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For fans of Threads, (or for anyone who just doesn't want to sleep tonight), I found a wonderful piece of Nuclear Fiction last week: A fake BBC news report tracking an escalating conflict between NATO and Russian forces.
"Nuclear Attack Emergency Broadcast - Live Breaking News from London (fiction)" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VZ3LGfSMhA
It's the only piece of fiction that has made me feel deathly ill in quite the same way Threads did.
[EDIT] also, those familiar with The Day After should watch out for a little easter-egg toward the end.
[DOUBLE-EDIT] I'm just re-watching the end now and even with full knowledge that it is fiction, the Attack Warning Red sound is still absolutely horrifying.
Another scary nuclear holocaust movie: Miracle Mile (1988) [1].
Framed as a love story, it's set during a single night in LA as a man accidentally picks up a ringing pay phone and hears what seems to be a soldier who has misdialed his father and calling to warn of an impending missile launch.
It's an incredibly tense film as the man anguishes about whether the phone call was fake or not, and decides to make an attempt to get out of town, but not before getting his girlfriend. It doesn't have the documentary realism of Threads, but the atmosphere of dread is a fantastic, and the structure -- a long "After Hours"-type night of craziness while nuclear holocaust is looming -- is pretty unique.
I'd add in 1965's "The War Game" by Peter Watkins. it was commissioned by the BBC as an educational film to prepare the populace for a post nuclear attack world, but was pulled at the last minute as "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting."
That was really unnerving. To me, it reinforced the idea that in a major nuclear conflict, I'm not going to have any idea what's going on. The survivors (assuming there are some) might eventually figure it out but in the short/medium term most are probably going to be left wondering what just happened, who are they at war with, did any side "win"?
If we're trading recommendations of harrowing things to watch, may I nominate Isao Takahata's "Grave of the Fireflies", the story of two children trying to survive in Japan towards the end of the Second World War in the face of a callous, indifferent world.
The only animated feature that is guaranteed to make this grown man weep like there's no tomorrow.
Productions such as the faux-BBC video and "The Day After" remind me that the word 'obscenity' is utterly wasted on pictures of naked people, when it applies perfectly to high-altitude nuclear mushrooms created by global banking interests.
Wow! Just wow! I knew this was fiction the whole time I was watching it and it's still horrifying, right from the outset. They did such a great job, I can't give them enough credit for their realism.
This is really well done. I think there are some issues with the chronology of how some of it would play out but that's nitpicking. If you enjoy this kind of thing, I very much suggest reading Red Storm Rising. It's somewhat old at this point but presents a very detailed account of this kind of situation.
Thanks, this is very well done. I think in a way it's even scarier than Threads, given it doesn't allow you the detachment of seeing other people. You would _be there_ watching this report and losing it.
Is that the one that they've been updating with the changing politician names and situations. I seem to remember a version that was a bit different.
That fake BBC video would be a great video to troll people with.
Playing it loudly in a Starbucks or at the office for example.
Quite a brilliant piece of art.
That's something that affects me strongly even knowing full well that it is fiction.
Also check out Pandora movie. It is korean but their are good English Subs. It is available on Netflix. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6302160/ Basically fictional Fukushima in South Korea
I remember a few years ago RTÉ news did a fake news report about Sellafield (nearby English) nuclear reactor going boom. I was there like "okay guys let's keep calm" but the girls all went ape-shit. Running around the house bawling. That was stressful.
Anybody really worried ... should probably know, that russia actually decreased their military budget lately. And that US Military budget alone is allmost 10x higher than russias ...
I'm not getting any sleep tonight. WOW
seriously... this is fantastic. thanks-
The expressions that you used ("deathly ill", no sleep tonight) make me think that you may be lacking some perspective and/or are identifying too closely with your body.
Sometimes, it pays to take a step back and contemplate on the fact that you will eventually die. If you vividly visualize that projected moment of your death and make it real in your mind, you will realize that possible problems you may be having in your everyday, mundane life now appear insignificant. You may also be filled with anxiety and dread. Alternatively, you may dissociate.
It is that dissociation that will allow you to identify with something other than your body (nothingness) and thus be free of such (unexamined) reactions.
People don't seem to understand how close to the edge of disaster we still are. The message in movies like Threads and The Day After are quite relevant today, despite how impossible they may seem. While an intentional war may be less likely today, the danger of an accidental one is just as real.
Just this week, one nuclear state is threatening another nuclear state that happens to border with two other nuclear states. Meanwhile, the nukes are on hair trigger everywhere. What can possibly go wrong?
The really scary part, however, is that, obviously, nobody cares. There are no angry tweets, demonstrations, whatever. Politicians must feel like they can do whatever they want without anyone even noticing.
On the positive note, there are UN negotiations of nuclear weapon ban going on. In theory, the ban could be approved as soon as this summer.
The scale of potential disaster is much lower now than then. We have many times fewer nukes, and counterforce is supposed to work a lot better for the attacking side leaving even less to be thrown on cities.
Unrivaled global superpowers go out with a whimper, not a bang. If war comes to the U.S. in the near future, I fully believe that it will be due to internal issues.
