THREADS: Why a 1984 British Horror Film Gives me Hope for the Future

It begins with an omen: the sound of an F-4 Phantom II fighter jet taking off as we meet our protagonist, Ruth, and her boyfriend Jimmy, whispering sweet nothings to each other in a car parked overlooking Sheffield. The camera cuts briefly towards the radio, long enough for us to hear something about unrest in the Middle East, but it is intangible, unreal compared to the two human beings on screen.

To me, the beauty of Threads lies in its focus on brief moments with its characters during its opening half. In the beginning, the nuclear threat is far away, barely given a moment’s attention amid Ruth and Jimmy’s everyday problems: Ruth is pregnant, and the two have decided to fix up a house and move in together. We see Clive Sutton, the Sheffield city controller, brushing up on emergency protocols, assigning a cabinet of deputies each tasked with providing access to food, shelter, and other necessities. Then, we return to the everyday problems of the city’s denizens. War in the Middle East is imminent, it seems, but we never see it firsthand; our experience of history is mediated through television announcers, radio hosts, and other government propaganda. One of Jimmy’s friends speaks of the trouble in the “far East;” when Jimmy corrects him, saying it’s in fact the Middle East, the friend quips: “well, it’s far enough, isn’t it?” The first half of Threads is chock-full of entertaining one-liners, which are made hilarious to my Canadian ears by the thick Yorkshire accent with which they are delivered. While most characters are not especially memorable before their demise, their voices are; we are shown the humanity of these people, made to bond with them as they navigate crises both personal and global.

Gradually, the distractions peel back: we see the outbreak of hostilities between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the Middle East begin to affect our characters. Food runs short; “It’s busy for a Wednesday, isn’t it? You’d think it were Christmas!” exclaims one shopper at a local market. Jimmy speaks in a garden with a friend when another F-4 screeches away from a nearby airfield. The friend feels something is afoot, but Jimmy isn’t worried. We hear a British PSA describe the potential effects of an aerial detonation and describe what should be done if a family member dies whilst sheltering in place. Clive takes residence in an underground bunker with his aides, each assigned a particular duty in case the unimaginable happens. Protests against nuclear war erupt, and labor unions attempt to organize a general strike against the war; all encounter brutal police violence. Jimmy and Ruth plan their future, painting their house and shopping for furniture. Clive’s team argues about the food supply: people have been panic-buying food and the local supermarkets’ shelves have been stripped bare.

Then, the moment finally arrives. We see panic in the streets as the first missile detonates on a nearby airfield. Jimmy sees the mushroom cloud. A nearby woman drops her grocery bag in the middle of the street, piss streaming down her skirt. Then, a narrator tells us of the USSR’s secondary targets: civilian infrastructure, industry, food production. Jimmy hides under his pickup truck. A glass bottle melts from the heat of a nuclear blast. A woman’s face disintegrates. The city’s bunker collapses, killing one minister. Jimmy’s mother gets severe burns over half of her body. Ruth’s grandmother is killed instantly from falling debris. Jimmy is not seen again in the film. For several days, a strange calm descends upon those citizens who found shelter before the second blast; while uncontrollable fires ravage the landscape, those who remain protected have nothing to do but wait.

Several days after detonation, Threads’ action begins to denoue. This is not a Hollywood film, where the evil is triumphantly defeated at the end of the third act; it is more akin to an ancient Greek drama, where the climax occurs at the midpoint. Unlike the Oresteia, however, there will be no catharsis, no rise after the fall. This is a nightmare, and the viewer is pulled deeper and deeper into the horror of nuclear aftermath. Ruth weeps at the loss of her lover. Jimmy’s mother begs her husband for water; all he can find is a few drops leaking from a broken pipe. Ruth’s grandmother’s body is moved upstairs and covered with a blanket. Clive and his entourage calculate how much food, water, and oxygen they have left; communication with outside authorities has been severed. Radioactive fallout dots the landscape, and the death toll rises. The survivors scavenge for food, and the remains of the British government sweeps in to establish order. Food stores are tightly controlled by armed guards. Citizens are forced to work on pain of starvation, and looters are shot on sight. A month after the blast, soldiers dig through the debris on top of the city bunker; all inside are dead. Ruth’s grandmother’s body, unburied, is decaying; a rat slithers underneath the covering blanket. A narrator proclaims that all of Britain’s peacetime medical infrastructure would be insufficient to treat all the wounded. In this nightmare, even doctors can offer only a look of sympathy.

