the Great Depression. John Steinbeck wrote the defining novel of the era, The Grapes of Wrath, which was made into a film by John Ford in 1940. The film was rather less bleak than the novel, and tried to end on a note of hope, when Ma Joad says, “We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, cos we’re the people.” Which has a flavor of Gone With the Wind about it.

I swear, I’ll never be hungry again.

Despite its rather upbeat ending, the film, which starred Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, is still considered not only one of the best films about economic depression, but one of the best films ever.

In a brilliantly concise explanation, one ‘labor agitator’ explains why bosses encouraged mass migration to join the California labor force. ‘Maybe he needs 1000 men, so he gets 5000 there, and he’ll pay 15 cents an hour and you guys will have to take it because you’re hungry.’

The film won Best Director Oscar for John Ford, and was nominated for 6 more.

10 Movies You Had No Idea Were Filmed In The Wrong Locations

In Victorian times, people would stop a house’s clocks at the time of an occupant’s death. Although this tradition continues somewhat today, there are some death clocks that weren’t stopped on purpose. Instead, they were broken by terrible circumstance, frozen forever to mark the last moments of disaster. These clocks are chilling mementos of past tragedies.

10 The Pirate’s Pocket Watch

On June 7, 1692, the town of Port Royal, Jamaica, was destroyed by a major earthquake. Shortly before noon, residents heard a thunderous cracking noise before feeling the earth shake violently and watching half their city slip into the sea. Three centuries later, historians began to explore the underwater ruins.

The most famous artifact recovered from the ruins was a pocket watch manufactured in the Netherlands around 1686. The hands on the watch were stopped at 11:43 AM, the exact time of the earthquake and the watch’s entrance into the sea. Although other records noting the time of the quake do exist, the discovery of the pocket watch was the first time that a stopped clock was used by archaeologists to date a disaster down to the minute.

9 Casey Jones’s Pocket Watch

Railroad enthusiasts know the story of John Luther “Casey” Jones, a train engineer who heroically died saving his passengers during a collision near Vaughn, Mississippi. While approaching the station at Vaughn, Jones and his signalman noticed something on the track ahead. They realized too late that it was the tail end of another train that was too long to fit its siding. The signalman leaped from the cab (on Jones’s orders), leaving Casey to his fate. A few seconds later, Jones’s train collided head-on with the other cars.

When Jones’s badly mangled body was pulled from the wreckage later that day, it was found that his pocket watch had stopped at 3:52 AM, the exact time of the impact. Although Jones died as a result of the crash, his actions ensured that he was the only fatality. No one else involved with either train suffered more than minor injuries.

8 The Titanic’s Mantel Clock

The story of the Titanic—the so-called “unsinkable” luxury ocean liner—is well-known. On the night of April 14, 1912, the ship struck an iceberg and ultimately sank into the North Atlantic during the early morning hours of April 15, taking approximately 1,500 people with it. Although there were many pocket watches and clocks retrieved from both victims and the ship itself, the most interesting one remains with the wreck.

This clock was located on the fireplace of the Straus suite, used by Macy’s founder Isidor Straus and his wife. Upon the dilapidated mantel, surrounded by sand and debris, sits a golden clock looking almost as new as it did the day it was made. Old pictures of the suite in its heyday show that the sinking did not affect the clock’s position at all. Its face, however, has seen some damage and is hard to read. The documentary Tony Robinson’s Titanic Adventure hypothesizes that the hands stopped either at 2:04 AM, when the last lifeboat was released, or 2:20 AM, the very minute the ship plunged beneath the waves.

7 John Taylor’s Pocket Watch

Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was killed on June 27, 1844, by a group of angry Illinois townspeople. After a long legal debacle that began with the destruction of an anti-Mormon newspaper’s printing press, Smith and a few other men waited in the Carthage, Illinois, jail for a trail. There, they saw a mob of around 200 men marching toward the building.

