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Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
Threads came out a year after The Day After and it was somewhat inspired by it but in typical British fashion as they had little money to spend they had to make it about people, it was a psuedo documentary it sort of follows the story of the people living in Sheffield as it is all but wiped out while also following the futile efforts of the local council trying to cope with it all, the images that still stick with me 40 years later were of a middle aged woman holding her shopping bags and wetting herself as she watches the first bomb go off, it was just this very ordinary middle aged women standing their with a puddle of urine spreading out below her, you just didnt see anything like that on TV, their is also the image of the traffic warden covered in bandages with a gun guardinga food depot, it was all so incogruous, we would laugh at traffic wardens but in this hellish future they will be armed and shooting people for almost anything as there will be so little authority left.
It scared the bejusus out of the whole country, we all knew in a war the UK would be screwed, it's basically one big military base/stationary aircraft carrier for the US so we knew we were all dead in a few minutes and in my teens I never thought I would survive into my thirties, I always assumed I would be killed by a nuke.
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You made me go find it on youtube for a re-watch, its been years.
This film has many potent short images like the middle aged woman you described that capture the experiences and feelings well. The woman rocking the charred baby and staring at Ruth as she walks by, the old lady needing to be cleaned up after messing the bed, the ending many years after the attack where Ruths daughter (and not the audience) see's her newly delivered stillborn...so many.
I think I like this one better than the day after because it goes much further into the future and depicts the medieval agrarian and radioactive society we'd live in.
It doesn't seem like that low budget of a movie, just very early 80s. They did a great job.