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Let me begin by saying I don’t remember the first time I saw Twister. Growing up in central Illinois, I also don’t remember when I learned that Oklahoma was an actual state where people lived.
At some point, I think I must have believed it existed only in the world of flying cows, snarling storms and Helen Hunt’s iconic truck. More than The Outsiders or The Grapes of Wrath, this deeply unserious movie became my spiritual urtext for a place called Oklahoma years before I moved to Tulsa at 18.
A bizarre touchstone, sure. But the 1996 blockbuster—once described by NPR as one of the best bad movies ever made—rewired my kid brain and is still fueling people’s tornado obsessions 30 years after it hauled in nearly $500 million at the box office.
Its cultural reach is, frankly, stunning: Twister brought storm chasing to the mainstream and is credited for boosting enrollment in meteorology programs years after its release. Universities called it the “Twister effect.”
It has inspired infinite Halloween interpretations, themed birthdays and even a ride at Universal Studios. Over the years, Twister became one of those movies that was perpetually on TV, a ‘90s juggernaut primed for cultural absorption through osmosis.
Cruising channels on a summer afternoon? Home sick from school? There was Twister, mythologizing Oklahoma on cable. In 1997, it became the first theatrical feature released on DVD and lives on in the era of weather streamers and influencers. It has found its way to Roblox, foodie TikTok, and at least one Gen Z super-fan’s wedding.
There’s an argument to be made the film is Oklahoma’s single greatest cultural export, up there with Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, the Oklahoma City Thunder, Will Rogers and Joe Exotic.
“We're on our third generation of fans now,” said Linda Wade, the longtime director of Twister The Movie Museum in Wakita, where a 30-year anniversary event is taking place later this week. “Many of my visitors were not born before the movie came out.”
Meet The Twister Bride
Before I moved to Tulsa for college, Oklahoma floated somewhere between the known and the unknown, tethered to reality mostly by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s one-liners and my own terror of storms. Twister taught me that Oklahoma winds could snatch away family members in the night.
As a kid, I remember watching a rented copy of Twister with my brother on the tiny TV in his bedroom. Slotting the movie into the VCR, we stared up at the screen and lost ourselves in this mythical land where tornadoes dubbed “Finger of God” could wipe the earth clean.
For years, I dreamed of tornadoes. The film’s storyline became a cornerstone of my childhood nightmares: Running to take cover. A monster storm chasing me down. Trying to get underground but never quite making it.
In elementary school I convinced myself I would become a meteorologist. I memorized the names of forecasters on the Weather Channel. I loved Twister. To this day, it is one of the only movies I’ve ever ponied up to purchase on Prime Video.
But here’s the thing about fandom: someone is always going to be more committed to the bit than you.
I thought my love for this movie was singular. Then I spoke to Zoe Greer-Osterhaus, an Iowa-based storm chaser and full-time machine mechanic, who, I must note, was not alive when Twister hit theaters.
Greer-Osterhaus, 28, has built a viral following on social media cosplaying as Jo from the movie, chasing storms and driving a 1996 red Dodge Ram called “The Extreme” (yes, like Bill Paxton). The Facebook account she runs for the red truck alone has 39,000 followers. On the road, people have almost gotten in wrecks trying to get a better look.
“They'll hang out the truck or their vehicle and then they'll start waving at me or trying to holler at me,” she said. “I've never had a negative reaction when I'm out with the Ram. It's always been, ‘Oh my god.’”
Online, she’s known as “Zoenado” under the handle “twister_fanatics.” Her TikTok bio shouts: IN DOROTHY WE TRUST. Her videos have amassed millions of views.
So how did a girl from Iowa build an online persona around a film that predates her birth? It started, she told me, with the reality show Storm Chasers on the Discovery Channel.
Storm Chasers, which premiered in 2007, cropped up in the post-Twister tornado craze when everyone realized you could capitalize on humanity’s enduring fascination with extreme weather.
Greer-Osterhaus initially didn’t like Twister. The dad character—the one who gets ripped from the storm cellar by that Finger-of-God-caliber storm in the opening scene—reminded her too much of her own dad, she said. But then, when Storm Chasers ended its multi-season run, Twister took its place as her obsession.
When she was old enough to drive, Greer-Osterhaus started storm chasing. At 17, she begged her parents to take her to Wakita to the Twister museum.
And two years ago, she recited her wedding vows with the Wakita water tower as the backdrop, wearing her Jo outfit. The groom dressed up as Bill Paxton’s character. “Moments Like This” played—a song featured in the original film.
To date, the Gen Z storm chaser is the only person to hold Twister-themed nuptials in Wakita, according to Wade, of the Twister museum.
Wake Up, Babe. We’re Going To Wakita.
Greer-Osterhaus is helping Wade and the museum organize the 30th anniversary event, which includes a storm chaser car show, a panel featuring several actors from the film, a cosplay contest and a special screening of Twister on Friday night.
The museum itself has had incredible staying power. It opened soon after filming wrapped in 1995 and was up and running before the movie’s release. Wade recalls Warner Bros. telling the tiny town to expect visitors for a few years.