Although Smith was killed in the attack, his friend, John Taylor, miraculously survived. In the melee, Taylor tried to escape by jumping from the jail window but was pushed backward by the force of a gunshot from below. The shooter had been aiming for Taylor’s heart but instead hit his watch, which he kept in his left vest pocket. The hands of the watch were stopped at 5:16 PM, approximately the time that Joseph Smith breathed his last. Taylor later took his miracle watch to Salt Lake City, where he eventually became president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The watch remains in the church’s archives to this day.

6 The Chernobyl Clock

In early morning hours of April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant experienced a meltdown after a safety test went catastrophically wrong. In the ensuing hours, the power plant and nearby areas were blasted with radioactive energy, heat, and fire. In 2005, intrepid photographer Gerd Ludwig ventured into the radioactive ruins of the power plant for a 15-minute photography trip. Although all the photographs of ghostly control rooms and empty hallways are stunning, there was only one scene that Ludwig truly risked his life to capture.

Deep in the heart of the reactor, where the radiation is strongest, Ludwig ventured into a room hidden behind a steel door. In the few seconds allowed to him, he saw an old clock hanging on a wall, its hands stopped at 1:23:58 AM, the exact time at which the reactor exploded. The image of the clock spoke so much to Ludwig that he begged to be allowed a few brief seconds to photograph, in his words, “the time when on 26 April, 1986, in the building that housed Energy Block #4, time stood forever still.”

5 The Train Workers’ Clock

The entire world knows the story of September 11, 2001, in which the United States suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history. Although the US has largely rebounded from the tragedy, 9/11 hasn’t been forgotten. Each plane crash site was made into a memorial, with the largest and most elaborate filling the footprint of the Twin Towers in New York City.

In 2005, the Ground Zero Museum Workshop opened in New York to honor the dead and remind the living of that terrible day. One of the featured items in the museum is a clock found in the wreckage, its hands pointing to 10:02:14 AM, when the south tower collapsed. The clock was discovered in a break room used by local train workers alongside the remnants of their weight lifting bench.

4 The Photographer’s Pocket Watch

On August 6, 1945, the future of warfare was changed forever. Whether truly merited or not, US military leaders decided to destroy the city of Hiroshima, Japan, with the ace they’d secretly been building: the atomic bomb. Roughly 100,000 people were killed in the attack, and everything within a 1.6-kilometer (1 mi) radius was completely turned to rubble.

In the aftermath of the bombing, 19-year-old Shinji Mikamo returned to Hiroshima to dig through the ruins of his family home. There, he found his grandfather’s golden pocket watch, which had originally been given as payment for serving as an imperial photographer. Even though the watch’s hands had been blown off, the heat of the blast had seared the time of the bombing onto the metal below, leaving the clock to always read 8:15 AM. Shinji donated the watch to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 1955 and then to a museum in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Unfortunately, the watch disappeared in 1989 and has not been seen since.

3 The Murrah Building Clock

Masterminded by two criminals who were disgruntled with the government, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was the deadliest terrorist attack in the US before 9/11. On the morning of April 19, 1995, a moving truck loaded with explosives detonated outside the building, killing 168 people (19 of whom were children under the age of six) and injuring more than 650 others. Three months later, the remains of the Murrah building were demolished so that a memorial and museum could be built on the grounds.

The idea of stopped time is heavily integrated into both the memorial and the museum. Two large structures known as the Gates of Time flank the entrances of the outdoor memorial, each inscribed with a time stamp of significance. The eastern gate reads “9:01,” which represents “the last moments of peace” before the blast. Its parallel, the western gate, reads “9:03,” called “the first moments of recovery.” Enshrined in the museum, however, is a memento that marks the exact time of the blast: a clock poised at 9:02 AM.

2 Oppau Church Clocks

Oppau (now incorporated into the city of Ludwigshafen) was a small town located in Southwestern Germany. Oppau’s BASF chemical plant was responsible for the production of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which it stored in a large silo alongside another chemical. Unfortunately, these two chemicals had a habit of getting stuck together, a situation that was remedied with the use of dynamite charges. While this operation was dangerous, it was also commonplace.

However, Oppau’s luck ran out on September 21, 1921, when the fertilizer exploded. The huge blast left both the factory and town destroyed. What did survive were several clocks belonging to nearby churches. Every single one was found to have stopped at 7:33 AM, the exact time of the explosion.

