Netflix’s Next Big Documentary Spotlights Traumatized Victims of the Deadly Joplin Tornado

For fans of the Twister-verse or even Stranger Things, this next Netflix documentary might be for you.

The Twister: Caught in the Storm, dropping Mar. 19, is the newest venture from production company Raw TV, behind some of the streaming giant’s most popular factual programs such as The Tinder Swindler (2022) or Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (2023).

Director-writer Alexandra Lacey now turns her attention to Joplin, Missouri. In 2011, a devastating EF5 tornado struck the Bible Belt town, killing over 150 people and injuring a thousand. It flattened homes, churches, a hospital, and a high school, reducing people’s entire lives to rubble and becoming the costliest single tornado in U.S. history.

In The Twister, Lacey and her team speak to those caught, literally, in the eye of the storm. She collects a colorful cast to recall the terror: a couple forced to shelter in a freezer, a 17-year-old working in the local diner, a school drop-out sucked out of his car only to catch a flesh-eating fungus, the captain of the football team-turned-paramedic.

“It was a difficult prospect to find the characters and make sure that we were treating each one of them the right way and making them feel comfortable to tell their story,” Lacey tells The Hollywood Reporter. “What really struck me was the lasting mental health impact on the folks there in Joplin. Every time the wind gets stronger, or the sirens go… It’s really hard.”

With a video archive of over 6,000 clips and a visual effects team at hand, Lacey leads a gut-wrenching exploration into the lives of people living with the tornado’s impact every day. Below, she talks to THR about selecting her contributors from a town of 50,000, the power of PTSD and mother nature, and the most emotional interview she’s ever done: “I feel like [the kids] were forced to grow up in one day instead of over several years. But also, I think they each found their magic that day, their strength, their resilience.”

How far back does this story go for you?

Well, it’s actually interesting because I knew about this story from my previous career. I used to be a television art director and I used to design the houses on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. And the year that I moved into documentary work was actually the same year this tornado happened in 2011, and my design team from Extreme Makeover actually traveled to Joplin to help rebuild a whole street there. [This was] shortly after I moved to London. So it does feel a bit like a full circle moment when I was approached about The Twister. It was probably 2023 when all this started.

This is your first feature-length film. Why did you want to focus on the Joplin tornado?

When I was approached to tell the story of the catastrophic Joplin tornado, I think my first feeling was that I wanted to make sure that we didn’t approach it as a classic natural history documentary — those films about this storm had already been made. I wanted to make a film that had a unique cast of characters that could say something more about human nature, hope and adversity, so that it wasn’t just going to be focused on the disaster and the devastation. We started doing research to work out, okay, who is going to be our cast of characters?

In a town of 50,000 people, there’s obviously lots of very moving, powerful stories of survival and loss. My producer, Carla Grande, did a fabulous job getting to know the pillars of community there and she and I both had to go in and build relationships with them. As you can imagine, with any disaster-torn town, they’d have news crews coming in wanting to ask them all sorts of questions. So we had to get them to understand that our approach would be sensitive and that we wanted to hear not just about what happened on that day but also about the recovery, the rebuild and how it might have changed some of them. Through speaking to folks, we learned that the tornado took place on high school graduation day. And this felt significant because anybody can relate to understanding the importance of graduation for any young person stepping into adulthood. We were wondering what effect that day, that storm, had not only on the graduating class of 2011 at Joplin High School, but also other young folks in town, younger teenagers or folks who just graduated. So we decided to tell a coming-of-age story through this natural disaster from their perspective.

So, there was a purposeful focus on the school.

Luckily, Joplin High School were fully on board. Kerry Sachetta, who was their principal back then, now their superintendent, Matthew Harding and Sarah Coyne. They were incredible. They helped us source yearbooks and find students and hear more about that experience from their perspective too. Because, of course, the high school was destroyed, and a lot of the other surrounding schools were as well. They also felt that it was worthwhile for us to tell it from the young perspective, because it felt like that was more universal. So even if you’re somebody from London, who hopefully will never experience a tornado, perhaps when you’re watching it, you can be thinking about if that was you as a teenager. How that might change you.

One thing I found interesting is that each of the characters, I feel like they were forced to grow up in one day instead of over several years. But also, I think they each found their magic that day, their strength, their resilience — they almost had to grow up and help the grown-ups around them. So, I guess that would be the silver lining of their experience.

Tell me about the others — the ones who weren’t graduating that day, like Steven, Chad, Kaylee and Mac.

Cecil was 17 at the time, he was a junior in high school. We have our out-of-towner character, Chad. He was 13. Steven had been kicked out of high school, he was 16, and then Mac and Kaylee were 19 and 20. So recent graduates. I always want to approach documentaries like movies in the way that they’re told, the characters that we meet. [I like to] embrace different movie genres but with a sensitive approach because we’re dealing with real people here, not actors. So with that in mind, when we decided to do it as a coming-of-age film, we wanted to think about, okay, what sort of characters would you expect to find in a natural disaster movie, but young versions of those, right? So we needed to have storm chasers. We needed to have a weather man. We needed to have also some of the characters you’d find in high school, right? The football captain in Keegan, who also was the son of the head of the paramedics in town — he could also help to tell the blue light story and the story of recovery. That’s how we chose the surrounding characters. Cecil was a junior in high school, so we thought that was also unique. When he went to high school his senior year, he had to go to high school in the mall because they’d lost the building.

