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Definitely Sarah Connor's nightmare in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I watched that movie when I was in middle school (mid-1990s), and it disturbed me almost as much as the scene in which that disgusting orderly licks her cheek right before she escapes from the psychiatric hospital.
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My father was US Air Force Air Police attached to the Defense Atomic Support Agency from the late 1950's to 68 and was part of the command during the Cuban Missile Crisis and he said they fully expected to experience a Atomic Blast. He said we came closer than anyone really ever knows. It's a absolute miracle we are still here.
@davidponseigo8811 That's true. Actually, it was true twice. Dad was MP and an officer. He had a NATO-critical job when we were in Germany. In 1960 and again during Bay of Pigs, things were pretty dicey.
In American films, they always claim that the Russians will use nuclear weapons, and they forget that they are the only ones in human history to have used this weapon twice. This is called media misinformation, and perhaps after hundreds of years, future generations will believe that the Russians were the ones who bombed Japan, and perhaps even the Japanese themselves will believe that.
well, it is known as one of the most horrific films ever made and it should be made watching compulsory to all world leaders along with "The Day After"...I've read that The Day After TV movie kind of changed Reagan's mind after watching it (only rumors though).
Whoever put this together probably didn't watch Threads... because the bomb explosions scene is nowhere near the most harrowing in the film. Threads makes the point that those who died in the initial blast were the lucky ones, and what's really bad is the after-effects. And the representation of _those_ still stands up today.
Agreed, though I'd add the launch scenes from The Day After. Those shots from the football game scared the bejesus out of me when I first saw it in '83 and I was only 24 years old... just out of the Army!
Everyone watched it and couldn't stop talking about it the next day at school. The thought of a blink of an eye death for everyone and everything you knew was the worst part about growing up in the Cold War. 😊
people say it is one of the most horrific movies ever done...goes well with "The Day After". Now I know what surviving a nuclear holocaust is and I rather die than being in one after watching the bits I found in youtube...
We were made to watch in Scotland in the 80s too. Though I'd already seen it when it was shown on TV. Several of the girls got nauseous at parts of the film and one had to leave the room, to avoid fainting.
Everyone thought Ronald Reagan a senile trigger happy kook. He wanted China and USSR to think that too. In hindsight Reagan was senile who probably should've been relieved of duty.
Terminator 2 gave me nightmares. I'm 74, so I grew up during the cold war, with sheltering under our school desks (one of the dumbest ideas EVER) as a reality. My dad was career military so I knew a lot more than the average kid, and more than most adults. It is a fear and dread that has followed me all my life. So many of these movies I avoided, but I did not realize that T2 had the scene in it. It was traumatizing for someone who actually lived through the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs.
Although younger than you, born in the 70s, that is what gives those images the extra twist. I live in Sweden and knew that if it happened it didn’t matter if we were in the war or not we would be dead anyway. I watched Wargames very recently and when those projectiles from ussr were shown it still had the same effect as when I first watched the movie which was a deeply unsettling feeling.
The idea of surviving a nuclear war is truly fiction. As a officer in the Army, the unit I commanded in Germany in the early 1970's was a priority 1 target for the Soviets at the time. We used to joke that if the war actually started we would climb on top of one of the munitions storage bunkers to watch the"LIGHT SHOW". We realized that we had zero chance of survival.
I was born in the early 70s. My earliest nuclear war movie was "The Day After." It affected me, but not as much as its BBC counterpart, "Threads." That one was set in Sheffield, UK. It shows the cold hard facts of nuclear war from the perspective of the military, civil defence and ordinary citizens up to 20 years later. It has made me not want to live through a nuclear war
What about ‘Special Bulletin’ which came out around the same time as ‘The Day After’ and was, I thought, superior. Directed by Edward Zwick and criminally underseen and underrated.
I watched that one first-run, and it was, then and now, the most horrifying cinema I've experienced. "Threads" is a close second. "The Day After" was a theater movie of little visceral impact by comparison.
