The Scariest Movie Ever Made

with october and halloween fast approaching many will be stockpiling their cues and watch lists with horror movies classics remakes reboots psychological thrillers slashers paranormal flicks and although they played a big role in my early movie watching days and i still enjoy them on occasion horror movies have lost their potency for me to a great degree watching scary movies like the exorcist or the shining at a very young age almost too young always brought with it a thrill it brought a sense of danger of doing something that was a little bit forbidden and despite the nightmares it was always something very exciting and something i look forward to but horror movies are a lot different now more formulaic and dependent on proven franchises and predictable jump scares a lot of them are good from a technical standpoint and are fun to watch in the moment but their impact fades the moment you leave the theater or switch off the tv some newer horror movies from the last decade or so have been successful in having that staying power to occasionally pop up in your mind and have that residual creep factor many of these films incorporate aspects of relatability they focus on digging horror out of more realistic situations and familial and pure conflicts and establishing a mirror which we can see ourselves and the people in our lives before turning the knife in the most horrific of ways there's no doubt that this method is effective but these horror movies almost always feature some kind of supernatural or paranormal element that yanks you out of that frame of believability so while these films excel at conjuring up a nightmare or two they almost always fall short of the marks set by first watching the classics and their impact is doomed to fade in your mind with time even the classic horrors like the shining the exorcist and the thing although they are some of my favorite films of all time and likely always will be they don't have the same staying power as they once did so it may not come as a surprise when i say that the scariest movie i have ever seen the movie that infected my mind and haunted me the most was not a horror at all in fact it's a movie that didn't even have a theatrical release the film in question is a bbc production from 1984 notoriously brutal film called threads if you watch threads with a slim idea of what to expect like i did the opening scenes may prepare you for an innocent little family drama a pair of young lovers from sheffield discover that they're having a baby and decide they're going to start a family you've seen it a million times but from the first scene something very sinister is lurking beneath the surface and it is not the uncertainty presented by their new life and it's certainly not an angry poltergeist or a lovecraftian monster in the backdrop of radio and news broadcasts we learn of the unstable state of geopolitics in this hypothetical timeline in which the cold war is still ongoing and heating up very quickly we're introduced to the couple's families and while we don't live through each and every one of their struggles we get a good sense of their daily lives and come to know them well enough to relate to their situations and to feel the knife twist when the bombs start dropping and this is the point at which threads warms up and starts to live up to the name i've given it and the reputation it's earned over the decades threads by no means is the first film attempting to depict the potential horror and calamity of a nuclear war coming to fruition just one year prior to the release of the bbc production a notable american television movie called the day after came out and followed a very similar path that threads would both thematically and plot-wise where thread separates from the rest of the pact and establishes itself as the scariest movie ever made is in the absolutely gut-wrenching level of detail provided details so raw and exposed that it borders on depravity despite not straying far from its appalling realism director mick jackson had strongly considered aborting the project upon hearing of the day after his production but upon seeing it continued to make threads in the belief that its american counterpart did not go nearly far enough in a depiction of the war's aftermath in preparing for the film mick jackson and writer barry heinz performed massive amounts of research reading through all the relevant literature and consulting with professionals in all fields striving for the highest degree of realism they could attain when jackson had his opportunity to improve on the day after his illustration of the nuclear explosion in its aftermath he pulled absolutely no punches showing us charred infants women and children buried under mountains of rubble cats burning to crisps and the most severe third degree burns imaginable an average filmmaker working with this material would likely have saved the nuclear holocaust for the climax using the subsequent destruction as a stark symbol to drive home the futility of nuclear war but in threads the bomb comes at hardly even the midpoint of the movie jackson takes us much farther farther than most of us would dare to go in the haven of our own contemplations he displays the absolute and immediate collapse of organized governance as well as the effects of fallout and the ensuing nuclear winter in its naked and grim probable truth the rapport built with the characters drives the utter chaos home to a devastating degree the cold classroom documentary style narration and reading off of the facts and statistics bludgeon you with a blunt sense of authenticity the what if scenarios begin swirling around in your head could something like this really happen a lot of us have heard stories from parents teachers and peers of cold war drills that were practiced in schools during this time period and we think back to the nuclear standoffs especially the cuban missile crisis and the heroics of stanislav petrov whose cool head and intuition quite literally prevented world war iii and at the moment when realizing how easily threats could have happened and still could happen jackson tightens his grip sending us 10 years into this apocalyptic future not a future of vast wastelands populated by ghouls and using bottle caps as a medium of exchange but a future of surreal gruesomeness where the english population has receded back down to medieval levels the quality of life could safely be called medieval as well with people living in squalor having to wear down their bones in the fields cultivating enough crops to barely ensure survival until the next harvest the broken down and unusable technology around them serve as artifacts for the old world of comfort and convenience a bitter reminder remnants