Was a feature-length film daunting for you or exciting?

It was just so exciting. It was a difficult prospect to find the characters and make sure that we were treating each one of them the right way and making them feel comfortable to tell their story. But in terms of approaching a film, I was just so excited to craft this feature and in some ways, I hope it will pull in audiences that enjoy Twisters (2024), Twister (1996) or even Stranger Things. We’re hoping that it will bring in audiences that perhaps wouldn’t usually watch a documentary, that will then leave learning something. That’s my hope. I want to make documentaries that bring in wider audiences because perhaps they’re entertaining. But also, there are lessons to be learned. Particularly with Cecil, he talks about being gay growing up in the Bible Belt, and how difficult that was for him and truly believing that the rapture was coming and that he didn’t want to be left behind.

I thought that was one of the most gut-wrenching parts of this documentary — to see a town so deeply entrenched in faith that the tornado almost felt like a form of punishment from God.

I couldn’t include everything, but [Cecil] had told me about how he had been shown these books called Left Behind, these Christian books that are written for children to teach them about how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world if they are left behind in the rapture. He’d grown up reading these terrifying books. When he was coming out of this storm and he’s speaking in the interview about the fact that he felt he’d been left behind — that’s what’s running through his mind: that he’s going to be on his own. It was an incredibly emotional interview, probably one of the most emotional interviews I’ve ever done.

You mention that you hope people learn from this film. What is the biggest takeaway that you want audiences to come away with?

I think it’s probably quite important just to mention that there’s been so many natural disasters over the past few years, and particularly the tornados that have just hit Missouri in the past couple days in the surrounding states. I think it just feels more important than ever that people understand the human impact of mother nature’s power. And that is something I want people to think about. I also really hope that, particularly in today’s world, that they will see the hope and adversity in this film as well. They will leave thinking community is important and we must come together.

Did you stay in Joplin for the shoot?

Yeah. I pretty much lived in Joplin for a period of few months because I think we came in and out of town five or six times over the course of a year. We stayed right in the path of where the tornado had hit. It’s not a small town, Joplin, but it has a small-town feeling. People in the Midwest are just wonderful.

Did you or any member of the team ever find it quite difficult? I wonder about the personal journey you all must have been on, considering the lingering impact.

The documentary shoot took place in Joplin, but the visual elements we purposely did not film in Joplin. We filmed those in a completely different state due to sensitivity. But in terms of the Joplin shoot, we made sure that our team went to PTSD training before doing the shoot to help the contributors. I think what really struck me was the lasting mental health impact on the folks there in Joplin. Every time the wind gets stronger or the sirens go… it’s really hard. The question everyone kept asking me is, “Why would anybody stay in Tornado Alley after having that experience?” But what I learned from the folks there is two things. One: it’s a shared experience of trauma, it’s bonded them all because each one of them understands what the other went through and the things [and] the people they may have lost. But also, I think it’s just such a special place, Joplin. It’s a gathering point of multiple farmland communities that come together.

Let’s touch on those visual elements, as well. You feel so embedded in that chaos. How was it done?

So, as we were learning the testimonies from each of our characters, it took us into the eye of the storm. We had a challenge: how do you visualize these moments? We were never going to find an archive from within the storm. We did not have a Twister or Hollywood budget. So we had to get creative. I took my clues from [the Joplin citizens] because they said to me that their memories inside of the storm felt like slow motion. This gave me the idea that perhaps what we should do is shoot our additional visual elements in super slow motion so they would stand out completely from the archive and not upstage it but just be a separate layer. It would feel immersive, I thought, for the audience as well, going into the storm with them. So we used a phantom camera and shot on a super high frame rate. You have flour being dusted into the sky, pieces of drywall being throw. It’s actually chaos when you’re in the room. But then, of course, when you watch slowed down, it becomes almost ethereal.

You also have this wealth of archive footage from news tapes and cell phones. Tell me how you even begin to make creative decisions on what makes the cut and what doesn’t.

Ever since discovering a box of unseen Betamax tapes of the Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith for our doc Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me, which was on Netflix a couple years ago, I have been absolutely obsessed with finding golden nuggets in archive, particularly stuff that had never before been seen. From day one, the producer and I were scooping up archives. Carla had a drive that she took everywhere that she went [in case] folks in Joplin had photos or film or video. She went to the news channels and saw what they might have in their back catalogs. And I think we collected around 6000 clips of archive. This included cell phone footage or home cam footage, news footage, security camera footage. We managed to get access to all the security camera footage that was from the high school building and the surrounding schools, which show the incredible power of that wind as it blew through the school. Several clips are never before seen, which is pretty exciting, particularly the archive that Kaylee and Mac share that takes us into the eye.

And I’m gonna have to just give a quick shout-out to my editor and assistant editor, Nic Zimmerman and Sladana Tegeltija. To have had 6000 clips to choose from, it was incredible to see them working to select the very best bits from there and just being so organized. By the end of it, I feel like Nick had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the clips that were available. He really is a true visionary. He cuts with such heart, as well.

You’re still so in the thick of this documentary. But what would you like to do next?

I am developing another Netflix feature right now… but I can’t speak about yet.