@@NewSonyWonderHappyMadisonFan Meh, the list is for top nuclear bomb scenes in movies. All of those clips shown in Dr. Strangelove we've all seen in documentaries and none of them really show how the bombs would look if dropped on an actual city. Terminator 2 put forth a very accurate representation of how the destruction would actually look in a city. Regardless of how you feel about the movies, I know nobody dares speak badly of classic movies like Dr. Strangelove or Citizen Kane, but I also think Terminator 2's nuclear bombing scene should have been number 1.
"Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (full title) was Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece from 1964. I was 12 years old and it's hard to explain the impact it had at the time. It wasn't simply grim, it was dark humor at its finest. Peter Sellers, George C. Scott.
To me, The Day After didn't really work as you could tell that they had thrown too much money at the sfx which even for 1983 looked rubbish. This is where Threads and the much earlier The War Game worked better as both productions spent more time showing the effects and not the cause.
Threads has to be the scariest and most depressing nuclear war movie ever. The special effects for the blasts aren't the absolute best, but it doesn't matter. The earlier BBC show "The Wat Game" (1966) is quite frightening as well, with a boy blinded by a blast.
Also, I doubt the video maker really watched Threads, because the blasts aren't anywhere the most harrowing scene in that movie. The special effects for everything that comes after the blasts are just fine, even today.
At 13 I watched the BBC 'Threads' film. This was 1984 & the nuclear threat was horribly real. Even now, it's a difficult, dark watch. Next day at school you could tell other people had seen it, without asking! There was a really weird atmosphere, as if everyone had suddenly realised the horror that could happen.
I watched it sometime in the 1990s, without knowing anything about it in advance. It was still effective. Its meticulous focus on what comes _after_ the initial destruction, and how all the plans for survival unravel, is what's really unnerving. The Day After is an optimistic film with a happy ending in comparison.
Yep. Some time after that, our relentlessly optimistic "jolly hockey-sticks" biology teacher came in with a cast on her arm. Turned out that she'd hurt herself while her and her husband had been digging a fallout shelter in their garden. One of the boys asked "why?" "Well, in case there's a nuclear war, of course!" She replied. "No," he replied, "I mean, why do you want to survive it?" Taken aback, she asked who else in the class felt the same way. _Everybody's_ hand went up. We hadn't discussed it in advance at all: 20-odd 16-year old boys had just quietly decided for themselves that they'd rather die in the attack than face the aftermath. She went a bit quiet after that. Me and my equally military-tech obsessed friend used to joke that given enough warning, we'd go into the middle of the nearest city and try to identify the incoming warhead in the ultimate plane-spot...
I've never been able to watch the whole movie again. Nor would I want to. Sometimes I have revisited clips from the film to remind me of the abject horror; Threads is probably the most harrowing , depressing and upsetting film one might see. I once worked in a small film theatre and Threads was shown one evening, The audience sat in deathly silence throughout and I recall seeing people crying as they watched. Even remembering this film is upsetting.
Barefoot Gen is one of my all time favorite Anime films! Because it's one of the few animated film to depict Japan during war times and because the story is based on the first hand accounts of an actual Hiroshima survivor IE Keiji Nakazawa.
For me "grave of the fireflies" renders a better picture of an inside view of japanese society during WWII, but Barefoot Gen is also a very powerful anime.
@TheCommenterDragon "In This Corner of the World" also has a very strong impression of the atomic bomb - it's just a bright light and a single shingle falling from the roof of the protagonists' house, and a distant view of the strange mushroom cloud some valleys away. Only later, when survivors from Hiroshima arrive, and later still when the heroine goes to Hiroshima after the war and picks up an orphaned child, do they learn the full impact of the bomb. It's all indirect impressions, not the emphasis on the blast and the radiation. A very unique and powerful perspective on the bomb.
@@TheCommenterDragon Wow, I'm glad I am not the only one who knows about the movie "In This Corner of the World" Its a very good movie, and covers what happens till after the way.
I don't think we ever saw the explosions in Miracle Mile, but we definitely saw the missile trails. That and the breakdown of society in Los Angeles were frightening enough. I watched it in '92 and still remember how much trouble I had sleeping that night.
