I saw a few announcements about the October 9 rerun of the BBC film Threads ahead of it playing, and couldn’t quite remember if I had seen it or not. I was probably confusing it with another powerful made-for-TV movie about nuclear war, The Day After. I certainly knew Threads by reputation, though — a bleak depiction of what would happen to normal people in the wake of a nuclear conflict.
After it started it took only a few minutes for me to remember that I had, at some point, seen Threads before. I’m not sure when or how, as it has hardly been shown since its initial debut in 1984. But I knew, and it was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that told me I’d forced the film out of my memory, such is its ability to horrify. Yet I still wasn’t prepared for the ways it can still scare today, 40 years after it was made.
Can a movie cause childhood trauma?
The flashbacks started immediately — not of war or a previous viewing, but of childhood. A light-blue four-door Ford Cortina not dissimilar to the one my dad had. A hand-held games machine that plays one game on an LCD screen, much like my once beloved Nintendo Game and Watch. Cassette decks with wired headphones and orange foam ear pads, and products purchased in supermarkets with prices ending in a half pence. I don’t know what made me more uncomfortable, the impending nuclear attack, or how distant and alien this depiction of life during my own formative years seemed.
The typed-out message on screen announcing the use of nuclear weapons by the United States and Russia in battle is cold, clinical, and horrifying. In the wake of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s nuclear posturing since the invasion of Ukraine, it’s horribly current, too. Then, more flashbacks, but this time of another more recent situation that made the film feel even more uncomfortably real. The panic-buying in the aftermath of the news brought back those first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when I stood in long, socially distanced queues outside supermarkets, silently wondering what the future held.
Threads is astonishingly effective at making you believe what you’re seeing. A lot of this comes from the use of government announcements, which are apparently genuine recordings of what we would have heard at that time should the bomb have dropped, according to director Mick Jackson. They have the serious, stiff-upper-lip tone associated with the BBC at the time, which as a British person, I feel conditioned to listen to and take seriously. I had the same feeling when Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the British population to stay at home in March 2020. Threads was weaving its way into my psyche in ways I didn’t expect, and technically, nothing had even happened yet.
A harrowing experience
Then the siren goes off, wailing to tell people that in just moments, a nuclear bomb is going to explode. If you’re not absolutely petrified watching what happens after it, and throughout the rest of the film, then you’re made of sterner stuff than me. It’s everything we as humans fear. There’s chaos in the bunkers as officials pointlessly try to organize something, anything, in a feeble attempt to keep order. Ordinary people, as feeble as the official’s efforts, stagger out into an obliterated world filled with the dead and dying. Fires rage. Radioactive dust settles. Though it continues in one form, life as everyone knew it is effectively over.
When pregnant Ruth leaves her home what she sees is so grim, putting into words here won’t do its impact justice. When she reaches the hospital, it gets even worse. I was glad to look down at the screen on my laptop to type out these words for a reminder that my reality was not what I was seeing on TV. There will be those who think I’m overreacting, that Threads can’t be that harrowing. There’s a chance it’s not to everyone, but just remember, I had made myself forget I’d seen the film. Not because I’m forgetful or that it lacks impact, but because it’s a truly agonizing ordeal.
How horror affects you alters with age and experience too. I spent years watching all genres of horror, often making it a mission to seek out the nastiest examples, but over the years this enthusiasm has faded and often replaced by empathy. It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good splatter movie today, but anything more realistic and it’s a far harder watch. Threads shows utter devastation on an individual level rather than global scale, and you connect to it on an emotional, human level. You watch people suffer not at the hands of a demon or maniac but through events out of their control. It’s utter despair played out on screen for you to endure.
Different past, same future
As the film progresses, mayhem and madness descends, the country is plunged into a darkness as black as the future, and it becomes clear that surviving the apocalypse does not look like the more preferable outcome. Yet it’s inevitable that you become practically desensitized to what’s happening. It’s shockingly simple to accept that eating a dead sheep or rat raw is the “new normal,” that childbirth will happen in filthy outbuildings, and an impending awful death awaits rather than any hope of a new life.
Worse, Threads doesn’t just envisage the immediate time after the attack, it goes far into the future where nothing gets better or easier. The future in Threads contains only the past, as there’s no machinery, no buildings or shops, and no real structure or society, and it’s filled with desperate people, horrendous disease, and atrocious conditions.
Watching the life shown in Threads prior to the attack must look like the dark ages to anyone who wasn’t around in the ’80s too, as it was before the internet, before home computers, smartphones, Instagram, Bitcoin, and electric cars. But this reveals the film’s true, horrific power. It doesn’t matter if the world before nuclear war in Threads doesn’t represent the world today, because we absolutely know the horrendous world it depicts afterward will probably be 10 times worse. It’s why Threads is, without a doubt, one of the most disturbing, upsetting, and chilling horror films I’ve ever seen. If it’s ever shown again, I’ll definitely remember not to watch it.
Threads is streaming for free on Tubi. Watch at your own risk.