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Los Angeles in 2012
Photo: Everett

From panoramic photos of nature’s wrath to fictional Mayan prophesies starring John Cusack, our lust for devastation is insatiable. The aphrodisia of atrophy is centuries old, ubiquitous, and infinitely potent. The Germans even coined one of those compound words for it: ruinenlust. And it can be big business. Here is a historical tour of our obsession.

13th century Thomas of Celano pens a poem about Judgment Day called Dies Irae. Centuries later, in 1791, the lyrics become the most famous movement of Mozart’s Requiem. It later shows up everywhere from The Seventh Seal to the X-Men trilogy, the musical Rent, and a pretty heinous commercial for AXE cologne.

1781 The iconic Paris opera house burns down, occasioning an ominous painting by French artist Hubert Robert, aka Robert des Ruines. Bankrolled by the country’s wealthiest patrons, Robert transforms new monuments like the Grande Galerie at the Louvre into picturesque destruction fantasies.

1906 A panoramic collage of photos snapped from the top of a hotel shows a ravaged San Francisco after a magnitude-8.3 earthquake. The shot triggers a rage for disaster imagery, and a few years later a cyclone in Texas merits a similarly transfixing still life. In 2011, video of a Japanese tsunami gets millions of YouTube views.

1970Airport, a star-studded drama about a briefcase bomber on a plane, rakes in $100 million, making it one of the year’s top earners. It kicks off a disaster-film golden age, spews a contrail of flat sequels, and inspires the satirical Airplane! series—along with Turbulence, Con Air, Passenger 57, and Air Force One.

2000s Detroit, city of long-abandoned car factories and $1 houses, is either an American anomaly or one seriously bad omen. The RoboCop hometown has also given rise to a cottage industry in urban-decay voyeurism: lush photo essays, reality TV shows, and a dystopian graphic novel called Sword of My Mouth.

2011 If ruinenlust is a drug, Roland Emmerich (2012, above, and Independence Day) is a kingpin. In 2016: Das Ende der Nacht, due this fall, producer Emmerich works with director Tim Fehlbaum to create an apocalyptic vision of Earth. The üerhot sun has desiccated half the planet, and survivors must navigate the ruins of Europe.