There is another very realistic Movie from the UK about nuclear war and its aftermath, and that's "war game" from 1966, made by Peter Watkins as a pseudo-documentary (which was his style for several later movies, like "punishment park"). War game is low budget and black and white, but it is very intense and realistic about the breakdown of society after all out nuclear war and the futility of civil defense plans. It was also banned from british Television for several years, and was released alternatively in select theaters.
1005 AGREE. Watkins only made another documentry, about the battle of Cullodon, where the Scottish Jacobite Rebellion is ended. The Battlesite is well worth a visit, 20 miles East of Inverness, take in a tour of nearby Fort George too - highly recommended,
Was about to say the same - it's of its time & they obviously didn't have the budget of others, but it's horrifying in clever ways. I know at the time it was genuinely terrifying, my Dad saw it back then.
@@TheCatBilbo The War Game was the first one I saw in early 1983, it was shown at my school. The Day After was shown in December 1983 in the UK and Threads in the September of 1984. Threads was repeated in August 1985 and the War Game was shown on TV for the first time as well.
@@indigohammer5732 What we are talking about is "The War Game" a 1966 BBC DocoDrama about a Nuclear Attack on the UK. The BBC management were so horrified when they saw it that it was banned from being shown on TV until the year after Threads was Broadcast. The War Game was shown in cinemas in the late 1960's.
I am beginning to agree with Jim Butcher- someone famous or powerful somewhere along the way accidentally mixed up "devastated" (total destruction) with "decimated" (destruction of only 10%), and no one wanted to correct them and instead people mimicked it, perpetuating that mix-up for decades on end.
I thank God that I never saw Threads as a child. The Day After was bad enough for nightmare fuel. Threads details not only the horrors at the moment of impact, but also the complete breakdown of society in the aftermath.
Threads is uniquely bleak & gritty. It's fantastic in its production & like you say, follows through to a horrifying future. It's unusual in that & why I think it's so good.
@@TheCatBilbo Typical British approach to it, just pure horror to slap you in the face with. No "but life goes on" BS - more like "living through the attack is actually worse than dying in it".
I did, but hey I was a Gen X 80's kid, so this sort of thing was our movies, our music, our politics, everything. The Cold War ending was like no longer being held hostage. ... And now we're all back to that in "Cold War II - "Now It's Personal", only with a population that just doesn't get it.
The images of people turning into skeletons haunted my 7 year old self for weeks. Even when I first rewatched the movie 20+ years later, my heart raced.
“In Japan you were a metaphor for nuclear war, but in Hollywood they left your balls in the cutting room floor!” King Kong Thanos: You’re a pencil pushing Terran and ho never learned to love his bomb.
If nuclear bomb scenes in TV shows were to make the list, Jericho and Fallout would certainly be on it. But I am glad to see that The Day After and Threads made this list. Both of which are terrifying even by today's standards. Also, T2 is one of my favorite movies ever and the nuclear dream sequence is haunting.
The Wargame (1966) The sirens go off. Everyone knows that an attack is imminent. There's a sudden silent flash. Everyone, including children, are blinded and left with their hands to their eyes, crying in pain. So terrifying it was banned for years. Still can't forget seeing it today.
"The War Game" was probably to old for most people nowadays to remember. It was a great film, and was banned from the BBC just after it was filmed for being too traumatic, until finally being shown almost 20 years later. I first saw it in 1980 at an anti-nuke church group. "Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier, With weapons beyond any reach of my mind, With weapons so deadly the world must grow older And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind?"
The scene in Terminator 2 is my favorite. Mainly because its not real but Sarah's nightmare and really shows her motivation for trying to stop Judgement Day. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.
I saw Threads when I was about 7 years, it prevented me from sleeping for weeks. It's probably the most scared I have ever been watching anything in my life. Bear in mind, on the news each day was the constant fear pushed on us as the Soviet Union and US and its Western allies butted heads.
