Nightmare Fuel / Threads

As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!

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"Our intention in making Threads was to step aside from the politics and – I hope convincingly – show the actual effects on either side should our best endeavours to prevent nuclear war fail."

— Barry Hines

Let's play a game. What's the key difference between The Day After and Threads?

The Day After's ending, while a Downer Ending, had some instance of hope with the persistence of human empathy and kindness; with the implications that, despite everything that happened, the survivors will start over again and eventually recover. In Threads? None of that. Showing only the pure horror and cruelty of the aftermath 13 years after the initial attack and snuffing out all hope for humanity's survival.

With its depictions of British civilization after a nuclear attack, the fallout's impact even years after the initial bombings, and the overall bleak nature of watching completely innocent people become victims to numerous ailments of nuclear war, this is often considered Nightmare Fuel: The Movie for a very good reason.

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General

• What's the most horrific thing about this film? Everything you see in it would happen in the event of a nuclear war. It's made very evident that the filmmakers did their homework to make it as realistic and non-fiction as possible. After the nukes drop, there won't even be the violent glamour of Fallout or Mad Max-style adventures in or exploration of a new post-apocalyptic world; we'll all just die. And it sure as hell wouldn't be a quick or painless death, either. Andrew Bartlett, a professor at University of California, Los Angeles, sums it up very well in his "Nuclear Warfare in the Movies" report;
  "Threads works on the viewer with a peculiar power: one finds oneself horrified, fascinated, numbed, provoked, unsettled, made restless. Its power may be the effect of its oscillation between form and content being so heavily weighted toward the pole of content — in this case, that threat of nuclear destruction which cannot help but feel 'real' — so that we are unable to relax into Threads as 'just' a movie."
  • Actually, want to know something even worse? Despite all of the horrible things being shown on-screen, a lot of critics and researchers deduced that this is a best-case scenario. After all, there are still a few people left alive after thirteen years by the end of the film. Chances are, the true outcome would be far, far worse.
• There is a certain element of this delightful piece of television which has been overlooked in its nightmare-enabling capabilities; it often traumatizes people who first saw it to this very day. Considering it was first broadcast in the mid-1980s ^note Aside from the original airing in 1984, it was shown in 1985 as part of a series of programmes marking the 40th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. and was then not broadcast again until 2003 (not to mention getting a DVD remaster with Mick Jackson's approval in 2018), that speaks volumes.
• For many of those living in Britain — especially those who live near or in Sheffield — this movie hits close to home and it hits hard. Those Oop North are so used to seeing places like New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo or London blow up to Kingdom Come in the movies that it doesn't affect them, but when it's a much smaller city in Yorkshire...
• The British Government's actual Protect and Survive public information films are used in the movie when the conflict in Mashhad escalates, as what the film presents is pretty much what we were expected to do if the five-minute warning went off. Two of the short films are available here and here; excerpts include "If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room, move the body to another room in the house ... If you have had a body in the house for more than five days, and if it is safe to go outside, then you should bury the body for the time being in a trench, or cover it with earth, and mark the spot of the burial". Terrifying in their own right, even more so if you consider the circumstances in which the government would have assented to broadcast these.
  • The electronic musical sting at the end of each Protect and Survive video is horrifying all on its own.
  • And no, Protect and Survive is not depicted in a good or helpful light. In fact, in the moments where some characters do adhere to the guidelines, it's simply worthless, especially if you lived near ground zero of the detonation or your windows and roofs were obliterated in the blast, allowing the fallout to come in.

Movie

• The intro is pretty foreboding, especially when taking account of the symbolism. It shows a spider spinning a web, all while the narrator talks about how everything connects in an urban society, and how those same "threads" also make it vulnerable to total collapse.
  Narrator: "In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong, also make it vulnerable."
  • Then, the opening title card slowly clicks into existence against a backdrop of Sheffield:

