Threads (1984)

[HDLSeanWiley]

This movie is basically like the nuclear war movie The Day After on steroids. It doesn't have any cheesy Hollywood material like The Day After has. It's really something else. One watch of it will help you understand just how it's something else.

 

[Au Naturel]

This movie is basically like the nuclear war movie The Day After on steroids. It doesn't have any cheesy Hollywood material like The Day After has. It's really something else. One watch of it will help you understand just how it's something else.

The 1980s had a bunch of nuclear war movies. I think I saw all of them. Another movie of the time was Testament. Not as showy and not as many special effects but deeply moving.

There was a whole raft of nuclear war movies in the 1960s. I think I saw all of these too. My favorite is Panic in the Year Zero.

Whenever nuclear war tensions start to escalate, we see a cluster of movies about it. Most are really badly done, some are classics. Soon I expect to see some more, given the high level of tension in the south China Sea.

 

[oregano]

Threads was the UK's answer to American nuclear war movies like The Day After and Testament. Testament was based on a novel called The Last Testament according to Wikipedia. Panic In Year Zero! has long been recognized as a classic. On The Beach was a really depressing movie according to my father, a bunch of people waiting for the radiation clouds to reach them and kill them.

 

[AGXStarseed]

Yeah, Threads was a horrible film. I've watched it once and I had to pause it several times just to let everything sink it and ready myself to carry on watching.
What I find most horrifying about Threads isn't the initial attack or the immediate aftermath, but rather what happens to society afterwards - especially the ending where it's pretty clear what the ultimate outcome is going to be.

This movie is basically like the nuclear war movie The Day After on steroids. It doesn't have any cheesy Hollywood material like The Day After has. It's really something else. One watch of it will help you understand just how it's something else.

Yep. Even when it was getting introduced, the guy introducing it said that it made The Day After look like "a walk in the park" in comparison:

The only other one I've watched was When the Wind Blows - an animated movie based on a story by Raymond Briggs (author of The Snowman - the animated adaptation of which many of us watch at Christmas) and featuring a theme song by the late David Bowie.
However, unlike that rather pleasant Xmas classic, When the Wind Blows is a pretty horrible film (in subject matter, not in animation or acting) and another that I had to pause a few times as we watch a nice elderly couple, completely and naively trusting everything that their government tells them, surviving the initial bomb impact - only to try and survive all that follows.
Briggs himself wrote the story the film was adapted from as a way to criticize the UK Government's Protect and Survive information campaign - which would have done little to preserve life during a nuclear conflict:

 

[Au Naturel]

I grew up with this stuff. From my earliest memories (the early 60s) to the final collapse of the USSR (1992) we lived in the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Vietnam racked up 60K American dead and millions of Vietnamese dead. Nuclear weapon stockpiles were many times that of today and everyone was on hair-trigger alert. There were a number of Cold war crises that came desperately close to actual nuclear war and the Cuban Missile Crisis is just the best known. People don't understand how lucky we are to have got thru it.

Seriously, Vietnam makes all the Gulf wars and Afghanistan combined look pretty meager.

I was 7 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It had a strong influence on me for decades after. Read everything I could find about the topic, fiction and nonfiction. Duck and cover drills at school. National Fallout Shelter Survey visited everyone to tell us how to build fallout shelters in our homes. Twilight Zone and other television programs had nuclear war-based episodes. Here's another gem from that era:

 

[Au Naturel]

Threads was the UK's answer to American nuclear war movies like The Day After and Testament. Testament was based on a novel called The Last Testament according to Wikipedia. Panic In Year Zero! has long been recognized as a classic. On The Beach was a really depressing movie according to my father, a bunch of people waiting for the radiation clouds to reach them and kill them.

On the Beach was based on the novel by Neville Shute. It hypothesized a full nuclear exchange with cobalt salted bombs to produce fallout that would raise worldwide radiation levels above what higher animals could survive at. Slowly, the winds carried the fallout far beyond the target areas and Australia/New Zealand was the last that it would reach. The novel focuses on the heroic ways that the last living humans on Earth met their fate.

Some of the other nuclear war novels I read were; Malevil by Robert Merle, Alas Babylon by Pat Frank, Tomorrow by Phillip Wylie, and Warday by Strieber and Kunetka.

 

[oregano]

@Au Naturel: Warday had an interesting format, one that was copied for the novel World War Z. I think Malevil was the novel about a family that, seeing the nuclear war coming, renovated a medieval castle in a remote area of France as a hideout/homestead to survive the war.