The Twister Caught in the Storm: What was the most terrifying moment caught on camera during the tornado?

This piece discusses deaths from the 2011 Joplin tornado, including that of Will Norton.

The sequence that multiple critics identify as the most alarming in the Netflix documentary is the destruction at St. John’s Regional Medical Center. The 367-bed Joplin hospital was knocked off its foundation in seconds; staff had only moments to push patients on gurneys into the corridors before the building shifted. Flying debris shattered windows and cut the backup generators, silencing the ventilators. X-rays and medical records turned up 75 miles from the building. Five patients and one visitor died in the immediate destruction; others died later of injuries sustained there. The Twister: Caught in the Storm, streaming on Netflix since March 19, 2025, documents the EF5 tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri on May 22, 2011, killing 158 people in 38 minutes. The hospital footage places that number in terms that raw statistics cannot.

The tornado and the day it chose

The Joplin tornado reached the city at 5:41 p.m. on a Sunday that happened to be the city’s high school graduation day. Several hundred students had received diplomas from Joplin High School earlier that afternoon. The storm reached nearly a mile wide, packed winds exceeding 200 mph according to the National Weather Service, traveled roughly 22 miles, and killed 158 people while injuring more than 1,150. It damaged approximately 7,500 homes, making it the costliest single tornado in U.S. history, according to the Wikipedia article on the 2011 Joplin tornado. Director and writer Alexandra Lacey, working with production company Raw (whose previous films include *Don’t F**k with Cats and The Tinder Swindler*), builds the 88-minute film around young Joplin residents who lived through that afternoon, drawing on cell phone footage, CCTV, and previously unreleased material shot by residents.

What the convenience store footage captured

Inside a convenience store where the tornado passed directly overhead, Mac Wright filmed the moment his group feared they would not survive. Wright, an amateur storm chaser who had spent the previous night at what he and friends called a “staying alive party” (a reference to Christian radio host Harold Camping’s prediction that May 21, 2011, would be Judgment Day), drove toward the forming storm with his then-girlfriend Kaylee Parker and her brother Eric Parker. When the tornado turned toward them, the group sheltered in the store. In the documentary, Parker describes the moment of impact: “We said our ‘I love you’s’ and waited to die.”

The Hollywood Reporter noted in its preview that the film also profiles “a couple forced to shelter in a freezer,” though that pair is not named in available critical coverage.

The eye of the storm and what it looked like

Wright describes an abrupt shift inside the store: the chaos stopped, the sky appeared, and then the second wall of the storm arrived. Several survivors in the documentary place weight on that interval. Cecil Cornish, who was 17 and working a shift at a Cherry Berry frozen yogurt shop when the tornado struck, stepped outside during the apparent lull. According to the documentary, he described seeing “the town exploding.” Cornish had already guided customers into the store bathrooms before moving to a back room whose walls were then torn off. According to a Decider review of the film, Cornish had feared being left behind by the Rapture because he was hiding that he was gay. He now lives in Joplin with his husband Landan Cornish, and has spoken publicly about managing PTSD from the tornado.

Steven Weersing and the weeks that followed

Steven Weersing was 16 when the tornado lifted the car he and a friend were riding in and pulled him out through the pressure differential. He suffered a punctured lung, broken ribs, and a severe chest wound. At Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, he was placed in a medically induced coma after contracting zygomycosis, a fungal infection that causes tissue to necrotize. Surgeons removed portions of his ribs, lung, liver, and heart tissue. Dr. Kimberly Gandy of Children’s Mercy stated at the time that his survival odds were five to ten percent. At least thirteen people in Joplin contracted zygomycosis after the tornado; the spores were driven into wounds by airborne debris. Weersing survived and, by the documentary’s 2025 release, was 30 and a father of four. In the film he describes having watched The Wizard of Oz as a child and not thinking the tornado looked dangerous.

Andrew Keegan Tinney, Will Norton, and the gaps in the record

Andrew Keegan Tinney, captain of the Joplin High School football team and a trained EMT through his father, who ran the local ambulance district, helped treat survivors in the storm’s aftermath. The documentary focuses on his friendship with Will Norton, 18, a YouTube creator with more than 23,000 subscribers who had graduated that morning and tweeted “I’m graduating today.” Norton was riding home in his Hummer H3 with his father Mark when the tornado struck. Mark held onto his son, but the storm’s pressure pulled Will through the sunroof; in holding on, Mark Norton suffered 17 broken bones, a collapsed lung, and a dislocated shoulder, and rescue workers had to use the Jaws of Life to free him. Will Norton’s body was found on May 27 in a nearby pond. He had been accepted to Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. The tornado left no on-camera record of his final minutes; the documentary works around that absence.

What the inside footage changes

The hospital footage, the shelter audio, and Weersing’s account give the 158 deaths a location and a physical texture that aerial or aftermath photography cannot. The material comes from inside the stores, the shelters, and the hallways of a hospital knocked off its own foundation. Across the documentary, the sequences that critical coverage identifies as most alarming share one quality: the camera is inside something that was supposed to hold.