Comments on: comment: threads

By: Aidan Kehoe

Aidan Kehoe — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:23:28 +0000

Now, I don’t think that’s true: societies are far better at rebooting themselves than this, even I’d suspect under the enormous stresses of a nuclear winter.

Yes–worked example, Germany after World War II. Japan not so much, its entire countryside had not been as thoroughly ground down.

I think it’s destruction and local war over a long term that really fucks up the ability of a society to, as you put it, reboot. I think China was in a far worse position than either Germany or Japan in 1945, in those terms.

By: Yatima

Yatima — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:49:48 +0000

Oh! When the Wind Blows still gets me, because it's not bad things happening to me, it's bad things happening to my parents.

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:45:02 +0000

“protective defensive sheath of narrative criticism”. This, I think, is why the zombie-meme seems so strong with those who came of age at the tail-end of the cold war. When the threat of nuclear winter appeared to dissipate, it dropped away from our nightmares and the fictions they feed. The resurgent zombie outbreaks that replaced it tapped into that same fear of societal breakdown, but with the advantage than nobody actually lies awake at night worrying themselves to death over it.

By: Matt Petty

Matt Petty — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:17:33 +0000

Nuclear campfire stories replaced ghost campfire stories for me and my friends: “…and, right, if you’re in the bath when the bomb hits, the water will boil around you and your eyes will melt before you die, my brother told me…”

The infographics on the various sleeves of ‘Two Tribes’ didn’t help, either.

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:33:29 +0000

For some reason I have to mentally separate Z for Zachariah from Whistle Down The Wind in my mind. “There’s a lone nuclear holocaust survivor hiding in our barn… and it’s Jeeesus!”

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:12:57 +0000

Try watching Threads on a black and white portable. In a tent in your mate’s back garden. As a twelve-year-old. In 1985. Ruined me.

By: Suw

Suw — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:35:26 +0000

The 80s were full of this sort of terror for me. I vaguely remember The Day After, or something like it, although I was only 12 at the time. But I also remember When The Wind Blows (1986), which was pretty traumatic, and then having to read Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien, another nuclear winter scenario, as part of our English Literature class at school. That was alongside After The First Death by Robert Cormier, which was about the hijacking of a school camp bus by terrorists. I seem to remember another book too, the name of which I can’t remember, which was about some sort of soldier (?) being hunted by the enemy. The key scene that stuck in my head was this guy hiding out in a fox’s underground burrow, and the enemy finding him, and stuffing the dead carcass of a cat he’d befriended down the hole he used to ventilate the burrow.

I’m not sure why my teachers were so determined to scare the living crap out of me, but at least I managed to avoid Threads.

By: Ian Betteridge

Ian Betteridge — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:59:32 +0000

Kim, who has nightmares for days if a zombie so much as growls in a film, *adores* watching Threads and scaring the bejesus out of herself. I blame her Protestant, Chapel-type genetic heritage: scary things are good if they are self-inflected DOOM.