Yes, ‘Twister’ Still Slaps

Editor's note: This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of Twister's theatrical debut. Being good Oklahomans, we here at The Pickup decided to celebrate this milestone with a full slate of stories about severe storms and the Okie preoccupation with them.

I’m no stranger to the trappings of nostalgia. I’ve lost count of the number of pop culture touchstones from my childhood that no longer hit like they used to.

Podracing and Darth Maul cannot save something as bad as Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace even if I saw it in theaters 11 times. Space Jam on VHS might’ve made for the sickest sleepover in middle school history, but it was an 88-minute toy commercial on its best day. I still can’t believe my mom took me out of school for Pokémon: The First Movie. However, Twister was a dizzying box office hit in 1996 and still delivers the goods. 

Growing up in Oklahoma, I did not enjoy the annual tradition of an epic NBA playoff run or a bevy of streaming options on Netflix. No, I had a Blockbuster card to rent movies with and—as far as I could tell from the shelves—Oklahoma! was just about the only notable flick featuring my home state. Sadly for Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bill Paxton does not drive a red 1995 Dodge Ram 2500 through a house in that one. That is their loss.

Twister pummeled my eight-year-old senses with golfball-sized hail and possibly caused some permanent hearing loss. It also scared the shit out of me, imparting the fantastical impression that a tornado was something that humans could conquer. All you needed was a firm belief in science, Helen Hunt at your side and a strap of leather. How’s that for a boost of confidence? 

I was pleased to feel that sense of terror from my childhood return on my recent rewatch. Elder audiophiles may recall that Twister was the first home release to be certified by THX, the famous audio company.¹ Those crazy sound effects that would shake your parents’ living room walls make Twister endlessly rewatchable and genuinely scary.  

And the tornadoes know how to make an entrance. The wind roars. Thunder cracks. Houses creak like a bad back. The real star of this movie is the sound design. The storm scenes evoke rusty buzzsaws and screaming velociraptors. If you do choose to rewatch it, then don’t be a coward and crank the volume.

Twister also holds up today and eclipses its sequel for this reason: it’s got great bones. What it lacks in sincere character development it makes up for with a stacked cast, a plethora of quotable lines, that wicked sound design and the action movie chops of Dutch director Jan de Bont, who was responsible for the camera work in Die Hard.² 

Twister is also sneaky. On the surface, it’s a disaster movie. But peel back that exterior and you’ve got a rainy horror film that shares more in common with movies like Se7en and The Shining. The weather is a sick monster, you see. This storm outbreak is as relentless as Jack Torrance and totally hellbent on making an impression, like John Doe. Just because the killer is a violently rotating column of air doesn’t mean it can’t be a methodical stalker. The novel use of computer-generated special and practical effects mixed with all the chase scenes make you forget you’re watching a horror flick. 

Twister begins in the summer of 1969 — nice. Doomed chickens cluck their way around a home in Kingfisher County shortly before a weather report warns of an EF5 dead-set on swallowing a young Jo Harding’s father whole. This childhood trauma renders Jo (Helen Hunt) obsessed with tornadoes, and exposes a significant flaw with the 2024 sequel, whose female protagonist merely becomes scared of the tornadoes after one eats her boyfriend. Jo’s obsession is terribly interesting. It puts her on a revenge trail against a force of nature, a pursuit so doomed that it takes Bill Paxton to help stop it. 

During another encounter, a ‘nader pins Jo’s Jeep under a bridge. Instead of recoiling, she tries to touch the whirlwind like an oblivious toddler reaching for a hot stove. Therapy would do wonders, but her heart is set on stalking storms. 

The storms, of course, stalk right back like a lumbering slasher villain. One targets the tiny town of Wakita, but not before it goes after Jo’s aunt specifically. 

Opposite of Jo is her weather man played by one of my favorite actors. No, not Philip Seymour Hoffman but he’s in Twister, too. I’m actually talking about Paxton. When he passed away in 2017, I wrote a tribute to his career that centered on his role in Twister as Bill Harding—the human barometer—or better yet, his nickname, The Extreme.³ Somewhere on the spectrum between Gary England⁴ and Indiana Jones, Bill brings a presence as calm as the eye of the storm. He’s so cool that you actually believe that a garbage can filled with plastic balls named Dorothy could defeat severe weather, even if he is a terrible driver.⁵ There’s something mythological about him and his storm chaser pals⁶ who show little fear when Mother Nature gives them the middle finger. 

And finally, a stray list of Twister observations: 

• There are some truly great vehicles in this motion picture but none finer than Dusty’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) Barn Burner bus complete with stereo system. His OU hat with the vintage disco logo is choice—a thrift store find straight from my dreams. 
• Paxton should’ve gotten an Oscar for accusing his rival of storm chasing for the money and not the science with a straight face. 
• Jami Gertz caught my attention on this rewatch. She plays Bill’s fiancée, Dr. Melissa Reeves, who’s just there to get some divorce papers signed, and gets off some iconic lines in the process: “When you used to tell me that you chase tornadoes, deep down I always just thought it was a metaphor;” and drumroll please, “I gotta go Julia, we got cows.” Because it doesn’t include Jelly Roll, Twister has the superior soundtrack to Twisters. 
• Jake Busey, son of Oklahoma film icon Gary, plays a lab tech for the bad guys. 
• Has food ever looked as good as it does at Aunt Meg’s dining table? Her steak and eggs live rent-free in my head. 
• A quick ranking of my favorite things tornadoes throw at people in Twister: a tricycle, a house, a hubcap, a tree, a semi-truck.

All this to say, Twister is scarier than I remember, louder than a tornado siren and has some real grit baked into its landmark visual and technical achievements. Only a handful of TV and movies made here hold the distinction of being a must-watch. Three decades later, that’s still the case for Twister. You know when Leo points at the TV in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because he sees himself? That’s what Twister does for Oklahoma.