Desperate for food, Ruth and others migrate to the countryside. By this time, fallout from nuclear detonations across the world has covered the skies, blocking out all sunlight. Temperatures drop below freezing, and radioactive snow covers once-fertile fields. Nine months after detonation, the nightmare continues. Ruth’s child becomes due, and she gives birth to Jane in a barn, a chained feral dog barking all the while. The noises of screams and animal howling meld, a spiraling cacophony of terror and suffering. Ruth bites the umbilical cord with her teeth. We see the new order’s attempts at mass education, several children watching a faded-out videotape about the English alphabet. An old woman, presumably a supervisor, looks on, reciting the tape by heart as if it were a mantra.

Ten years after detonation. A narrator indicates that England’s population has fallen below medieval levels. Jane begs Ruth to wake up and go to work in broken phrases. We see Ruth one last time, hair whitened from cancer, blind from cataracts. She is dead. Jane moves away in search of food. She and two other boys are found looting, and one is shot; in a physical struggle for the remaining spoils, Jane and her compatriot engage in intercourse. There are no utterances of love or pleasure.

Ten years and nine months after detonation, Jane’s child comes to term. We see rampant inequality between government and citizen, the British authoritarian military administration withholding food and doling it out only in cases of hard work and good behaviour. We realize with horror the fulfilment of this movie’s initial proclamation that “the threads that make society strong also leave us vulnerable.” Jane finds a shabby hospital but is unable to explain her situation to the staff. She gives birth on the floor, but there is no crying. The child is born still. The final frame of Threads shows Jane, looking in horror at her dead clump of cells, mouth open to scream.

To me, the most terrifying aspect of Threads is the buildup: the tense anticipation of watching civilians putter around on their quotidian business while municipal officials scramble to establish systems and protocols in case of an event that many deem impossible. There are conflicting senses of inevitability of the war’s conclusion and faith in humanity’s better nature. We are made privy to the escalation of war, shown the callous disregard for NATO’s citizens by its governments, but until the last minute there remains a spark of hope, a slim chance that the unimaginable might be avoided. It is terrifying and thrilling watching these events play out, and the swiftness with which the film abandons characters it has spent time introducing to us makes for some horrific moments. Despite the terror that Threads can instill, though, I found the emotional effect of this film wearing off more quickly than I anticipated. This is unusual for me, a person who still has nightmares from watching Poltergeist when I was ten years old.

Put simply, I find it less frightening than I would otherwise because it has happened already. Many of the steps put forward in the film closely mirror the lead-up to the outbreak of COVID-19 in North America, and, while COVID didn’t destroy infrastructure or cause nuclear winter, it killed (and continues to kill) thousands upon thousands of people. My own industry was effectively cancelled for two years. Recession and other crises of supply and economy threaten livelihoods and access to resources for millions. Environmental crises compound, swaths of BC forests burn and thousands died in last year’s heat dome. It is my view that our Western European and North American global empire has begun to decline, and that we will be unable to prevent long-term changes to the Earth’s climate, rendering many areas of our planet inhospitable to human life. Many will doubtless suffer and die because of these factors, and rising authoritarian sentiment in North America is cause for deep concern; our society’s most vulnerable will uniformly suffer the most in the coming years.

As such, any prospect of continued economic prosperity of certain regions of this empire is rapidly fading. The places I call home will radically change within the next century, causing immeasurable harm to those who are unable to protect themselves. It’s difficult for me to be shocked in the long term by a film like Threads because, in a way, the nightmarish apocalypse it predicts is already here (not to speak of the hundreds of apocalyptic scenarii encountered by societies in the face of European colonization!). If anything, it grants me hope. My primary criticism of Threads is of its pessimistic view on human nature - that, without the web of needs and incentives that comprise our civilization, humanity’s greed, petty evil, and laziness will eradicate all care and community. I refuse to believe that. Our society is undergoing radical change, democratic institutions are under increasing pressure, and there remain networks of care and many people who are willing to band together in order to fight for a more just world. There are millions upon millions of talented, kind, courageous, intelligent, and resilient human beings living in all corners of the world right now, and I like those odds. Extinction events and societal decline need to succeed every time in order to destroy us totally, but we only need to succeed once.