Looking Back On Threads, The Docudrama That Terrified A Nation

1984 was a hell of a year. As well as being the setting for George Orwell’s nightmarish book of the same name, there was so much going on at that time: the US were still in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union boycotting the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, Marvin Gaye’s tragic death, President Ronald Reagan called for an international ban on chemical weapons, Ghostbusters and Gremlins were released to name a few. As well as all these arguably pivotal events in music, cinema, and political struggles, somewhere in the UK, the BBC would release a nuclear war docudrama that threatened to make laxatives obsolete. That film was Threads.

Originally released on the 23rd of September 1984 in the UK and 13th of January 1985 in the US, Threads follows the plot of two families in Sheffield, connected by Jimmy Kemp and Ruth Beckett who are dating, as well as a provisional government who are set up in the event of a nuclear attack. While all this is happening, the US and the Russians are at each other’s throats in a conflict taking place in Iran. The film is split up into two halves. The first half depicts normal everyday life as tensions between the Russians and the Americans build up and the country’s growing attention towards it, and the last half having the world as we know it being destroyed. In this half, regular timestamps explain how the world would change afterwards while watching the characters surviving through it or die trying. Spoiler warning, not many of the characters we meet last long, whether it’s dying in the initial blast or eventually succumbing to radiation sickness.

However, while Threads follows multiple characters, you cannot help but feel particular sympathy for the character of Ruth as she survives the conflict longer than anyone, and therefore gets the most screen time. From finding out she may be pregnant when tensions start building in the Middle East to her final moments with her daughter, her story arc is the hardest to watch, so it’s rather cruel of late writer Barry Hines to make her story the one to focus on the most.

Though the last half is where all the gory details (no pun intended) are in this story, the beginning of the film starts off slow and at times can verge dangerously on boring, playing more like a TV soap than a docudrama. However, it is interesting to watch the audience grow more attuned to what’s going on along with the characters as tensions build in the first half: customers at a pub watching the news, Ruth attending a peaceful anti-war demonstration, the public watching ‘Protect and Survive’– a short documentary on how the public should protect themselves from nuclear attack — on televisions through shop windows. This way of background storytelling is a subtle but effective method of showing the audience what it needs to know without bashing them on the head with exposition and how the rising conflict affects the characters in a realistic manner.

An impressive feat of this film is its low budget. At £400,000, this would have been typical for TV projects, but the creators of the drama do a lot with very little, going as far as to leaving things to the audience’s imagination. An example of this is having many of the survivors covered in bloodied bandages that mask their face. It can even be seen in the set design. While the majority of the film seems to use already existing urban and rural locations, the scene depicting the aftermath of the bombing seems to be the only set where any additional money may have been spent. The film is also not afraid of showing you the grisly details, and the makeup department did a remarkable job of showing scars and burns. The original copy doesn’t have a soundtrack, instead amplifying the natural environmental sounds around our characters, though the Blu-ray copy that came out in February of this year apparently has one.

Though it may have lost some of its impact today, considering our consumption of violence and horror in the media desensitizing us, it’s important to think about the time it came out. Scholars considered the previous year of 1983 to be one of the most intense periods of the Cold War, some going as far as to say that was the closest to all out war the world had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also came out at a time where the media was soaking up the crisis as inspiration, with the Americans releasing similar dramas like The Day After and Testament. It did to the public back then what the movie Contagion did to our generation a few years ago. However, while the impact and fear of Contagion may have dissipated over days, it’s not hard to imagine the public would have felt these films for a long time. During that period, armageddon was a very realistic threat.

Now I warn anyone who wants to have a go at this film to approach it with caution. The first half at times can be deceptively slow and you will curse yourself for wanting to move the plot alone as the horror sets in. The range of negative emotions felt in the final portion of the film are astounding: heartbreaking sadness as a little boy screams for his mum down a ruined street as an elderly woman holds a charred baby, shock at the human and animal carcasses peeking out of the burning rubble, disgust as Ruth chews through her umbilical cord when she gives birth to her daughter (something that most people probably won’t want to see in their lifetime).

However, the fact that Threads is still being revered as one of the most realistic portrayals of nuclear war thirty years after its inception says a lot about the film. It’s brutal. It’s unapologetically depressing. It’s a work of dark art.