I was 10 or so when that movie came out. The end where the lone drone has to care for the habitat all alone had me crying my eyes out. I didn't care for the humans, but it upset me the drone was left alone without even the gimpy drone to keep him company.
@@robertbissonnette4411The scene in the command center as they tick off the cities after they're hit was just God awful. I was 11 and to this day I remember hearing "Charlotte.." and I'd never heard of it. As soon as I got home I looked it up in my encyclopedia. I thought that was a small city to bomb Now I know that each side targets every city with 100k or more. Also every state/provincial capital and every nuclear reactor plus more I don't remember. That's at least 400 MRV ICBMS and whatever each of us sends from subs. What's left? Who the hell would want to survive that?
I'd recommend 'When The Wind Blows' a 1986 British adult animated disaster film, directed by Jimmy Murakami based on Raymond Briggs' graphic novel of the same name. The bomb dropping scene is very moving, as is the rest of the entire film tbh.
Whatever your thoughts about the fridge nuke sequence from _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ are, it and _Terminator 2: Judgement Day_ have incredible nuke scenes.
The day after was perhaps the scariest movie I saw in the eighties. I think they should remake it for today. It seems we need a reminder of the horrors of this kind of war or any war for that matter.
@@jamesrizza2640 It may have got to you but if you've seen both, you know that as a film Threads is far more horrific in its portrayal from before the war starts until 12 years after. American films have to have "hope" n them because american audiences cant cope watching a film that has a nihilistic ending.
I dont think that would work today. There's too many kooks that want to destroy the world or set it on fire, so all that would do is embolden them. They would see it as biblical armageddon.
I remember watching "The Day After" as a teenager and man did it hit hard then. Watching Threads and knowing there are missiles that contain 80mt per is all the more nightmarish.
Be comforted with the knowledge there has never been a 80MT nuclear device. The largest test was the Russian 50MT. The largest deployed device was 4MT. Most modern nukes are in the 300 kilo tonne range (still 20 times more powerful than the devices used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). However, even still it really doesn't matter as any target will be bracketed by multiple devices anyway. Those of us not near a target zone will still be fucked because such a war will end all fuel deliveries globally and the surviving populations won't have any food in the local shops soon after.
@@lunsmann 50MT is half of what they were going with originally but the creator of said bomb was nervous and therefore halved the yield. The blast still far exceeded their expectations. Still the regular 10MT warheads that are cluster like per missile are more than enough to do the job. If those things start flying around, kiss it goodbye, Fallout will look like a lush paradise afterward.
@@DonLoco3 - Yes. Aware of the Tsar Bomba story. The lead scientist halved the tritium at the last moment. You are right with the mirv warheads, up to 16 individual warheads on a single missile. This is why it's important to only elect sane people into government. Nobody wins a nuclear war. Maybe sub- Saharan nations will rise to the fore after because everyone who dominates now will be irradiated hellholes. I hope we never get to find out.
@@lunsmann yeah, that original "Tsar Bomba" was supposed to be 100MT....but they finally decided a good portion of the blast would be lost into space so they scaled it down...nearly killed the flight crew that dropped it...scared the hell out of our people though when they realized it was deployable
Threads, the build up, the impact and following 2nd and 3rd generation impacts was brutal. It underscored there were only losers and there would continue to be only losers.
Threads has always stuck with me, mostly because I'm from Sheffield where it was set and having been born in the 80's it's the Sheffield of my childhood being hit by a nuclear strike.
we originally had a plan to use nuclear bombs to propel spaceships...in theory it would have worked...see something like that in "Deep Impact"...another unsettling film...
There is one movie you didn't include on this list, and that was the tv movie Special Bulletin, which aired on March 20, 1983. I remember watching it and for awhile, wondered if it were real, the way the whole movie played out. Check it out. It definitely should have been on this list!
Tough to find nowadays, but there are copies on VHS if you have a player. I have one. Warner Brothers released it briefly on DVD; the few extant copies go for a couple hundred dollars. I always wondered why; just like the TV movie "Shadow on the Land". They seem to be deliberately buried by history.
