Threads and the rare occasion of a horror movie that actually scares me
When a horror movie isn't a horror movie
I reviewed Threads way back in the day when it hit DVD for the first time, but it’s a movie that bears repeating and a feature that I keep coming back to even though I shouldn’t. It’s one of those movies where one viewing is enough and it’s powerful enough to stay fresh in your memory for all time. But I sometimes crave something that is visceral, a movie that sets out to deliver a powerful feeling of disgust to the viewer. For many people out there, it doesn’t take much. My parents, for instance, found the violence in Game of Thrones to be utterly repugnant. It really set them off. To me it was just another Sunday night. The decapitations in Highlander were key to the reason that I had to sneak around my folks to see it. I’ve been chomping on horror movie gruel for so long that it takes a lot more than it used to to move me. You build up a tolerance over time.
Threads is special, though.
In the time since the internet made all things available to all people all the time Threads has managed to gain a foothold in people’s minds outside of England but back before it was released to DVD it hung heavily in the minds of BBC viewers old enough to have seen it. They aired it twice in England in the 1980’s and once in the United States on public television and then it was closeted away, shoved to the back of everyone’s consciousness until 2003. It haunted England and it haunted me, one of the few people in the States to have seen a piece of it when it aired. I tuned in just in time for the attack scene and watched up to the point where Ruth leaves the house for the first time. Being so little in 1985, it defied my expectations in a profound way. I was expecting a survivors-after-the-bomb kind of thing and while it is that sort of movie, there’s no feral maniacs fighting over guzzoline. It stifled the fantasy in me in a significant way and informed an opinion at an age too young to be struggling with it that being one of the millions killed in the initial attack was the preferred outcome. I shut it off as Ruth crawled through the wreckage, seeing what was left of Sheffield and, for all we knew, the rest of the world, for the first time and it was just too much.
After the DVD release I caught back up with it for the first time since I was a speechless kid, presented with a model of an honest-to-God nuclear war, and what I found was that it was every bit the downer that I remembered. It gave me chills. It made me sick at times. It helped me to know what people mean when they say that their blood ran cold. Threads isn’t a horror movie by the official record but grim, morbid obsessives like me have claimed it as our own and where we might gleefully celebrate the murderous antics of any given slasher, we hold Threads in quiet regard and speak of it in hushed tones.
Produced in 1984, Threads was the UK’s answer to 1983’s The Day After. The latter was an American production for TV, cast with American actors like Jason Robards, Steve Gutenberg, and John Lithgow. It’s a powerful movie on it’s own terms, but it’s also very much a movie, with a story told from start to end and characters that you’re intended to identify and sympathize with. Segmented away from its broader message that nuclear war will fucking suck, it is a conventional production. Threads, however, set itself apart by presenting itself as something closer to a documentary with dramatized elements. And this is why it is so terrifying.
In the world that Threads unfolds within, a US-backed coup in Iran triggers a Soviet invasion of the northern parts of the nation. NATO forces react by occupying the southern part and tensions escalate in the background of the lives of several ordinary folks around Sheffield, England, in order to give you an idea of the nation’s attitudes and preparedness for war. As war becomes a greater and greater threat, title cards appear on screen to give you an idea of civic and military preparedness. They also clue you in on population numbers and likely targets of ICBMs. When the attack finally comes, it is a devastating nightmare to behold. The film’s director, Mick Jackson, mixes on-location scenes with stock footage, special effects, and a soundtrack of ceaseless screaming to create five minutes of the most ugly, bludgeoning footage as the world comes to a swift and fiery end for the vast majority of NATO and Warsaw Pact nations. More title cards appear to tell you how the attack will take place: Large airburst warheads detonate high above target nations to short electrical systems and bring down communications, followed by high-yield strikes on industrial, military, and urban population centers. When it’s all over, millions are dead in our hypothetical England and everything is on fire with no functional infrastructure to put the fires out. But the worst hasn’t even dropped.
When Russia decided in 2022 that Ukraine was theirs to own and they marched troops and armor into the country with designs on an easy annexation, the specter of the Cold War reared its head and half of the world’s population froze in its boots, cruelly delivered back to those heady days of the 70’s and 80’s, when nuclear obliteration didn’t feel so much as a matter of if but when. I felt compelled to go back to Threads and dip a toe in the catastrophizing that I was so familiar with. I’m not sure why. Russian saber-rattling had the world on edge and no one could be sure if Vladmir Putin had the stones to end the world over Kiev. Those first couple of weeks for the war were a trip!
Horror movies for me are a release valve in the same way that thrill rides and heavy metal are. You get to hold your anxiety at arm’s length and take a good look at it in a way that you can’t when you’re in the middle of it, riding it out with white knuckle intensity. Serving up Threads as the world teetered on uncertain finality might have been an attempt at that but it’s a different kind of movie. The others shine a light on your fears to remove the shadows and illusions and show you that the reality is not as bad as you might think. They’re a reassurance of a sort. Threads is not. It was designed specifically to put a terror in you so deeply rooted that you take to the streets and demand disarmament now. There are rumors that it played a role in getting Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to the table for disarmament talks. Because of that, there are significantly fewer of these weapons in our stockpile than there used to be but a thing to remember is that there are still a shitload of them sitting in silos, swimming around the Atlantic and Pacific in nuclear submarines. The threat is still out there and the leaders who wield them seem to get stupider and crazier with each new version. It’s probably why the doomsday clock keeps getting closer to midnight no matter how far away from the Cold War we get.
Threads is not a movie that I can comfortably recommend to people. I think that it’s important that people see it and take in the full experience, however. If you put a phone in every other person’s hand in the movie, you could convincingly make the argument that it was made only a few years ago. Though, the fashion is definitely dated, the subject matter is as fresh now as it was then. It is a brutal, unflinching look at the end of the world by our own hands and as we sit here now, dancing on the edge of a half dozen armageddons it’s useful to know just how badly things will go. It hopefully drives people to act now and dispel any notions of coming out the other side of it as some kind of prepared survivalist.
It's excellent and brutal, unlike the hopeful American version, that we would somehow survive and rebuild. The only thing that makes me think it will not happen *intentionally* is that we are run by plutocrats now and money and riches will be worthless after the pocky-clips. They would be slaughtered the moment their mercenaries realize the gold is worthless. The fact that we were nearly obliterated during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and again during Able Archer military games in 1983, terrifies me.