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Thread: Threads (1984 UK Telefilm) Who has seen this horrific, horrific little masterpiece?

  1. Threads (1984 UK Telefilm) Who has seen this horrific, horrific little masterpiece?

    Short story made long: A few nights ago I had a dream about a nuclear holocaust. For some reason, my subconscious decided to make me a farmer in a small English town (I'm an American living in north GA at the moment). In my dream, the bomb goes off in the distance and I see myself in third person obliterate into cinders like Sarah Connor in T2. As a child of the 80s, nuclear war was my biggest fear, and it didn't help that I had an eccentric, anti-social grandfather who used to preach to me about "getting ready for the end," so these dreams intermittently haunt me.

    Waking at 5:30AM and a little uneasy from the nightmare, I got up and started to surf the net. Bleary eyed, I typed "nuclear war rural england" into Google, and the result was an imdb.com entry for a film called Threads. Have any of you seen this movie?

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/

    I watched it today. . . and I wish I hadn't. It was made in 1984 and focuses on Sheffield, England being attacked by Soviet ICBMs. I can only imagine how audiences--at the very apex of Cold War paranoia--responded to this movie at the time. The film is unrelenting, lacking all sentiment, as though a documentary recording how it would be--the visual narrative is interspersed with monotone narration and text about the events unfolding and the implications buried beneath the surface of the horror we witness.

    We follow several characters through the narrative, all of whom meet grisly ends from radiation sickness, severe burns, disease, or full-on psychosis. There's cannibalism, marshall law firing squads, genetic mutation, rape, murder--all that fun stuff. The American equivalent to this movie, called The Day After, while scary in its own right, is like an after school special compared to this film.

    The real terror in Threads is the bleak, meticulous look 13 years into the future after the nuclear blasts--the now-medieval-like peasants hopelessly attempting to till irradiated fields where photosynthesis is now impossible due to nuclear winter.

    I'm going to have to play Kirby's Epic Yarn for about 36 consecutive hours to chisel away the considerable trauma this movie has caused me. Not even the 80's datedness blunted the effect. If you have a morbid love of apocalyptic films/literature (and I ain't talking about 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, or any other recent Hollywood bullshit--the exception being The Road), then consider watching this movie. Word of warning though--it ain't upbeat. And check out The Day After, too--though it's a much weaker film.

    Never seen a more frightening movie. Someone hold me.
    Last edited by Crafter; 17 Oct 2010 at 09:14 PM.

  2. It's really great, haven't seen it in a long time though. Talk about a bleak movie...

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