8 ms·

Threads has to be the most upsetting film I've seen.

by JonnieCache 10y ago

rmc 10y ago
And Threads was based on an optimistic Soviet nuclear attack, i.e. fewer weapons.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Nuclear war is the one where "everybody dies" is the best case scenario.
  - ido 10y ago
    Not really. There are definitely scenarios (likely to more probable one) where the nuclear war is not "USA vs Russia/China nuking the entire planet". The article itself suggest a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan would result in 2 billion death (supposedly mostly around India/Pakistan), which means the majority of the worlds population will survive.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  Indeed. There was a great article which I can't find now about all the missiles still pointing from the US to Russia and vice versa, where after the fall of the Soviet Union a General formerly in charge of the Soviet arsenal met his British counterpart and assured him that in the Soviet nuclear war preparedness plans, the entire UK was a complete overkill zone.
jon-wood 10y ago
For reasons I'll never understand our biology teacher in secondary school decided to show it to us as the traditional end of term video one year, suitably traumatising a room full of 15 and 16 year olds. There are scenes from that film that will stay with me the rest of my life, I should really rewatch it sometime and see if its quite so powerful to an adult mind.
- pjc50 10y ago
  > scenes from that film that will stay with me the rest of my life I bet that's the most persistent thing you remember from that teacher. Effective education! And probably tipped you away from the idea that a nuclear war might be winnable, and towards disarmament. Our teacher showed us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness for similar reasons, I think.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    I think the UK government has always realised that any level of nuclear war was not survivable let alone "winnable" - estimates from the 1950s suggested that it would only take 3 H-bomb strikes to cause a total breakdown in the UK (and some UK diplomat had a drunken debate with Khrushchev over that very point).
    - pjc50 10y ago
      I think there was significant effort devoted to making sure there could be some sort of "continuity UK" in the event of that happening; the Trident at-sea deterrent, the PYTHON project, all sorts of subterranean bunkers, and so on. It would clearly be pretty desperate, but there was real money spent on it. A bleak version of "thinking the unthinkable", I suppose. (http://burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk/wp/part-3/ http://burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk/wp/part-3/ etc)
      - arethuza 10y ago
        I doubt any of the UK bunkers would have survived an all-out attack - their locations were fairly well known and none of them were designed to resist a direct attack. In fact, nobody has bunkers that can resist a direct attack - not even Cheyenne Mountain.
        Declanomous 10y ago
        Alas, Babylon has a good bit about that. One of the characters is stationed at strategic air command in Nebraska. He warns his brother about an impending nuclear war, and that is the last that is heard from him. The other characters speculate about whether he survived, given the fact that strategic air command is sure to have a very sturdy bunker. It turns out the base ended up being a very large radioactive hole. A bunker is, after all, a very static target, and it just ends up being hit by many bombs. That's my recollection anyways. I read it in 6th grade, so it's been well over a decade since I read it. I really ought to re-read it.
rbanffy 10y ago
I got depressed by reading the Wikipedia article...
hasslein 10y ago
Absolutely. When people ask me what the scariest horror film I've seen is, I respond with "Threads."
andyjohnson0 10y ago
I watched Threads last year. Maybe because it is set in the north of England in the 1980s, a region and a era that I grew up in, but I found it very distressing. I don't frighten easily, but I honestly did not sleep well for a couple of nights afterwards. All national leaders should somehow be legally compelled to watch it. We need them to be as scared as possible of nuclear war.
- arethuza 10y ago
  I don't think it's just you - I found it deeply disturbing as did many other people I knew. Charlie Stross has a vivid account of his feelings on the subject: "I'm a child of the 1970s and 1980s; I grew up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Prior to the end of the cold war in 1989-91, I don't believe I ever lived more than 10 kilometres from a strategic nuclear target." http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-uk-and-nuclear-disarmam.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-u... I think a lot of people who grew up in the Cold War and who contemplated what might actually happen still have that lingering "Lovecraftian horror" from the whole business.
  - andyjohnson0 10y ago
    I spent the first eighteen years of my life living in a major port city, only a couple of miles from the docks. Everyone, even children, knew the city would be flattened if a war went nuclear. Its hard to remember now what the constant subliminal awareness of imminent destruction felt like. Seems that we just don't think about it anymore, even though Russia and the US still have ~2000 active nukes each.
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    The thing is, there are still thousands of nuclear missiles pointed from the USA to the states of the former Soviet Union, and vice-versa. There are other nuclear states as well, which could use their nukes if push came to shove (Pakistan/India, North Korea, China). We are still very much under threat of a nuclear war breaking out, and the cold war is showing signs of starting up again. Trump is making pro-Russia noises, but anti-China noises, and he could easily change his mind on a dime and go ballistic over some perceived slight from Putin. Many people feel complacent about it because the Soviet Union has collapsed and relations between the USA and Russia are relatively peaceful, but this is a false sense of security.