1 The Tsunami Clock

While the Hawaiian islands are seen as a paradise by many, they still face the wrath of nature on occasion. The city of Hilo, located on the Big Island, has itself faced two major tsunamis in the last century, the second of which was on May 23, 1960. One of the area’s famous landmarks, a green clock located in the low-lying suburb of Waiakea Town, survived the first tsunami but was heavily damaged by the second. Its hands are stopped at 1:04 AM, the time at which the first massive waves hit the island.

The clock has been kept in this condition as a memorial to those who lost their lives and homes and still stands today. Waiakea Town no longer exists, its former lands having been replaced with public parks and green spaces.

The author is a Ph.D. student in agriculture who lives to read and learn.

Dwayne Johnson) this list takes a look at 10 popular disaster movies and delves into what experts have to say:

Dr Victoria Petryshen, environmental scientist and Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Environmental Studies at USC.
Morgan Page, Earthquake expert and Research Geophysicist at the Earthquake Science Center.
Michael Angove, tsunami expert and meteorologist and Tsunami Program Manager at NOAA.
Peter Gleick, climate and water expert and Hydrologist and Climatologist at the Pacific Institute.

Top 10 Controversial Movie Trailers

10 The Swarm (1978)

After watching the trailer for the first time, Dr Petryshen jokes that “The Swarm is now a movie I must watch immediately.”

Yes, animal migrations happen regularly, and more and more insects are appearing in places they have never been seen before. In Los Angeles, for instance, mosquitoes are now commonplace where they were hardly ever encountered just a few years ago. It seems that these insects are moving north, looking for more favorable climates.

And, of course, swarms of locusts, bees and other insects are not uncommon. But, as Petryshen points out, as much as Hollywood would like you to believe otherwise, they are definitely not “targeting” the human race. The migrations are about their survival, not our downfall.

Still, overall, Petryshen gives this film a “why not?”

9 Twister (1996)

A lot of what you see in this movie is quite realistic. According to Angove, the moviemakers consulted with the National Weather Service and it shows. The technical advice, ideas and suggestions the agency provided clearly did not go to waste. A lot of what is shown in this movie accurately portrays scientists’ attempts at understanding more about these weather systems.

“The one quibble I have with this scene,” Page points out during the cow scene above, “is that when we see the cow the first time it’s turning one way, but when we see it again later, it’s turning the other.” She does, concede, however, that this might be possible had they driven right through the tornado. It looks like the tornado is off to one side, though, in which case the scene doesn’t make much sense as the twister wouldn’t just change direction.

“The cow doesn’t look all that perturbed, tough,” says Angove.

8 Volcano (1997)

“Just to be clear, there is no volcano under Los Angeles,” Page feels compelled to point out after watching this poignant scene. There are many places you will find volcanoes, but Los Angeles is not one of them.

However, as far as she knows, she says, the human interaction with the slow-moving lava is portrayed quite accurately. Yes, your sneakers would start melting and yes concrete barriers and water have been used to stop or divert lava flow in places like Hawaii and Italy. And, yes, unfortunately, you most probably would die if you jumped into lava.

7 The Perfect Storm (2000)

This movie is great for many reasons. First: Clooney. Need we say more. The film also gives the viewer a real sense of just how difficult a sea rescue operation during a storm can be. It very accurately portrays the challenges the sea guard would typically encounter under such conditions. Additionally, the science makes sense. To the scientists, at least.

“What started off kind of like any other hurricane turned into an unusual and very dangerous storm because of the high latitude. Instead of dissipating as it normally would when approaching land, it managed to reinforce the “core” when it encountered these very specific barotropic conditions,” Angove explains. Or tries to. Suffice it to say that the meteorologist and tsunami expert is impressed with the scientific accuracy of the conditions that created “the perfect storm”.

6 The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

The movie is loosely based on the theory of “abrupt climate change.” Basically, as a result of global warming, ocean currents that circulate water around the world shut down, heating up the tropics and cooling the North Atlantic. In the clip above we see a giant tsunami about to hit Manhattan. Which is rather unlikely, according to Dr Petryshen.

