Sleep no more: Threads is coming to Blu-ray
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The Day After just had the effect of people and animals (horses mainly) being vaporized, with an x-ray type shot of them first, so you saw their bones. IIRC, that was shown the first time, but has frequently been edited down in most broadcasts you see on basic cable, since people found it too disturbing. And if THAT was too disturbing, imagine the freak out that would happen if Threads aired in the US.
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How does it compare with The Road? That one left me pretty depressed.
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There is another film that was created before Threads.
It was called 'The War Game'
It was filmed in black and white for television on the BBC in the mid sixties. But it was so horrifying, it was put into the vault.
It was only, finally, shown for the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima.
There is also, When the Wind Blows. Which basically takes a pair of cheerful old people and subjects them to the cruellest of fates while they stumble around their irradiated ruin of a house trying and failing to understand what has happened to them while they slowly begin to rot alive.
It was called 'The War Game'
It was filmed in black and white for television on the BBC in the mid sixties. But it was so horrifying, it was put into the vault.
It was only, finally, shown for the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima.
There is also, When the Wind Blows. Which basically takes a pair of cheerful old people and subjects them to the cruellest of fates while they stumble around their irradiated ruin of a house trying and failing to understand what has happened to them while they slowly begin to rot alive.
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As I recall Threads used the actual civil servants in Sheffield Town Hall who would be in charge of looking after the population after a nuclear war as "extras" (actually filmed them going through the drills they had to practice). Part of the reason it looks so accurate, and also so depressing. They knew what they were being trained to do was utterly pointless.
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I came here to recommend that movie. I saw it back in the days, and it was harrowing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_(1983_film)
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With our population and technology, it's helpful to remember that any sufficiently global catastrophe will bring on collapse. It won't be pretty. And it wouldn't even take that much.
Even a modestly lethal pandemic (for a horribly lethal pandemic, a good read is Station Eleven), a smallish flying rock, or a CME could cause apocalyptic chaos. Imagine nothing else but the grid going down for six months, or globally missing a growing season. I certainly do not.
Even a modestly lethal pandemic (for a horribly lethal pandemic, a good read is Station Eleven), a smallish flying rock, or a CME could cause apocalyptic chaos. Imagine nothing else but the grid going down for six months, or globally missing a growing season. I certainly do not.
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The description of this reminds me a lot of a book that I read as a child; The Last Children of Schevenborn. I think, like one would with watching this film, I only read it once, but that's all it took to impart its horror. It described witnessing the blast, finding somewhere to survive, watching money become meaningless. Watching friends and family getting sick from lack of food, or from the radiation. Children stillborn from birth defects. There was no hope in it at all, beyond "we've survived, for today. We'll see about tomorrow."
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Based on the comments thus far, my take away is that I should not get my hopes up to see super mutants and an economy based around bottle cap currency?
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It's been years since I've seen it. Just thinking about Threads puts me on the verge of tears. It truly is PTSD in 2 hours. Every film discussed above that I've seen (The Road, The Day After, When The Wind Blows, and others) are downright cheery in comparison. There is no hope, but the hope for it to end.
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So in other words, eat a bunch of LSD before you watch it? =P
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Probably not the best idea. But definitely don't watch it if you're severely depressed, the despair it causes could be quite dangerous.
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And perhaps they can add the UK government's 'Protect and Survive' public information films as bonus material. These are perhaps the scariest thing ever - not just the cool, calm voice of Patrick Allen, but that chilling jingle at the end which haunts me from my childhood.
https://youtu.be/3CWFbDEOoAY
https://youtu.be/3CWFbDEOoAY
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My first thought was "I remember that, I should watch it again", but I've remembered waking to lightning flash and waiting for the shockwave. That's a shitty way to wake up. I'll pass.
Plus we know the world won't end like that. It will end when something accidentally bumps the power button on the universe simulator we live in, or deletes it to make room for more higher dimensional porn.
Plus we know the world won't end like that. It will end when something accidentally bumps the power button on the universe simulator we live in, or deletes it to make room for more higher dimensional porn.
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And thus the Doomsday clock ticks 30 seconds forward.
https://thebulletin.org/2018-doomsday-clock-statement
https://thebulletin.org/2018-doomsday-clock-statement
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The real bitch about the film is that it was toned down - a lot.I don't recall if it was "The Day After" or "Threads," pretty sure I've seen both but they blur together in my mind if so.