With the US finding any way to tease Russia into attacking first, intentional war is just as likely now as an accidental one.
I was born in 1970. I grew up (~12 to 17-19) expecting to not live into adulthood. It wasn't always on my mind, but I thought there was pretty high likelihood of nuclear war. It was pervasive meme in the art(movies/books/etc) and news of the time. And nobody expected to survive, era of "duck and cover" were long over.
I've read enough about Threads to know that I absolutely do not want to see it. Just reading the story in the article makes me queasy. The article calls The Day After "reassuring and sanitized," but from what I remember, that was something of a nightmare.
The movie Testament also came out around this time and it's often brought up in the same context as The Day After and Threads. Watching Testament felt like a gut punch.
I wouldn't tell anyone else not to watch Threads. (How could I? I've never seen it.) But if you are going to watch it, you should brace yourself emotionally. If your idea of a post nuclear apocalypse is driving around in cool cars like Mad Max in the Road Warrior, you probably should watch Threads.
Just being reminded that this film exists has put me in a bleak mood. It makes "The Road" look like "The Wizard of Oz".
Another British nuclear war favourite would be When the Wind Blows, which is probably one of the saddest things, I have ever watched.
Even after decades, this is still the single most terrifying thing I have ever watched.
"Unrelenting bleakness" is a pretty apt description of this production. The end is chilling. The whole thing is just crushing to watch.
The second to last sentence seems poignant:
> And we recognize, acutely and uncomfortably, the fear and hatred with which she’s treated as a refugee.
Escpecially with the impact of immigration in the Brexit vote, it's worth pointing out just how few refugees that the UK has accepted.
The UK had 9,000 applicants (and 5,000 accepted) [0] vs Germany's 600,000 and Sweden's 110,000.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_Civil_W...
Streaming here:
Maybe it would be beneficial to flood both Donald and Ivanka Trump's Twitter feeds with links to the film?
Hi all - I'm the author (backed by a very capable team) of the YouTube nuclear attack video. I appreciate the commentary and the dialogue about Threads, The Day After, The war Game, Fail Safe and other such movies, all of which inspired us in making our own modest production. Ben Marking.
I've been thinking recently that we need a similar movie today to give us a stark picture of the reality of a world facing severe climate change.
I wonder if societal expectations of the end of the world will affect how it does play out, should the unthinkable happen. Threads is a horrific, profound work- but it's also very rooted in the anxieties of densely urban England. In the U.S. there's much more open land, unclaimed wilderness, and so the concept of post-apocalyptic plenty abounds, whether in survivalists building compounds in forests and fields, or the looting of abandoned malls in zombie films. The prepper subculture has been around long before current geopolitical realities. In the face of nuclear apocalypse, those who can't flee to New Zealand will just preemptively take to those compounds[0].
It'd be interesting to see a work of art that includes our culture's awareness of prior works of art.
Never forgot the first time i watched Threads. I was a teenager up late and flicking through TV, probably hasn't had a nightmare since i was 4 years old but I dam well did that night. Brilliant piece of work by the BBC.
There was this great surge of nuclear scare in the early eighties. Threads, The Day After, and on lighter note WarGames are among the movies which came out of that scare.
I lived through those years. I was scared. I went and saw The Day After on what I believe was its first European showing, in Copenhagen a few days after the American TV airing had made a big splash in the news. It didn't tell me anything I didn't know, but I was seriously shaky all the same, going home that night. I'm still sort of incredulous to find us all alive in the 21st century. And at times I wonder - were we all just in silly hysterics back then? But then I read up a bit on things like Operation Able Archer, autumn 1983, and realize how clear and present the danger really was.
Let's hope it remains a vision and not reality. The way Trump and Kim are rattling sabers does nothing to make me sleep better. Neither of them appears particularly stable to me and both could do with a bit of a diversion from their other foreign and domestic issues.
Wag the Dog squared.
Carl Sagan, for me, was always the clearest voice on the threat of Nuclear disaster. Here he is in 1986:
Both Radiolab and Hardcore History recently released programs on the threat of nuclear war.[1][2]
[1] - http://www.radiolab.org/story/nukes/
[2] - http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-o...
Threads is undoubtedly the greatest horror film ever made. Monsters can't come close to the reality of what humans can do to each other.
A lot of superlatives about this. Just in the comments here for example. Whats interesting is that this is achieved through realism. Its a pretty well researched show, they tried to depict the facts as clearly as possible.
When I read this headline my first thought was 'pthreads are bad but calling them a nuclear holocaust seems a bit harsh'.
And then I remembered that POTUS needs an external threat to make him look precedential.
"pretty much everyone dies eventually, while rats, maggots, and the class system endure"
Well written. Love that the author groups these three. The class system and rats are the last to leave the UK.
It isn't great that Trump said relations with Russia are at an "all-time low" earlier today..
One of the reasons Threads worked because it felt like a documentary about ordinary people. That bloody voiceover with its calm measured tones describing the absolute horror that was unfolding...brrr.
This article is about a film called Threads, not about hazards in concurrency or parallel computation.