A tsunami is usually the result of an earthquake that causes the sea floor to suddenly and dramatically go up and down. “The east coast of the United States is what is known as a passive margin. There is nothing on the sea floor that is going to cause such a massive tsunami. Short of a giant asteroid,” Petryshen quips.

More likely is the steady rise of the sea level, a direct result of melting ice caps due to global warming. This is something New York is in fact very worried about and has led to the proposal of a billion-dollar sea wall to keep out the rising water.

Top 10 Space Movies Judged By Actual Astronauts

5 Wall-E (2008)

Not your typical disaster movie, Wall-E looks at the post-apocalyptic world left behind after humanity trashed this planet to the extent that they had to take off on a spaceship and send in the robots to clean up after them so life on earth is once again possible.

Although Dr Petryshen chooses to remain hopefully optimistic that we would never actually let things get to this point, she simultaneously points out that when she looks at the current Coronavirus crisis and climate change, her heart sinks just a little.

At the moment we don’t, of course, have the ability or technology to take off on a spaceship and leave the mess to a team of robots. However, some elements depicted in the movie are rather accurate. The space junk, for instance, is very similar to the junk mentioned in a previous list on astronauts reviewing space movies. Even the wind turbines clearly visible in the wasteland where Wall-E works, strike close to home.

There have been several environmental studies, in fact, looking at the long-term effects of the giant non-recyclable fiberglass blades used to create the “environmentally friendly” sources of energy. “We simply don’t have an answer to what to do with these once they are no longer in use,” says Petryshen.

4 2012 (2012)

According to Page, an earthquake occurs when one side of a tectonic plate fault slips and moves, relative to the other side of the plate. This generates seismic waves that cause the shaking and rolling motion we see in the movie. The scale is hugely exaggerated though. “We’re talking centimeters not meters,” Page says.

She also rolls her eyes when she sees John Cusack trying to outrun the seismic waves in his car. Typically, these waves move at a speed of about 5 000 meters per second. No way you can outrun that in a battered old jalopy!

3 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

With constant reminders of global warming in the form of droughts, fires and unprecedented heat waves, it’s not that hard to imagine that we may one day, as depicted in the movie, be in a position where fresh water is the scarcest commodity on earth.

Dr Petryshen, however, points out that it is highly unlikely that climate change would cause the collapse of all of civilization and turn the entire earth into a desert wasteland. In fact, in many parts of the world, climate change is leading to an increase in severe storms and flooding.

To understand the effects of climate change, think about the worst parts of the weather you experience where you live; these are the things that are going to get worse. So, while in many parts of the world this means drought and fire, in other parts storms and flooding are more likely, making the global all-encompassing water scarcity depicted in Mad Max highly improbable. There will still be water in other places on earth.

2 San Andreas (2015)

In this action-packed movie, the San Andreas fault ruptures and causes a bunch of massive earthquakes along the fault line. The only person who can save the day is, of course, The Rock.

How realistic is it though? Would all the buildings in downtown Los Angeles simply crumble should the big one (defined here as a magnitude 8 earthquake along the San Andreas fault) hit?

“Probably not the way you see in the movie,” comments Dr Petryshen. Buildings in L.A. are built on rollers and multiple safety measures to withstand a certain amount of shaking, compensating for the P-wave (up and down) as well as the S-wave (swaying side to side). Naturally, should the shaking be sustained over a long enough period of time, even those measure will ultimately fail. But it’s hard to imagine all the buildings succumbing at the exact same moment.

1 Geostorm (2017)

Much like many other disaster movies, Geostorm builds on the idea of plausible geo-events and takes it to the extreme. In the opening scenes of the film we see clips from real-life events such as tornadoes, flooding and the drying out of reservoirs.

“The worry of course is that we are now modifying the climate to an extent that will make these extreme events even more damaging to civilization,” Gleick explains. The movie then transitions into massive CGI storms and the global response. “The world comes together and produces what we in the business call geoengineering,” Gleick continues.

