Be Excellent To Each Other

I never did watch it. I should do really but everyone says it's depressing as fuck.

The most harrowing film I've ever seen. Left me utterly shell-shocked for about 2 days after first watching. Guaranteed to turn you into a tree-hugging hippy. Incredible!

Anything containing John Hurt is awesome. Except V for Vendetta, which is shit.

Hi! I watched it in school at the age of 14.

There you guy, scientific proof!!!

Threads is brilliant and horrible. I watched it one evening when Mrs G was away, and it was a "go for a walk afterwards" film—just had to get out of the house. Pretty rare that happens to me. The only other example I can think of fairly recently is Requiem for a Dream.

Easily the most shocking film I've ever seen. I saw it while I was at uni, back in 1999. Fucked me up pretty significantly. Was a bit scared to go to nearby Sheffield* as a consequence. The tension of the build up is near unbearable. The event itself utterly horrific. Everything after shatteringly depressing.

Hurrah!

*(Also lots of pylons there. However, the film does show a bunch of pylons badly hurt by EMP. Take that PYLONS! YAY!)

One for after Christmas dinner then.

It's better to watch it as a kid in 1985 and be able to think "this is probably how I'm going to die".

Might be tricky, even more so now that Jimmy Saville is no longer with us.

I could dress the same and then watch it on a portable TV.

I should get round to watching this - I do like my British End-of-the-world Fiction. Day of the Triffids! Death of Grass! 28 Days Later! That other one I forget!

You won't forget this one in a hurry. Brrr.

Threads is harrowing. Mrs Metal calls it 'The Sheffield Movie' and the mere mention of it makes her shiver.

The way all the government's plans completely fall apart is scary, and you have military helicopters chasing a crowd of starving people ordering them to stop stealing food.

And then, Ruth decides to go and see if her boyfriend went to the hospital...

I have never heard of this film! Why!

I want to watch it now, though...

When The Wind Blows.

Oh, crap, I read the book of that. Illustrated by the same guy who did The Snowman? I think. Anyway, similarly

Yeah, Raymond Briggs.

Don't watch it, it's as bad if not worse than Threads.

Ethel & Ernest is another of his similarly wonderful, upsetting works, highly recommended.

I always got a chill watching that Father Christmas (though slight chance it might be The Snowman) film by Briggs, as you can see the old couple from When the Wind Blows in it. Which means that everyone in it's going to die soon. EVERYONE'S GOING TO DIE.

Let us know how you get on with Threads, newbies. It is genuinely traumatising. Oddly thrilling for the first half, though. You can catch them on YouTube. I always get a shudder when it shows the fire engines leaving the city and the works of art being pulled off the museum walls and put into storage.

I think the things that chilled me most of that bit...

It's the breakdown of society that scares me. When people realise that the rewards for being a good little citizen have gone, it doesn't take long for the threads* of the tapestry to unravel.

*oh ho!

It's even scarier than that. It's not about rewards even. We're all hooked up to a life-support system that is quite, quite complicated. Once the system has been broken to such an extent, we're unable to piece it back together. People are good citizens because that is how we survive. Society isn't inherently 'good' in a moral sense. You can have a malformed society. But society does give the best percentages on survival.

The breakdown of 'law and order' is born in the void of trauma and desperation in Threads, chillingly so. There's no longer any system.

It's also depicted in Threads at a level many people cannot grasp. The IMDB threads are quite an eye-opener, with people saying: "How could the world be like that 13 years later? We'd have fixed everything by then!" Er, no. Not only that, but 13 years later in Threads isn't really the nadir—it's the last death twitch of society, while enough of the people alive before the war are still around and while enough of the technology still functions. Still: festive movies, eh?

Man, this makes me want to watch it again.

"You will not be watching a pleasant drama"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfFa-jlN22U

I thought I'd seen this, but I think I might have seen the cartoon by Raymond Briggs instead (the one already mentioned) as I don't remember anything about 13 years later!

Malc

Humanity only has time to form a proper society and think about things when it's not constantly consumed worrying about finding food. When you used up all your fuel on agricultural machinery a decade ago and your peasants are falling over dead in the fields from radiation sickness, you don't really have time to organize a The Stand-style field trip to the power plant to switch it back on so we can all have lights and blenders again*

There's a minimum level of development humans can achieve by mostly doing it for themselves. In Wurm Online you sort of see this, as everything you do are things I could imagine myself being able to do. Building houses out of stone and wood, felling trees, mining rock, forging iron, getting animals to have sex. It's the next stage after that, industrialization, when your forge isn't just an open furnace but producing steam to drive pistons, that's the tricky thing. You start needing your specialists then, to know how to make higher quality steel and iron to enable such technology. The one advantage organized survivors of such a disaster would have would be they know such things can exist, they just have to work out how they were built. I'm sure the film mentions the use of steam-powered traction engines and also the resurgence of coal mining.

*

Get it here: http://www.moviedir.com/download/thread ... 15969.html

A good Threads-y children's book is 'Brother in the Land' which is sort of like threads with a hint of 'The Road' in it. Came out years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_in_the_Land

*shudder*

Cue standard Thatcher's Britain 'Which one's are from after the bomb?' joke.