Threads has to be the most upsetting film I've seen.

rmc 10y ago

And Threads was based on an optimistic Soviet nuclear attack, i.e. fewer weapons.

rbanffy 10y ago
Nuclear war is the one where "everybody dies" is the best case scenario.
- ido 10y ago
  Not really. There are definitely scenarios (likely to more probable one) where the nuclear war is not "USA vs Russia/China nuking the entire planet". The article itself suggest a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan would result in 2 billion death (supposedly mostly around India/Pakistan), which means the majority of the worlds population will survive.
pmoriarty 10y ago
Indeed. There was a great article which I can't find now about all the missiles still pointing from the US to Russia and vice versa, where after the fall of the Soviet Union a General formerly in charge of the Soviet arsenal met his British counterpart and assured him that in the Soviet nuclear war preparedness plans, the entire UK was a complete overkill zone.

jon-wood 10y ago

For reasons I'll never understand our biology teacher in secondary school decided to show it to us as the traditional end of term video one year, suitably traumatising a room full of 15 and 16 year olds. There are scenes from that film that will stay with me the rest of my life, I should really rewatch it sometime and see if its quite so powerful to an adult mind.

pjc50 10y ago
> scenes from that film that will stay with me the rest of my life I bet that's the most persistent thing you remember from that teacher. Effective education! And probably tipped you away from the idea that a nuclear war might be winnable, and towards disarmament. Our teacher showed us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness for similar reasons, I think.
- arethuza 10y ago
  I think the UK government has always realised that any level of nuclear war was not survivable let alone "winnable" - estimates from the 1950s suggested that it would only take 3 H-bomb strikes to cause a total breakdown in the UK (and some UK diplomat had a drunken debate with Khrushchev over that very point).
  - pjc50 10y ago
    I think there was significant effort devoted to making sure there could be some sort of "continuity UK" in the event of that happening; the Trident at-sea deterrent, the PYTHON project, all sorts of subterranean bunkers, and so on. It would clearly be pretty desperate, but there was real money spent on it. A bleak version of "thinking the unthinkable", I suppose. (http://burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk/wp/part-3/ http://burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk/wp/part-3/ etc)
    - arethuza 10y ago
      I doubt any of the UK bunkers would have survived an all-out attack - their locations were fairly well known and none of them were designed to resist a direct attack. In fact, nobody has bunkers that can resist a direct attack - not even Cheyenne Mountain.
      - Declanomous 10y ago
        Alas, Babylon has a good bit about that. One of the characters is stationed at strategic air command in Nebraska. He warns his brother about an impending nuclear war, and that is the last that is heard from him. The other characters speculate about whether he survived, given the fact that strategic air command is sure to have a very sturdy bunker. It turns out the base ended up being a very large radioactive hole. A bunker is, after all, a very static target, and it just ends up being hit by many bombs. That's my recollection anyways. I read it in 6th grade, so it's been well over a decade since I read it. I really ought to re-read it.

rbanffy 10y ago

I got depressed by reading the Wikipedia article...

hasslein 10y ago

Absolutely. When people ask me what the scariest horror film I've seen is, I respond with "Threads."

andyjohnson0 10y ago

I watched Threads last year. Maybe because it is set in the north of England in the 1980s, a region and a era that I grew up in, but I found it very distressing. I don't frighten easily, but I honestly did not sleep well for a couple of nights afterwards. All national leaders should somehow be legally compelled to watch it. We need them to be as scared as possible of nuclear war.

arethuza 10y ago
I don't think it's just you - I found it deeply disturbing as did many other people I knew. Charlie Stross has a vivid account of his feelings on the subject: "I'm a child of the 1970s and 1980s; I grew up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Prior to the end of the cold war in 1989-91, I don't believe I ever lived more than 10 kilometres from a strategic nuclear target." http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-uk-and-nuclear-disarmam.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-u... I think a lot of people who grew up in the Cold War and who contemplated what might actually happen still have that lingering "Lovecraftian horror" from the whole business.
- andyjohnson0 10y ago
  I spent the first eighteen years of my life living in a major port city, only a couple of miles from the docks. Everyone, even children, knew the city would be flattened if a war went nuclear. Its hard to remember now what the constant subliminal awareness of imminent destruction felt like. Seems that we just don't think about it anymore, even though Russia and the US still have ~2000 active nukes each.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  The thing is, there are still thousands of nuclear missiles pointed from the USA to the states of the former Soviet Union, and vice-versa. There are other nuclear states as well, which could use their nukes if push came to shove (Pakistan/India, North Korea, China). We are still very much under threat of a nuclear war breaking out, and the cold war is showing signs of starting up again. Trump is making pro-Russia noises, but anti-China noises, and he could easily change his mind on a dime and go ballistic over some perceived slight from Putin. Many people feel complacent about it because the Soviet Union has collapsed and relations between the USA and Russia are relatively peaceful, but this is a false sense of security.