Nearly 31 years later, more than a thousand Twister enthusiasts still venture to Wakita each year to check out photos, props and memorabilia from the film.
“I’ve had visitors from every continent,” Wade said. “It's amazing because we're a small town. I mean, our population is between 200 and 300, and most of us are retired folks.”
The 2024 standalone sequel Twisters brought another surge of interest, Wade told me—“a lot of the ladies, of course, like Glen Powell”—but most chasers who come through tell her they still prefer the original.
I heard much the same from the storm chasers I spoke to.
Meteorologist Emily Sutton of KFOR-TV News 4 in Oklahoma City, who has a brief cameo in Twisters, remembers her dad taking her outside to watch summer storms roll in as a kid growing up outside of Chicago. Twister captured her imagination.
“I was obsessed,” said Sutton, who was in fifth grade when the movie was released. “And I obviously wanted to be like Jo.”
Knowing her love for the movie, a friend even arranged to surprise Sutton with a video message from Bill Paxton at her 2016 wedding. Several years later, Sutton dressed up as a tornado for her Twister-themed 35th birthday party. “I was the finger of God,” she said.
The Kids Are Buying Dupes Of Dorothy On Roblox
Twister remains a staple of storm chasing culture, even among the newest generation of chasers.
For young chasers, “it’s the cool vintage thing,” said Edgar O’Neal, a fulltime chaser based in Yukon, who saw the original movie when it came out in theaters. “You know how people wear vintage band T-shirts? That’s kind of the way they treat it.”
Even the Gen Z streamers who publicly dunk on the original film are stuck in its vortex, using catchphrases and lines from Twister while they’re out chasing. They have inherited a media ecosystem with Twister as its cultural blueprint—an Oklahoma artifact, atomized in the digital age.
In the three decades since the film’s release, Twister has been chopped up, repackaged and kept alive in niche corners of the internet. On TikTok, there are entire videos dedicated to Aunt Meg’s steak and eggs.
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Young people following famous storm chasers like Reed Timmer online get regular doses of Twister homages. “The kids love Reed,” O’Neal told me.
And the kids are also encountering Twister lore courtesy of storm chasing games like OUTBRK on Steam and Twisted and Helicity on Roblox. In Twisted, you can buy the red Dodge truck as your chase vehicle and pick Dorothy as your probe.
The Twisted Discord channel alone has nearly 130,000 members, and on any given day, people tune in to watch streamers play the game on YouTube.
I spent a few hours of my one precious life trying to immerse myself in the storm chasing game world before deciding it was beyond me. I’m taking O’Neal’s word that Twister references abound in these online spaces.
“All these kids, even in their screen names, a lot of them have Twister-esque phrases,” O’Neal said.
OK, But Why Are We Still Talking About Twister?
The kids are right to love Twister all these years later. There’s a lot to love. At once a monster movie, a disaster flick and a campy romp with endlessly quotable lines, Twister is silly. But it also has the patina of actual science. The chasers are trying to increase tornado warning times. They use actual storm terminology. The Dorothy device in the film was inspired by the real work of researchers in the 1970s and ‘80s.
The characters face off against nature itself, a trope that works because it plays on our primal fears. If anything, the anxieties of Twister feel perhaps even more relevant today as extreme weather events grow more common.
I called up another millennial Oklahoma transplant, Ross Terrell, who compared Twister to the weather version of Jaws, which feels right.
Terrell, an Atlanta native, moved to Tulsa from Salt Lake City last summer to become the managing editor of The Oklahoma Eagle. As a kid, he remembers watching Twister every time it came on TV.
Now, living through his first Oklahoma storm season, Terrell watches Twister from a new vantage point. It’s not lost on him that he’s in the place where plot points from the film “could actually happen.”
“I'm like, ‘Oh, hey, this is real. You're in the state now. You're in Tornado Alley,’” he told me.
Every Midwesterner has a tornado story. Hollywood packaged it up, called it Twister and exported it to the world. For Oklahomans in particular, the movie also doubles as a shared vessel for storm trauma, a way to relieve the anxiety we carry of knowing that, on any given spring day, we could get wiped off the map.
It’s an anxiety I saw up close the summer I lived in Oklahoma City in 2013. That year, deadly tornadoes battered the metro area over a two-week stretch in May, killing more than 30 people and devastating communities already marked by loss and grief from violent storms.
Sutton, of KFOR-TV News 4, was out chasing during this infamous tornado outbreak. She was on the same road as a team of chasers killed during the May 31 El Reno tornado after it suddenly exploded to 2.6 miles wide—the widest on record. During the Moore tornado, Sutton saw the storm kick up debris and realized she was looking at people’s homes, cars and property, lost to the wind.
“Your heart sinks because you know people are going to die. With that big of a tornado, someone's gonna die,” she said. “And there's nothing you can do. You can just hope and pray that they listen and they have the proper shelter.”
Hearing Sutton recount these memories, I realized we shared the experience of living through the same storms that summer. Our tornado stories had converged. I’ve maybe never felt more Oklahoman.
So will people still watch Twister 30 years from now?“As long as tornadoes are around, Twister will be important,” Sutton said. “And also the fact that it's always on TV.”