THREADS
by
Barry Hines

• The HANDEL Warning System announcing that a Soviet nuclear strike is inbound. After the prior build-up, this is practically the moment the movie takes off the gloves.
  ATTACK WARNING RED. ATTACK WARNING RED.
• Just like in The Day After, the panicked screaming of everyone on the streets in Sheffield is very haunting. Especially the screaming that can be heard during the shot of the mushroom cloud over Sheffield after nearby RAF Finningley is directly hit.
  • The first attack is an exo-atmospheric one, which generates an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out all power across Britain and most of North West Europe, and destroys most electronic equipment in its range.
  • Then the second attack occurs. Warsaw missiles attack military targets, specifically RAF Finningley to cripple military capabilities.
    • According to nearby eyewitnesses, the artificial method they used to recreate the mushroom cloud — a giant smoke bomb set off near RAF Finningley — led to genuine panic on the streets. People thought an actual nuclear weapon had just been detonated. This could've made for a highly disturbing bit of Enforced Method Acting had they been rolling the film.
  • The dumbstruck reaction that Bob, Jimmy's friend, has to the explosion over RAF Finningley is haunting as well as absolutely tragic. He can only stare in silent horror at the resulting mushroom cloud, visibly broken by the realization that everything he'd most feared has come to fruition.
  Bob: Jesus Christ, they've done it. (quietly, holding his thumb to his mouth in shock) They've done it...!
  • The messages during the attack purely emphasize everything going From Bad to Worse.
    • 80 megatons fall on UK
    • Blast casualties between 2 1/2 and 9 million
    • Communications in chaos
    • Command and control links failing
    • Nuclear exchanges escalate
  • The third attack is arguably the worst. Sheffield is hit, primarily its economic targets. One shot, in particular, shows the Tinsley Viaduct and the Blackburn Meadows Power Station, two major economic targets. Then a nuclear warhead strikes the city, and it all goes to hell.
    • Mrs. Kemp tries to look for Michael when she realizes that he isn't present, only for the screen to be saturated white. Then the movie frantically cuts to scenes of animals horrifically burning due to the blast's intense heat and seeing people combust into flames as they try to find or get into their shelter. All done in complete silence until the shockwave obliterates everything in its path.
  • Beyond this point, that teleprinter clicking heard when text appears? Silent from here on out.
• The amount exchanged between the attacks? 3000 megatons. To put that into perspective, that's the amount of 200,000 Little Boys, or 60 Tsar Bombas. And 210 megatons were dropped on the UK in total (%7 of the exchange). If that was only the UK, how many megatons were the other countries hit with?
• Did you survive the nuclear attack? Congratulations, you've condemned yourself to A Fate Worse Than Death. It's telling that the victims of the initial strike got off lucky, ensuring that the fates of all the characters are horrific ends.
  • The Kemp family suffer very horrific ends. Michael dies when the third nuclear strike collapses Jimmy's aviary and crushes him, Mrs. Kemp succumbs slowly and painfully from radiation exposure and fourth-degree burns from the intense heat, and Mr. Kemp perishes alone in a graveyard much the same way; not even keeping down the bottle of Scotch he traded for. The only thing keeping him company alongside that Scotch is Michael's electronic handheld game console, and Mr. Kemp completely breaks down and loses all hope. For one more painful kick, the handheld plays an upbeat beeping tune as the view fades out.
  Mrs. Kemp: Oh, I wish I were dead. I wish it were me.
  Mr. Kemp: I wish I could swap places with him.
  • The group of officials in the town hall last longer than most of the cast, but tensions begin to fray as it becomes evident that the attack is far worse than they assumed; as well as how because of the collapsed four floors of the town hall burying them in the bunker, nobody will be able to rescue them in time. A few weeks after the attack shows most of them walking around with visible facial hair, covered in dust and debris, arguing with each other as they attempt to figure out a way to help people. They all end up suffocating after using up the last of the oxygen underground, and are later dug to by a group of rescuers long after they're already dead.
  Clive Sutton: What is that in terms of food, then, 500 calories?
  Dr. Talbot: I don't know. A few slices of bread, some soup... a lamb chop, a treacle tart, a few pints of beer... (furiously) BASTARDS!
• The man sitting against the wall, waiting to be executed. The wall behind him has countless bullet holes in it.
• When Ruth walks around in the rubble after the explosion. The only sound is coming from the wind, and she sees burnt corpses, a mother looking for her daughter, a lost child, and a delusional middle-aged woman who is holding her clearly burnt-to-death baby. The unflinching, wide-eyed and devastated face of the latter may perhaps be one of the most haunting still images◊ ever shot of a rehearsed pose.
  • This is made a lot more terrifying when you notice that the baby's body is burned, but the clothes aren't. The woman kept the body and changed the clothes.
    • Also, when Ruth finally returns home after fleeing in the wake of her grandmother's death to look for Jimmy. Rats and dogs are eating the covered corpse of her grandmother. She opens the door to the basement shelter she left her mother and father in, only to find them long dead after they were murdered by looters for their supplies. We don't even see the corpses; you just hear the sound of hundreds of flies buzzing in and around her parents' rotting bodies, producing a mental image that's horrifying and undignified enough.
• When Ruth goes to a makeshift hospital, it is extremely unhygienic, and the people there have devastating injuries. Since there is no anesthesia, the people who are operated on are screaming in pain.
  • The camera doesn't hold on most things in the hospital for too long, but for a British TV movie released in 1984 — the same year the Video Recordings Act that banned Video Nasties was passed — we see some absolutely horrendous things, including pus-soaked bandages from survivors with infected wounds, people having water salted with SAXA table salt applied to wounds in lieu of antibiotics, people having shards of glass removed from their flesh with tweezers in close-up, and perhaps worst of all, a man screaming very believably as one of his limbs is hacked off. Without any anaesthetic. The way the scene is edited in such a disorienting way leaves you wondering what the hell else is happening in that room. Nothing Is Scarier indeed.
