That Time A Tornado Destroyed A Drive-In Playing Twister ... Or Did It?

On Victoria Day 1996, the Can-View 4 drive-in complex in Thorold, Ontario, Canada showed "Twister" a few weeks after the film's opening. There were ominous-looking clouds in the sky, but nothing that could have ever prepared the audience for what was about to come. The wind picked up, the rain began pouring over all of the cars, and just as Helen Hunt's face graced the screen — a real tornado plowed through the complex and obliterated the screen. Audience members who were children at the time recall hiding under seats for safety, adults love to tell their "I Was There" story, and given the metatextual nature of the film — as "Twister" includes a scene where a tornado tears through a drive-in screening of "The Shining" — the story made headlines across the globe.

And it's totally plausible. I first saw "Twister" at the drive-in near my hometown in the middle of a thunderstorm when I was six years old. As Jack Torrance battered down the doors of the Overlook Hotel with his axe, I watched a tornado rip apart a drive-in theater as dark clouds rumbled above my own. It's a core memory, to borrow an expression from "Inside Out," and one that has me a little weary of attending 4DX screenings now because it replicates that experience in ways that are a little too close to comfort. I've told this story to folks many times before, and it's often met with people asking me if I know about the Can-View 4 tornado destruction. The story has become the stuff of legend, a true story that sounds too cinematic to be true.

Well, that's because it is. Sort of.

It's hard to imagine it today, but at-home internet was still in its infancy in 1996. The story of a drive-in theater being hit by a tornado while "Twister" was still on the Now Showing marquee spread like wildfire, and evolved like a game of telephone. A tornado hitting a drive-in turned into a tornado destroying a drive-in while "Twister" was playing which turned into a drive-in getting hit by a tornado while the "Twister" drive-in scene was playing. Years later, folks have turned to Reddit to share the stories their parents told them about being there that day, but two decades after the storm, "Cursed Films" director Jay Cheel got to the bottom of what really happened that day by interviewing folks in the audience and employees of the theater who were working when it all went down.

A tornado did wreck the Can-View 4 that night, but it wasn't the screen playing "Twister." In fact, the Can-View lost power before the scheduled screenings and closed up before any movie had a chance to play. If this is the truth, then why do so many people claim to have been there? "A friend of mine said she was there at the time, and her vehicle got damaged so badly by flying stones she had to file a claim with her insurance," one Reddit user posted. "I've watched this documentary but I can't understand why she would make up a story like that."

Fortunately, Cheel's 2016 short documentary "Twisted" isn't just about the tornado that damaged the Can-View, but also how memories can be "twisted" by time, the influence of pop culture, and buying into your own narrative.

Watching "Twisted" had me questioning the legitimacy of my own memory of seeing "Twister" for the first time, so much so that I had to call my parents to confirm that I hadn't made something up in my head. Of course, reading the Reddit threads of people who claimed their parents were at the site of the Can-View "Twister" disaster then had me second-guessing whether or not my mom had remembered things correctly. I ended up looking up the weather history on Weather Underground's database so as to maintain my sanity and learned that on the date I saw "Twister," there were, in fact, 30 mph winds and a reported 4.5 inches of rain. I guess my ol' noggin' is still good for something.

But it was in this confusion that I truly came to understand how many of the Can-View would-be "Twister" viewers must feel. My memory of that movie-going experience is so rich and formative that it genuinely broke my brain a little bit to imagine the possibility that I had just convinced myself of it after all these years. Watching the interviewees plead with Jay Cheel's camera that they know what they saw and what they experienced is fascinating because I sincerely believe each person talking genuinely believes that what they're saying really happened — even if we know it didn't.

Jay Cheel has since made "Twisted" available online for all to see, and it's a perfect primer before Lee Isaac Chung's "Twisters" hits theaters.