Werner Herzog’s 2016 film Into the Inferno opens with a shot that makes you feel like you’re staring into Earth’s fever dream. Lava churns. Steam hisses. And Herzog—because of course it’s Herzog—starts philosophizing about human existence while standing next to a lake of molten rock that could vaporize him in seconds.
The documentary doesn’t just show you volcanoes; it drags you through the weird, contradictory relationship humans have with these geological blowtorches. North Korea’s Mount Paektu gets framed as sacred propaganda. Ethiopia’s Erta Ale becomes a pilgrimage site for scientists who camp on its edges like they’re at some extreme geology sleepover. Herzog interviews a volcanologist who literally died two weeks after filming—killed by a pyroclastic flow at Mount Unzen in Japan back in 1991. That’s about as dramatic as it gets.
Here’s the thing: most volcano documentaries fall into two camps.
The first camp is the disaster-porn category, where everything’s about explosions and destruction and CGI recreations of Pompeii getting buried in 79 AD. National Geographic’s Volcano: Nature’s Inferno fits here—decent science, sure, but it leans hard into the “watch things explode” formula. The second camp tries to be educational but ends up feeling like a textbook with a camera crew. BBC’s Earth: The Power of the Planet episode on volcanoes does this better than most, thanks to Iain Stewart’s genuine enthusiasm, but it still can’t escape that vaguely instructional tone.
Then there’s Fire of Love, which came out in 2022 and basically broke the mold.
Directors Sara Dosa took archival footage shot by French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft—who spent decades chasing eruptions like some people chase storms—and turned it into something that feels more like visual poetry than science journalism. The Kraffts died together in 1991 at Mount Unzen (same eruption that killed the guy Herzog interviewed, actually), and the documentary doesn’t shy away from the fact that their obssession with volcanoes was both beautiful and kind of reckless. You watch them stand meters from flowing lava in silver heat suits that look like disco costumes designed by NASA. You see Maurice grinning like a kid while ash rains down around him. It’s romantic and unsettling in equal measure.
Wait—maybe the best volcano documentary isn’t even trying to be one?
Consider The Land of Volcanoes, a 2019 Indonesian film that follows communities living on the slopes of Mount Merapi. It erupted in 2010, killing 353 people and displacing thousands. But the documentary isn’t about the eruption itself—it’s about the stubborn, complicated reasons people rebuild in the same spots. One farmer explains that the volcanic soil grows the best vegetables he’s ever seen. Another family runs a tourism business showing visitors the debre fields. Turns out proximity to death makes for excellent economic opportunity.
PBS’s Nova: Deadliest Volcanoes from 2012 deserves mention for actually explaining the science without dumbing it down. It covers the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique, which killed roughly 30,000 people in minutes via pyroclastic flows that moved at 400 miles per hour. The documentary uses fluid dynamics simulations to show exactly why those flows are so lethal—they’re not just hot gas and ash, they’re basically ground-hugging avalanches of superheated material that move faster than you can run, drive, or think.
But if you want pure spectacle paired with actual research, David Attenborough’s 2012 special Galapagos includes segments on the islands’ volcanic origins that feel almost meditative. He stands on fresh lava flows—some less than a decade old—and explains how the Galapagos hotspot has been punching through the Earth’s crust for millions of years, creating islands like a geological assembly line. No explosions. No panic. Just Attenborough being Attenborough, making you care about basaltic rock formation.
The weird outlier? Encounters at the End of the World, another Herzog film from 2007 that’s ostensibly about Antarctica but includes a bizarre, haunting segment about Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano on Earth. Scientists descend into it’s crater to study volcanic gases, and Herzog films them like they’re explorers in some alien landscape. Which, honestly, they kind of are.