of a dream scarcely remembered by those born before the bomb those born after the bomb might be considered lucky to have no conception of the pinnacle of civilization they missed out on but the persistent flow of fallout and radiation ensures that they'll be subjected to all kinds of mutations and deformities in the womb threads becomes the scariest film ever made when jackson takes this turn into the future conceptualizing the absolute extinction of hope that nuclear war would foment not only is threads the most terrifying film i think i've ever seen but it's one of the only movies i've seen that's left me physically ill afterwards i've tried since seeing it to dissect it to get under its surface and unravel the secrets of what make it so profoundly effective the probability of the events both then and now and the extinction of hope that jackson cultivates surely plays a sizable role in that also somewhat ironically threads employ several cinematic tactics used by effective horror movies those being the creation of incremental dread and emphasis on implication more showing than telling the implementation of both of these factors is likely more due to the constrained budget they had than anything else but still works greatly in jackson's favor nonetheless we see examples early on in the ominous news broadcasts and in characters nervously laughing off the impending threat with a pint in their hands but where these tactics pay off is in the sequence that occurs just after the bombs land moments prior we see several characters even the character we believe to be the protagonist fleeing preparing and bracing and after the emp strikes we never see them again in fact this is how a great number of the deaths and threads occur ominously off screen we might like to think that these characters survive somehow but deep down we know pretty well that they didn't and jackson allows our imagination the pleasure of filling in those terrible blanks in addition we know all too well the anxiety imposed upon humans when we feel a lack of control in the events in our lives in the worst of cases this anxiety over lack of control presents itself as a crippling fear threads not only presents this frightening lack of control in a nuclear holocaust but documents how control over that fate of civilization and the fate of the planet rests in the hands of bumbling bureaucrats the competence of many of whom we can safely label as questionable people who in all cases are just as fallible and prone to misjudgment emotion and error as we all are but to sum up the terror of threads there i believe would do any analysis of this movie an injustice i believe better answers exist somewhere upon further investigation one source that constantly popped into mind while watching the movie was ernest becker's pulitzer prize-winning book the denial of death a subject and book nicely complementing the morbid themes of threats becker's introductory thesis is essentially that humanity is inherently terrified at the conception of their own death and thus the central driver of life is to seek a symbolic transcendence of death in his own words becker claims that the idea of death the fear of it haunts the human animal like nothing else it is a mainspring of human activity activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death to overcome it by denying it in some way that it is the final destiny of man many i believe would have difficulty swallowing the concessions of humans as animals and i think to some extent that validates becker's belief in the grand scheme of the cosmos we humans are as insignificant as any other animal yet we differ in that we have knowledge of our own mortality that knowledge is intuited by all and kept repressed by most and deep down that gnawing void widening feeling that becker labeled as creatureliness is felt by everyone on some level of consciousness and the only way to combat this feeling is by creating some sense of significance in the most heroic of cases this means becoming immortal through the arts or through governance through worship through successful campaigns of warfare even in the most average of cases to become a cog in the heroic systems that create infrastructure that builds cities that construct landmarks seen by all and we all create significance by having children procreating extending the species to create infinite possibilities for more progression for our very significant species so when we return to the question of the main ingredient that makes threads the scariest film ever made i would answer that the film is the most successful attempt at depicting the total annihilation of our species significance and it occurs in the blink of an eye everything that we've created to deflect the finality of death is completely obliterated all of our heroes turn to dust the symbols of our significance reduce to rubble at the press of a button the dam built by civilization to hold back the unbearable existential terror of our nothingness as a species is destroyed and under those most impossible and oppressive of circumstances we watch as the survivors kick around in the fallout dust we watch the characters live out our greatest fear as a species a relegation from significance to creaturelyness whether you agree or disagree with my assessment of threads as the scariest movie ever made it can't be argued that it is an incredibly brutal gut punch of a movie to watch and because of that and the reputation that precedes it a lot of people simply won't watch threads and i think that might be a mistake you may not be able to stomach a re-watch but threads is a film that everyone should see at least once and in my opinion one of the most important films i've ever seen there should be no debate that those in high offices of political power should be mandated to watch threads but for me the importance of the movie doesn't lie so much in its potential utility for diffusing global tensions because such a name is incredibly lofty and totally out of the locus of our control mick jackson ensures that there is no hope for his characters while simultaneously instilling hope in his audience on the individual level watching threads will tweak your perspective it will scare you away from procrastination lethargy triviality complacence and orient you more towards extreme gratitude for the miracle of simply being alive and lead you to contemplate what truly matters to you threads is a film that greatly refreshed my appreciation for life for all of its ups and downs slings and arrows and one that i believe with a hopeful perspective will do the same for you you

Channel: Renegade Films

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Id: TnHlUIkZnvM

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021