Threads

In 1983, ABC televised The Day After, an original TV movie that postulated a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union and dramatized how the residents of cities in Kansas and Missouri are thrust into the horrors of nuclear winter. Threads did the same thing for England a year later. But whereas The Day After was populated by known, recognizable actors like Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg, John Lithgow, and Amy Madigan, Threads is cast entirely with unknowns, lending it a terrifying air of reality. Director Mick Jackson mixes kitchen sink drama with documentary techniques to create a most effective form of speculative fiction that's as bleak as one could imagine. The lengthy opening builds slowly but with so much tension as we meet various characters going about their daily lives in the working-class city of Sheffield, Northern England, while they (and we) are constantly aware of a conflict building between the United States and the Soviet Union that grows more and more ominous. Then, when the bombs fall, it's worse than we might expect.

The movie tracks both the preparation for this event, such as it is, and the eventual long-run medical, economic, social, and environmental consequences of a nuclear war on civilization. Writer Barry Hines drew on source material about nuclear attacks, as written by Carl Sagan, James B. Pollack, and Duncan Campbell, to make a credible and terrifying visualization of what scientists and science writers theorize life after a global nuclear war would be like. The nearly two-hour telefilm follows two families specifically as they attempt to live through the long nuclear winter, where everyone around them is dying of exposure to the fallout, arrested or shot for looting, or scrambling for some way to survive for another day. And it doesn't stop there; the story extends past the last attempt at harvesting crops, the birth of a child, the one-year anniversary of the war, and a decade later. Despite how unrelenting bleak the film is, it's compelling as hell.