But they made us watch it in school sometime around 6th grade, which was ~1991 or so? I believe we were still doing "Duck and Cover" drills, as if those flimsy school desks would stop a nuclear-fire-fuck-ball
It was horrifying, that's all I remember.
All I can say is that I can't thumbs up enough the notion of finding the tallest, most exposed place and being taken fast, because life after something like that would not be worth living.
I would rather be envied, than be one envying the dead, myself.
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The real bitch about the film is that it was toned down - a lot.I don't recall if it was "The Day After" or "Threads," pretty sure I've seen both but they blur together in my mind if so.
But they made us watch it in school sometime around 6th grade, which was ~1991 or so? I believe we were still doing "Duck and Cover" drills, as if those flimsy school desks would stop a nuclear-fire-fuck-ball
It was horrifying, that's all I remember.
All I can say is that I can't thumbs up enough the notion of finding the tallest, most exposed place and being taken fast, because life after something like that would not be worth living.
I would rather be envied, than be one envying the dead, myself.
If Hiroshima was of any indication, vaporization was probably the most merciful way to go.
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Demolition
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The intro by Peter Weissbach brings back memories. As mentioned in the article, they aired it before the movie on CKVU in 1984. I remember thinking that it must be a very serious topic because Peter was known as a fairly excitable talk-radio guy on various Western Canadian radio stations. For him to appear so somber and serious meant that Threads was no joking matter.
As for the movie, it gave me nightmares. I still shudder when I think of the ending where...
As for the movie, it gave me nightmares. I still shudder when I think of the ending where...
...the girl gives birth to a deformed, stillborn baby, and she starts screaming as the midwife hands it to her.
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"If life feels a little too joyful, if you're looking to spend a couple of hours drenched in unrelenting misery, and if you want a film experience that will haunt you for literally years to come..."
I thought that was what House of Sand and Fog was for.
I thought that was what House of Sand and Fog was for.
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As mentioned before, "The War Game" is excellent.
"Threads" is unique, the last 90 seconds are probably what may stay with you most of all.
"On the Beach" (the original movie) is well worth watching and, for an nicely done update, the 2000 remake is excellent and offers some interesting alternative takes on things (such as the value of anything when everyone is going to die.).
"Threads" is unique, the last 90 seconds are probably what may stay with you most of all.
"On the Beach" (the original movie) is well worth watching and, for an nicely done update, the 2000 remake is excellent and offers some interesting alternative takes on things (such as the value of anything when everyone is going to die.).
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I remember my father getting up and switching the TV off when we were watching the original broadcast, as he judged (rightly) that were some things that his family were unprepared to see.
Watching it many years later as an adult I'm glad he did.
Watching it many years later as an adult I'm glad he did.
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I'll be really honest here, to the folks who keep asking for a comparison to The Road. I'm not trying to get into a game of one-upmanship over who's got it worse or who's seen the more depressing movie or whatever, but here it is:
The Road, though based on McCarthy's novel, was a Hollywood movie with Hollywood tropes, pegged to a traditional movie 3-act structure with easy-to-see Hollywood story beats. It's depressing and stark, but it's a movie that relies on excellent acting to sell the premise that survival in a post-apocalyptic world is very hard. The apocalypse itself is unnamed and unexplored; the desolate world left behind is never truly connected with the actual event, whatever it was. It simply is, and it's implied that if you're just brave enough—if you can carry the fire—you might eventually make it. There are, in the end, good guys left to fight the bad guys, or at least to keep carrying the fire.
Threads is not like that.
The apocalypse in Threads is central to the movie because it's not an unnamed event or a shadowy bio-engineered plague or a solar flare or climate change or whatever—it's good old fashioned nuclear war between the USA and the USSR. The characters in the movie don't start out scrabbling for survival in a dead world that they don't understand—the characters in the movie watch the world die, and more to the point, they know exactly who killed it and why. Much of the horror and dread is in observing the destruction of systems, the faltering of the mechanisms that keep civilization working and, more to the point, that keep us civilized. The Road shows that people turn savage when civilization departs, but Threads shows us why.