Geoengineering in the real world refers to the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming. The building of sea walls and even tree planting campaigns happening now are, one could argue, geo-engineering. We are lightyears away, however, from the massive inter-planetary scale of the geoengineering efforts we see in this movie. Hopefully, we won’t ever need this kind of intervention.

Top 10 Hilarious Pranks Pulled To Promote Movies

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This rings true for the rare photographs in this list that tells you tales of suffering, courage and hope experienced firsthand by the photographers and captured through their lenses.

Note that some of the pictures are disturbing therefore powerful and quiet alive. Scroll down at your own risk.

Here is a list of 10 disturbing photographs that shocked the world.

10. Kosovo Refugees

Photographer: Carol Guzy

In 2000 Carol Guzy received a Pulitzer Prize for the touching photographs she had taken of the Kosovo refugees. In this particular photo, a 2-years-old refugee child (Agim Shala) was being passed through the barb wired fence to his family on the other side. Guzy currently works for the Washington Post and has won the Pulitzer four times.

Photographer: Carolyn Cole

Very aptly named, the photograph certainly says a thousand unsaid words. It mirrors the devastating effects of the Civil War in Liberia. The picture was taken on the streets of Monrovia, capital of Liberia. Cole won the Pulitzer in 2004, for her coverage of the siege of Monrovia. For the records, Carolyn Cole is a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times.

8. World Trade Center 9/11

Photographer: Steve Ludlum

This photograph is an eyewitness to history. It captures the power of universal destruction. Ludlum said, “It’s an iconic image. When people think of the World Trade Center disaster they will think about this photograph.” In 2002, Ludlum won the Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography.

7. Thailand Massacre

Photographer: Neal Ulevich

Neal Ulevich is an American photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for capturing “disorder and brutality in the streets of Bangkok.” In 1976 the worsening political situation in Thailand culminated into violent confrontation at The Thammasat University. Several students who were demonstrating against dictatorial Field Marshall Thanom Kittikachorn’s plan of returning into the country, were shot, beaten, hanged, mutilated and even burnt to death.

6. After the Storm

Photographer: Patrick Farrell

In 2008 Farrell captured the horrors experienced by the victims of the tropical storm Hanna that had hit Haiti. He documented the after math in black-and-white stills, more of which you can find here. He was awarded Pulitzer in 2009. In the above picture, we have a young boy rescuing a stroller from the wreck of his home.

5. The Power of One

Photographer: Oded Balilty

Oded Balilty is an Israeli documentary photographer. In 2006, when the Israeli government decided to uproot illegal settlers, a ferocious clash was inevitable. What we have here is a brave 16-year-old Jewish settler, Ynet Nili resisting the authorities. Later, Nili had said, “You see me in the photograph, one against many, but that is only an illusion, behind the many stands one man, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, but behind me stand the Lord and the people of Israel.”

4. After the Tsunami

Photographer: Arko Datta

This is considered as one of the most striking representation of the devastation that followed the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Arko Datta is an award-winning photojournalists from India who is also recognised for his photographs of the Gujarat riots, depicting the plight of victims of the riots. ‘After the Tsunami’ is a “graphic, historical and starkly emotional picture” that depicts a woman mourning the death of a relative.

3. Operation Lion Heart

Photographer: Deanne Fitzmaurice

Fitzmaurice is an American photographer and photojournalist won had won the highly respected Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her sensitive photo essay ‘Operation Lion Heart’. ‘Lion Heart’ is the nickname given to Saleh Khalaf, a nine year old boy maimed by an explosion in Iraq. The boy was brought to a hospital in Oakland, CA where he underwent several life-threatening surgeries. His unwillingness to die and his courage gave him the nickname – Saleh Khalaf meaning ‘Lion Heart’.

2. Bhopal Gas Tragedy 1984

Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew

In December 1984, gas leaking from the Union Carbide India Limited storage tank killed as many as 15,000 and injured 558,125 people in Bhopal. This massive environmental and human disaster was a result of ignorance in standard safety and maintenance procedures. Bartholomew while documenting the catastrophe came across a man who was burying a child.

