I’ve seen a lot of scary movies in my time, but the scariest ones are never horror films. Elem Klimov’s Come and See springs to mind, as does Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. Hell, even Jaws is more frightening than most horror flicks, whose only real job is to make you squirm in your seat and come back for the sequel. The best scary movies, though, aren’t about supernatural beings or alien menaces. They’re about regular people living through situations that either did or easily could happen. They’re real, and reality is scary as hell.
This is why the BBC television drama Threads is so effective: it’s about a group of people going about their lives until something very plausible happens that turns everything completely upside down. Somewhere along the way, however, it becomes one of the most unsettling films I have ever seen.
Beginning with the lead-up to the nuclear bombing of England and ending ten years later with one of the most horrific and devastating screams I can recall, Threads follows a handful of people as they navigate the same real world we exist in just before and a long time after it’s utterly destroyed. But Threads is much more than your standard fare post-apocalyptic survival picture. It’s dark, and just when you think it’s at its darkest, it goes deeper, and then deeper again.
Pay close attention to the indifference most of the characters have towards the increasingly-threatening news broadcasts playing in the background of their lives. Very few of them give it much thought, a notion that seems insane given the circumstances of the film and exponentially more insane given the same indifference given to the current state of world affairs. Are we living the first half of Threads right now, and are we too stupid or inconvenienced to notice? This question that haunts me, and it should haunt you too.
As the days after the attack grow into weeks, months, and then years, things get even more bleak as the survivors become gradually desensitized to the conditions they are forced to live under. Death is everywhere, literally, but as we witness its power and are appalled by its effects, it fades from the minds of those living through it, replaced by instinctual survival at its most base. This de-evolution of humankind is not the stuff of sci-fi but the horrifying result of entirely conceivable planet-wide madness. And be it through escalating displays of world power or the refusal to address climate change, it’s exactly where we’re headed unless we do something to stop it.
Threads may be a work of speculative fiction, but its terrifying, near-documentarian approach gives it an immense amount of gut-wrenching heft. Add to that its complete plausibility, and it should scare the shit out of anyone sane enough to understand its very clear messaging. It’s a difficult film to watch, but I urge every jingoistic blockhead and ineffectual know-it-all liberal to watch it all the same. Threads could very well be our future.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.