There are no good guys left. There's no carrying the fire. There's no journey to the sea. There's no goal. There's no destination. There's just sad, poisoned, dying people trying to hold together their tattered destroyed lives and families as the fucking embers of the world cool to blackness and everything grinds to a halt. There's no hero's journey to be had and there's no real dramatic structure—no traditional story beats, no overcome-able conflict, no cartoonish bad guys or wasteland pirates or whatever the fuck.
There's just people dying. The final scene in the movie ends with the daughter of the dead main character giving birth to a deformed stillborn thing. That's the message: everything is dead, even babies straight from the womb. The earth is a corpse, peopled with corpses and it will never get better. Everyone will die and in time even the memory of mankind will pass, and we made it happen to ourselves.
So yeah. The Road has a happy ending compared to Threads. It is a movie utterly bereft of hope because it's a movie carefully calculated to horrify people, because nuclear war is horrifying.
You should watch it, if you haven't. But only once. If you can stand watching it more than once, you're a lot stronger than I am.
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One of my earliest memories is a dream where the sky above my school playground was full of of missiles*. The memory of how that made five year old me feel still sends a chill down my spine.
I also saw this film - during the cold war there were a number of films that covered nuclear war, often started as a result of an error.
The scariest part is that we came very close to it happening for real on more than one occasion. And that is just the ones we know about.
* I distinctly remember the missiles looking like variations of skylab
I also saw this film - during the cold war there were a number of films that covered nuclear war, often started as a result of an error.
The scariest part is that we came very close to it happening for real on more than one occasion. And that is just the ones we know about.
* I distinctly remember the missiles looking like variations of skylab
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I remember watching this on a local commercial channel around 1984-85. There weren't any commercials, but they had suicide prevention breaks. I've never seen that before or since.
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I've not heard of this film before, and was probably just a year or two too young to see it in school, although I do remember seeing the animation set in Yorkshire? And I've seen grave of the Fireflies. But reading the comments here they both sound like a veritable barrel of laughs compared this film, definitely going to put it on my watch list.
I have also been fortunate enough to visit the memorial museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think the thing that brought home to me more than anything else was seeing the shadows created on walls from where people were standing and who were just obliterated into literally less than ash. And then you realise that they were the lucky ones.
I would have liked to have thought the world had moved past the idea of nuclear war as a viable option for anything, but now I'm currently living in Japan with North Korea lobbing missiles overhead every so often and the President of the U.S.A. actively taunting a highly militarised paranoid dictatorship.
I guess I was lucky enough to miss the Cold War but in plenty of time for this current idiocy.
I have also been fortunate enough to visit the memorial museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think the thing that brought home to me more than anything else was seeing the shadows created on walls from where people were standing and who were just obliterated into literally less than ash. And then you realise that they were the lucky ones.
I would have liked to have thought the world had moved past the idea of nuclear war as a viable option for anything, but now I'm currently living in Japan with North Korea lobbing missiles overhead every so often and the President of the U.S.A. actively taunting a highly militarised paranoid dictatorship.
I guess I was lucky enough to miss the Cold War but in plenty of time for this current idiocy.
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For those still needing to know - Threads, or The Day After:
The Day After is a stylised made-for-TV disaster movie, presenting Armageddon in a manner suitable for a US TV audience, it's tame, restrained.
Threads is raw. And subtle. It shows the day to day lives of two characters and their immediate friends and families, complete with bickering siblings, boring parents, a one-off affair, i.e. real life. In the background, un-noticed by all, the tensions of international politics play out and the world edges towards war, unnoticed.
And then Threads rips this to pieces. Unlike TDA, it shows the reality of panic; people being trampled, a woman urinating in fear, animals burning, bits of bodies, decaying corpses, shoot/hanging of looters, firing on desperate civilians, the hopeless situation of local government. And the real,kicker, that after a dozen years, it is even worse.
The War Game was an even earlier effort, constrained by 60s film technology, but has one scene even more stomach churning than Threads; the fire-storm, with the unrelenting, dispassionate voice over "this is a firestorm.... within 30 seconds 80% of his officers will be dead... this is a firestorm..."
Both should be required watching for politicians. And everyone should see both films once. Just once is all that is needed.
The Day After is a stylised made-for-TV disaster movie, presenting Armageddon in a manner suitable for a US TV audience, it's tame, restrained.