I remember vacant-eyed woman with roasted baby bit. Brrrr. BRRRR.

Good summary here, spoilerific mind. http://www.btinternet.com/~pdbean/threads.html




I remember reading that one, Gov. Pretty gripping opening, though I haven't read it since I was a lad. I dimly recall Z for Zacheriah too. There was a Tanith Lee short story that was simply devestating too, and that gave me nightmares. People lived in sort of plastic shrouded houses and couldn't go outside because of the radiation poisoning, and there were cullings.

What's incredible is just how scary and primal all the British nuclear stuff was. I've seen The Day After (American version predating Threads by two years) and though it has some very effective sequences such as John Lithgow seeing the missiles rising up in the distance from outside a football stadium, the general soap operaness of it all blunts the impact. Plus, the presence of stars such as Lorne Greene and, um, Steve Guttenberg mean that you can't see it as happening to ordinary peple like you and me.

However, the film is still worth watching and is more 'enjoyable' than Threads. It is also credited for swinging Regan from his hawkish first term towards a second term dedicated to detente and disarmanent, as the film had a big impact on him. He dismayed many of his generals and the secretary of defence through his new outlook. Also intersting is that Threads too was seen on PBS a few years after the BBC broadcast in America, and was also seen among certain circles in the US government.

A largely forgotten Canadian film called Countdown to Looking Glass is a tense and gripping look at the build up to nuclear war from the perspective of a 'CVN' news broadcast from USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier and which also features a scarifying but lo-fi scene when a nuclear depth charge is used against a Russian submarine. Fascinatingly, it also features the infamous Newt Gingrich as himself. Both this and The Day After can be found on Youtube. Last I looked, anyway.

Both of these however don't really compare to Threads. What's incredible is just how scary and primal all the British nuclear stuff was. This is because dramatically the films just don't show the shell-shock and mental damage of the event in both Threads and Peter Watkin's The War Game. Possibly the most harrowing scene in The War Game is the moment when the interviewer asks a group of children what they want to be when they grow up, to which they reply emotionlessly with dead eyes, "Nothing." There's also a relentlessness of detail in British productions that escapes the US versions. In The Day After and the lesser (but childhood gripping) 'By Dawn's Early Light' the effects of nuclear attack are merely scene through big budget spectacle but the ramifications on flesh and bone passed over.

In the Ludovic Kennedy narrated Q.E.D episode of 'A Guide to Armagedoon' (1982) the effects of a one megaton bomb detonated over St. Paul's Cathedral are shown. The programme opens with a ballet dancer, special focus shown on her legs and arms. This moment concludes with the sight of the giant windows of her studio blowing in with a blizzard of glass. This soberly narrated film has many original special effects sequences, such as the cross on St. Paul's melting, a bus on fire with the sound of people screaming and the paint on metal peeling (reproduced by discordant violins) and hurricane winds whipping down shopping precincts. The effects of thermal pulse are shown on flesh by a clinical display of the different stages of a roast cooking in the oven, which is enough to put you off your Christmas dinner. Interestingly, some effects are taken from Threads. An experiment is also carried out as a family are asked to live in a home-made shelter for two weeks - 'the core of inner refuge' - to see how tolerable the experience is. Not very, is the answer.

Finally, probably the most notorious TV experience are the 'Protect & Survive' shorts fronted by Barrett's Housing / Reeves & Mortimer compere Patrick Allen. Known as 'the voice of doomsday' as he'd be the last person you'd hear over the radio, he tells you what to do if a member of the family dies in the core of inner refuge. The most frightening bit is the sound effect provided for the 'invisible' fallout, a horribly sinister electronic noodling which summarises the impressively precise and horrible evocation the BBC could achieve of nuclear war's horror.


Um, that post ran a bit longer than I intended.

I watched on DVD a few years back and wasn't that freaked out by it. 'The War Game' and YouTube clips of 'Protect and Survive' give me nightmares just by thinking about them, but I was unmoved by 'Threads'. Probably due to a post-Cold War sense of stability, like those who saw a future of peace around this time a hundred years back.

I didn't actually see Threads until a few years ago. I really enjoyed the early parts as it was filmed literally a few years before I moved to Sheffield, so it was one long nostalgia trip as I was reminded of how various parts of the city used to be back then.

Once the war kicked off, though, I found it *really* horrific - probably because it was set in my home town rather than some faraway pseudo-alien place like New York or Moscow. I stupidly watched it right before bed, too, so I had some pretty bad nightmares.

Thoroughly recommended, but don't watch it if you're already feeling a bit down.

This seems the best place to post this... I dimly remember seeing it as a child, and being absolutely chilled to the fucking bone. In fact, I've been searching for it for years.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8OYvHPpGDY

EDIT: I forgot, there's a post-WW2 remake too, here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ciu0DGMhaR0

Me and my housemate and a friend of his were having a conversation on Saturday about scariest films we'd ever seen. Naturally I mentioned Threads. Turns out he's a huge post-apocalypse fan and he's insisting I bring over the library copy and we watch it tonight.

I've tried warning him that what is seen cannot be unseen, but he won't listen! (Dimlie in both senses)