• When Ruth has to give birth to her daughter, Jane, in a freezing cold barn and cut the umbilical cord with her teeth. Alone, and in the run-up to Christmas. That's something no mother should ever have to go through.
• In the next scene, Ruth looks like she has aged by 30 years as a result of radiation.
• Ruth's almost animalistic crying as she tries to grind some stolen corn into flour. You can hear the raw, savage desperation of a starving woman with nothing to live for... who has to carry on living anyway.
• It's implied that Ruth is forced to trade sexual favours for a few dead rats to eat.
• The scene when you realize that all the education that the next generation is getting comes from old pre-school learning videos^note From the BBC Schools series Words & Pictures: the original version of the 1983 episode that appears in Threads can be seen here., with several children and an old woman seen in a dark, filthy room and huddled around a single small black-and-white TV/VCR showing one. The literacy rate will become extremely low, if not completely non-existent. The woman mouthing along to the words by heart is an especially tragic sight.
  Vicky Ireland ^note Words and Pictures presenter in the 1980s: There was the skeleton of... a cat! A cat's... skeleton!
• Because of the vast amounts of atmospheric smoke caused by nuclear detonations, the smoke blocks out the sun, causing temperatures to plummet. This ends up causing crops to die, or if they survived, not be harvested for several years. Fortunately, a harvester is found to still be of use. Unfortunately, since there is no way to get petrol, the narrator says it is one of the last times modern machines will be used to harvest crops. After that, all crops have to be tended to by hand, or on the off-chance they can be found, using antique coal-fired traction engines.
• When the smoke eventually clears, it has caused severe damage to the ozone layer, and has greatly upped the chances of cataracts and cancer, the former being seen on Ruth shortly before she dies.
• Because there is no way to properly dispose of bodies, millions of corpses are left to rot out in the open, which brings rats, flies and other pests spreading diseases such as Cholera and the Bubonic Plague.
• As a result of the nationwide devastation and associated diseases and famines, Britain's population rapidly falls from 56.3 million (1983 estimate) to 11 million; noted to be Medieval levels.
• When Ruth dies. By her reaction, it seems that Jane either doesn't know that her mother is dead or understands that she is of no use to her anymore, and leaves her body after shaking it a few times. The scary part comes when you realize that Jane has nobody to take care of her anymore. Also doubles as a Tear Jerker.
  • Ruth's death itself. Poor, poor Ruth has aged fifty years in thirteen, and has been blinded by radiation. The cataracts on her eyes are disturbingly realistic for a low budget made-for-TV movie from the 80s.
  • Also worth mentioning that when she drops to the ground just before her death... nobody but her daughter seems to notice. Everyone else, numb to suffering at this point, just carries on working the fields.
• The final scene, where Jane gives birth to a stillborn, deformed baby. The movie ends right as she's about to scream, and the credits roll silently over black; effectively setting the overall tone that humanity is finished. The fallout from the initial attacks all those years ago has done its damage to both the present and future generations, the children and youths who have been born since then are uneducated and malnourished savages, the Electromagnetic Pulses from the bombs have rendered basically everything electronic useless, as well as most communications and forms of manufacturing — reducing the available technology and infrastructure to barely-above medieval levels — and the sheer cold and lack of sunlight from the Nuclear Winters result in widespread famines and disease. There isn't even the slightest bit of hope left to cling on to.
  • How Jane's baby was conceived. Jane refuses to give some bread to one of the youths she raided an army depot for food with and he decides to try and snatch it off her. In the struggle it seems that he lost interest in the food and instead was hungry for something else. Keep in mind, Jane and the boy are both severely undereducated and can barely even speak, meaning they probably have no idea what sex even is. It would seem the boy was all of a sudden overcome with an animalistic urge to have sex with Jane. There's no way Jane would be able to give consent, so she was — for all intents and purposes — raped.
  • What happened between Jane and the boy almost certainly wasn't an isolated incident. By this stage in the story, the oldest of the kids born into the post-nuclear world are reaching sexual maturity; but do not know how to cope with the resulting urges and, because of their near total lack of education and limited language skills, are unable to ask or give consent. So young boys are growing up thinking they can force themselves on girls; who, like Jane, then have to give birth to mutated babies due to there being no forms of contraception or abortion. As more and more of the pre-war generation die off, there will be fewer people who are in a position to so much as try to educate these kids not to engage in this kind of behaviour. And, if any of the resulting second generation of post-war babies survive into adolescence, then the pattern simply repeats itself.
  • This also sets an unsettling precedent; on the slim chance that later generations don’t simply die out, after being raised in an uncivilized and unforgiving world where language and comfort are non-existent, this basically means that mankind would eventually be reduced to little more than animals. Not only has most of humanity died, but their sentience would likely devolve as well. Human Civilization as a whole would have no choice but to start all over again from what is essentially the Stone Age.
  • Jane's stillborn child is an apt metaphor for the future of humanity after a worldwide nuclear war; diseased, deformed, unwanted and, ultimately, dead.

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THREADS
by
Barry Hines