1. Tragedy of Omayra Sanchez

Photographer: Frank Fourier

1985 Columbia, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano eruption lead to a mudslide that killed more than 25,000 people. Frank Fournier captured the tragic image of Omayra Sanchez, a 13-years-old girl trapped for 60 hours under the debris of her home which won the 1985 World Press Photo award.

As to the little girl’s fate, she tragically died due to hypothermia and gangrene following three days of struggle which was followed by millions of people around the world on television. This erupted major criticism on the Columbian government for commencing a weak rescue mission.

Here are some other great lists; rare historical photographs, World’s most expensive photographs, Perfectly Timed Photographs, Fantastic Nature Photographs etc. You may also like these lists.

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Disaster movies are hugely popular with audiences around the world. There is just something about watching the Statue of Liberty toppling over into the sea or a giant tsunami “folding” over an entire city that keeps people on the edge of their seats. There is a lot of work that goes into making a disaster movie, as producers will attest to. And there are a lot of things that can go wrong or not according to plan. On this list are some lesser-known facts about some of the most popular disaster movies.

Related: Top 10 Films About Economic Disaster You Really Need To Watch

10 Independence Day

Way back in the day when Will Smith wasn’t a Hollywood pariah, he was the star of the biggest film of 1996, Independence Day, the script of which was written in a mere four weeks. The movie made top dollar regardless of reviewers calling it the ultimate B-movie or an over-the-top cheese-fest.

What some may not know is that the film had the support of the U.S. military, which agreed to provide greater access to military facilities and make their officers, soldiers, and pilots available for consultation. However, as soon as they became aware of the multiple references to Area 51 being the center of obscure alien projects, the military immediately withdrew their support.

Also, when residents of California spied the “Welcome Wagon” used in the film, more than 150 of them called the police to report a UFO sighting.^[1]

9 The Impossible

The Impossible is a terrifying film, not only because of the tsunami sequences but also because hundreds of thousands of people lived through and died during that specific real-life tragedy.

María Belón, Enrique Álvarez, and their three sons—Lucas, Simón, and Tomás—were in Khao Lak, Thailand, when the 2004 tsunami struck. The Impossible tells their story of survival, closely following the harrowing details, which are enough to make you watch through your fingers.

At the beginning of the film, the sound of a jet can be heard in the distance. This was done on purpose as that is how María described the sound of the approaching tsunami. The massive destruction that followed during the next 10 minutes took a year to complete. The producers also included many tsunami survivors as extras for the film.^[2]

8 Greenland

In Greenland, the grim reality of the selfishness of humankind in the face of overwhelming disaster is thoroughly explored. It’s all fun and games and social media debates over a visible comet in the sky during the daytime when the realization hits that the U.S. government can only evacuate so many people. Chaos ensues. Fortunately, there are also great moments, such as the military personnel putting their lives on the line to help save others. Throw in the ambiguous ending, and you have yourself a decent disaster flick.

Director, Ric Roman Waugh, did some intensive research into the science of comets to bring realism to his vision. He spoke to several scientists and did some of his own studying to fully understand what would truly happen if a huge comet broke through Earth’s atmosphere the way it does in Greenland.

Waugh also mentioned that his focus on family came from the hope that the personal side of such a disaster would help his film stand out from previous disaster films.^[3]

7 Don’t Look Up

The black comedy film Don’t Look Up focuses satirically on the typical scientists no one ever wants to listen to when it comes to pending doomsdays. Reviews were mixed, especially about the satire, but the movie continues to be a fan favorite after being released in December 2021.

If you’ve seen the movie, you would have noticed the hotline launched by the government, which people could call if they had any questions. In real life, that number leads to a sex chat line. And apparently, that was an accident as the number was just thought up randomly.^[4]

6 The Wave

The director of The Wave, Roar Uthaug, submitted his movie as Norway’s entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards but sadly failed to be nominated. The movie is based on actual events—in this case, the 1934 landslide that caused a tsunami in the Norwegian community of Tafjord, as well as the prediction that this disaster will repeat itself in the not-too-distant future.

The Wave had one of the best opening weekends in Norwegian history, beating the number of tickets sold for Jurassic World by 30%.

