Horror, apocalypse and world politics

Abstract

The only film I have been really and truly scared, and indeed horrified by-in an intense and sustained way-is Mick Jackson's post-nuclear apocalypse movie Threads. Peter Bradshaw, 20141 In 1984 the BBC released Threads, a film that traces the impact of a hypothetical nuclear war on two families living in the British city of Sheffield. Presented in harrowing detail, their ordinary lives and plans for the future are thrown into chaos by thermo-nuclear destruction and the subsequent unravelling of British society. The intersection between the familiar present and an apocalyptic future, set against the background of international crisis, the nuclear arms race and the prospect of mutually assured destruction, produced a level of fear and foreboding in viewers such that Threads is regarded as one of the most horrifying films ever made. At the time of its release, it cut through geostrategic discourses on deterrence and civil defence and gave substance to an omnipresent anxiety about the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war. Like the broadcast of War of the Worlds, a 1938 radio drama (based on a novel by H. G. Wells) that caused mass hysteria in the United States, the apparent authenticity of Threads left viewers in a 'cold, shivering sweat', shaken, depressed and anxious for weeks after watching the film.