Threads is raw. And subtle. It shows the day to day lives of two characters and their immediate friends and families, complete with bickering siblings, boring parents, a one-off affair, i.e. real life. In the background, un-noticed by all, the tensions of international politics play out and the world edges towards war, unnoticed.
And then Threads rips this to pieces. Unlike TDA, it shows the reality of panic; people being trampled, a woman urinating in fear, animals burning, bits of bodies, decaying corpses, shoot/hanging of looters, firing on desperate civilians, the hopeless situation of local government. And the real,kicker, that after a dozen years, it is even worse.
The War Game was an even earlier effort, constrained by 60s film technology, but has one scene even more stomach churning than Threads; the fire-storm, with the unrelenting, dispassionate voice over "this is a firestorm.... within 30 seconds 80% of his officers will be dead... this is a firestorm..."
Both should be required watching for politicians. And everyone should see both films once. Just once is all that is needed.
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I grew up in Kansas and I think that's probably why my parents wouldn't let us watch The Day After. Ironically I don't think they knew what Threads was because I watched it on TBS and it was definitely nightmare fuel for a 12 year old.
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What exactly about this movie would make it unsuitable to watch with younger kids but who normally watch adult science documentaries and series?
Is it like “The Road” depressing?
Edit: ok I see the last part was already addressed. Just not sure what age is actually appropriate given a high maturity level.
Is it like “The Road” depressing?
Edit: ok I see the last part was already addressed. Just not sure what age is actually appropriate given a high maturity level.
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Statistical
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I wasn't supposed to but I watched it at a friend's house when I was 11. It was vivid nightmare fuel for some time afterwards. I wouldn't recommend it for any child under 15. Even for a teenager it is going to be disturbing. If you aren't convinced I would strongly recommend you watch it yourself before deciding.
'The Road' wasn't totally depressing. There was hope. Maybe that hope was a longshot but there was hope. There were also joyful moments even in the harshness of the apocalypse (soda machine scene). As one author put it Threads is a story about the death of hope itself.
As an adult what I took away from Threads is an overwhelming sense of loss. It didn't matter who pushed the button first or why or if they felt they had good reasons. It was all for nothing. It ended civilization and it was a pointless tragic event without redemption. Kinda like the victim of random crime except in this case there were billions of random victims.
Threads also comes across more like a historical docudrama made after an actual event. It doesn't follow traditional hollywood 3 act screenplay. There are many events which are simply pointless. They aren't part of a larger narrative just horrible stuff that happened after the bombs fell.
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I mean, ultimately, that's the thing—The Road was entertainment. It was a hollywood movie that needed to be commercially successful. You can't have a commercially successful big budget film that's just two hours of human misery without any hope. No one would go see it, and if you're a movie studio you don't finance a movie no one is going to see.
Threads was a TV production, paid for and produced by the BBC. They had no Hollywood studio overlords to satisfy. They didn't have to make something entertaining or commercially successful. They made something educational, with very few concessions to entertainment. The result is not something most people would watch for pleasure.
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The thing is, it played at a time where most people only had three or four TV channels and you still had to get off your couch to change channel.
Nowadays, anything that demands that kind of involvement is a click away from being discarded. We live in a more pleasure-centered world now.
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Strange no one have mentioned The War Game (1965) by the British docudrama pioneer Peter Watkins. It is basically the basis for Threads, but filmed in grainy black/white to resemble the news broadcast on television at that time.
I saw it in school in the late 70´s, at about freshman level. I lived in south Sweden, close to a big naval base, a certain target in a possible central European conflict at that time. That film made a very deep impression, which still affects me. When I later saw Threads it felt like a glossy version of The War Game.
I saw it in school in the late 70´s, at about freshman level. I lived in south Sweden, close to a big naval base, a certain target in a possible central European conflict at that time. That film made a very deep impression, which still affects me. When I later saw Threads it felt like a glossy version of The War Game.
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The Road was a book first, and I don't think Cormac McCarthy was beholden to a studio boss...
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Horror movies do not scare me. Doesn't even cause my pulse to jump. Threads, to this day, scares me shitless.
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Two more for the watch-it-once list:
Testament, like Threads, is unremittingly bleak.
Miracle Mile starts with a traditional boy meets girl storyline, but destroys it. I think I felt even worse after this one because I didn't know the subject matter before stumbling across it on TV and it was darkly comic.
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