The movie also includes the single most expensive scene ever filmed in the country. Amazingly, 40,000 liters (10,566 gallons) of water came crashing down on a purpose-built set and could only be filmed once. Planning the scene took six months and the execution several days.^[5]

5 Knowing

Knowing may not be your traditional disaster movie, but it does center around trying to prevent the apocalypse. Despite the ending being panned by critics and movie-goers alike, the film has gained a cult following (thanks in no small part to the presence of Nicolas Cage).

Filming was completed in just three months and was also the movie debut of Liam Hemsworth. There is a cool tribute in the form of an elementary school named William Dawes. He was one of several people instrumental in warning American soldiers about the imminent arrival of the British in April 1775.

Also, in a creepy twist of events, the ending of the film is something scientists have been predicting for many years, but luckily for us, they believe that it would only happen in four billion years.^[6]

4 Pompeii

This film eerily reconstructs the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 that led to the decimation of nearby Pompeii, leaving its residents buried in huge mounds of volcanic ash. To accurately depict the city, the director and his team LiDAR-scanned the streets and buildings. They then re-created a digital version of it by overlaying a computer-generated model over shots taken from a helicopter of the destroyed Pompeii. Scientists were impressed by this true-to-life recreation, especially the villas and the stones used for paving.

Director Paul Anderson wanted to bring across a clear message with this film that what happened then repeated itself in 1631 and killed 3,000 people and will likely happen again in the future. This is especially concerning considering that more than one million people still live in the vicinity of the volcano today.^[7]

3 Into the Storm

A firenado makes a terrifying appearance in Into the Storm, a found-footage film based on real-life events. In 1986, eight tornadoes hit Dallas County in Iowa over the span of an hour. This disaster forms the center of the film, which also features a 747 being lifted by a tornado.

There has been some debate around this scene, as some doubt that a tornado could do this in real life. However, since there isn’t a significant weight difference between an empty 747 and an average-sized locomotive and tornadoes have been known to pick up locomotives, it is plausible that it could lift a plane as well.

The film makes use of several actual news reports, including some from the F5 tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, in 2013 and the Joplin tornado from 2011. There is also a clever tribute to Twister in a scene that shows a statue of a cow being blown clean off a building and flying across the screen.

Filming was rough on the actors and actresses, and the extras on set would often break out in song to try and lift their spirits. One of their favorite tunes to belt out was “Come Sail Away” by Styx.^[8]

2 Twister

Back in the ’90s, Twisterbecame everyone’s favorite disaster flick. Sure, watching it now makes for some hilarity, but it is still a fun ride.

Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, the leads of the film, found themselves sitting in the cab of the infamous red truck for hours on end with bright electric lamps shining down on them. To keep the illusion of a dark and stormy sky behind the truck, these lamps were made even brighter until they eventually temporarily blinded both of the actors. For days afterward, they had to wear special glasses and use eyedrops. Hunt and Paxton even had to get hepatitis shots after spending some time filming inside a dirty ditch.

Wakita, Oklahoma, found a prominent place in the film after a couple of movie scouts noticed the debris still left over in the town from a hailstorm in 1993. Residents were recruited as extras and were paid $100 each day they were on set.

A few months before the movie’s release in 1996, Wakita opened the Twister Museum which boasts a Dorothy I prop, and a Twister pinball machine donated by Bill Paxton.^[9]

Twister was also the first film commercially available on DVD in the U.S.

1 Moonfall

Moonfall was one of the most anticipated films of 2022. Whether it lived up to the hype is for individual viewers to decide.

What the movie has done, however, is cause speculation around whether the moon could, in fact, hit Earth should it be knocked out of orbit. Director, Roland Emmerich, confirmed that the Hollow Moon theory was a major inspiration for the film and that he’d read up on the theory in several books. He and his team also used planetary sciences simulators to depict what the moon careening toward Earth would look like. And they got it spot on, as the moon wouldn’t just cut a straight path for us but instead would get into an elliptical orbit that continuously gets smaller before an eventual impact.

For filming purposes, 135 different sets had to be constructed which were built on six different sound stages.^[10]