Great Disaster Movie Posters

Disaster movies are dependable purveyors of guilty thrills, from early silents about the Titanic to 2014's 'Into the Storm.' Their posters lure us in with promises of mass destruction and killer special effects, and are entertaining in their own right.

The makers of 'Deluge' knew early on that audiences would flock to see New York get destroyed – in this case, by both an earthquake and a tidal wave. The film's special effects are remarkable for their day.

The atom bomb gave rise to new (and understandable) fears about the obliteration of Earth, and a genre was born: the 1950s alien invasion chiller. The poster for this George Pal production captures the paranoid mood of the time.

This film forgoes the special effects and focuses on human emotion. The story, set in Australia shortly after a nuclear war, spends time with Earth's last living souls as they count the days until the deadly radiation reaches their shores.

Alfred Hitchcock didn't bother with alien or nuclear armageddons. Far more disturbing was the thought of ordinary birds swooping down and killing us. We prefer the famous Polish poster for 'The Birds' over the Hollywood version.

It was marketed as a drama, but with a raging blizzard, a bomb on a jumbo jet and an all-star cast, 'Airport' heralded the golden age of the disaster movie. It also spawned two sequels and inspired the 1980 parody 'Airplane!'

Hot on the heels of the hugely successful 'Airport' came this blockbuster about a capsized cruise ship. The poster's got it all: a terrifying illustration, an eye-catching tagline, a synopsis, a cool logo, and headshots of the cast.

The '70s love affair with disaster movies was in full swing in 1974. 'The Towering Inferno' scores extra cool points for headliners Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. Incredibly, this film earned Fred Astaire his only Oscar nomination.

Irwin Allen, who produced both 'Poseidon' and 'Inferno,' obviously found the genre to be lucrative. But this nonsense about killer bees received negative buzz (sorry) and bombed. Audiences were done with disaster movies – for now.

The true rebirth of the genre came in 1996, when advances in digital effects made it easy for filmmakers to concoct authentic large-scale destruction. 'Twister' and 'Independence Day' were the hits that ushered in this new era.

The poster for 'Deep Impact' – like its tagline – attempts to find the tricky balance between heartfelt human drama and the awesome spectacle of Earth getting wiped out by a giant comet.

Unlike '70s disaster movie posters, which crammed in tiny photos of each and every star, Hollywood now understood that the destruction itself was the selling point. Thus this poster cuts to the chase: helpless fishing boat, big damn wave.

The Statue of Liberty also appears in the poster for 2004's 'The Day After Tomorrow,' but the J.J. Abrams-produced monster movie 'Cloverfield' takes it up a notch by ripping her head off (which actually happens in the film).

Once again, there's no need to show the actors' faces when the disaster imagery speaks for itself. The poster for 'The Happening' is effectively creepy – far more so, some might argue, than the film itself.

These days, Hollywood releases subtle "advance" artwork that is often more inventive than the final posters. The advance poster for Steven Soderbergh's global virus drama cleverly connects the title to key cities in the film.

We couldn't resist closing out our gallery with this endearingly goofy drive-in stalwart. The poster might be cheesy, but note that it takes great pains to avoid mentioning just what these "creatures" are: giant rabbits.