@@casinodelonge if you really want to see these things close up take a trip to the Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio....many of them on display there....some in cross-section
24:12 - The Day After: When this aired in 1983, the movie played as per normal up until the attack scene, and then was uninterrupted (no commercial breaks) for the remainder.
@@emergencyrapidresponseteam7181 Fallout is still one of the best Nuclear War sci-fi works ever made, though it's only made in the video games and the recent live-action TV adaptation.
@@Daneelro British guy here and while Threads is the superior film for telling what happens for the next 20 years of aftermath, The Day After was much better at the actual explosion visuals. Combined those 2 are 'The Nuclear films'.
Countdown to looking glass is quite disturbing for sure. I have another one (well, two, but one is more of an audio only); The last broadcast and fictionalized BBC special report
The Indiana movie and fridge. Don't explain how he got the fridge to unlock and let him out. In Hollywood, that scene was considered so bad the expression, "Jumping the shark" became "nuking the fridge."
Touch of comic relief can help drama. The fridge was farce to full military power. For me this was immersion breaking. I'm forced back into a movie theater watching some escapist entertainment. But forgivable. To steal, roll, and mutilate from Abraham Lincoln ... You can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but never all of the people all of the time.
There were 2 you missed. World War Z had a really good one, especially because you weren't expecting it at all. The second one was another made for TV movie called Special Bulletin about a terrorist bomb threat in Charleston SC. It was done War of the Worlds style through news reports until the end.
Can't believe they missed Special Bulletin off this list. I believe it won an Emmy when it was made in 1983. It's lurking somewhere on RU-vid if anyone wants to check it out.
Probably because it wasn't nearly as well known as The Day After, though I think Special Bulletin is more suspenseful. Really showed the possible terrorist side to nuclear weapons.
@@jmburgess2003 I think they could have dropped ID4 or Avengers from the list, as while there may have been nuclear explosives involved, the scenes were more about big-ass spaceships blowing up than the nukes themselves. Nice to see the BBC's Threads make what I assume is an American compiled list. Our counterpart to The Day After really captured the fear we grew up with in the shadow of the Four Minute Warning.
I came to the comments to see if anyone mentions Special Bulletin. That movie really scarred me, especially the scene with the anchors crying in the studio after the bomb is detonated.
I know it doesn't match the visuals of the other shows here, but I would suggest the nuclear attack on the Martians in the original War of the Worlds. I know as a child, it had an effect on me and may have been one of the first visualizations in a movie of a nuclear explosion.
Godzilla Minus One has arguably one of the most accurate atomic bomb scenes. While not technically an actual bomb (it’s Godzilla’s atomic breath) the resulting explosion is basically what an atomic bomb does, complete with the back blast and devastation.
You forgot "Twin Peaks. The Return" 2017, the famous 8th episode with the fantastic fly-through the mashroom cloud scene. One of the best nuclear blast scenes in the cinema history.
Threads at no.1, When The Wind Blows at no.2. No other country in the world can make films like the Brits when it comes to showing the impact of external events on helpless people. Threads gave me nightmares for a while and When The Wind Blows made me cry with helplessness the whole way through. I'm male and not afraid to admit that. The Day After, although very good, could have done without the hopeful ending. IMO it would have been a far better film without it. Someone else commented that when Threads was shown on the BBC, the following day at school you could tell who'd seen it and who hadn't. He/she is not wrong, only for me in 1984 I was in full time work and the effect was the same on my work colleagues.
"Testament" is another one that will tear at your heartstrings...people watching their kids put on a play knowing they all were going to die....having to bury them in the backyard...very sad...
as a little kid the day after scared the absolute shit out of me. but I felt better when I realized that because I lived just a few miles away from a major target, if it happened I'd never know it.
Funny - that's exactly how I felt. Was living 1 mile outside the gate of Eglin AFB in FL and so decided (as a 14 yr old) that I didn't have to worry about it since Eglin would be sure to be hit. And again thought the same thing when I moved to Colorado and lived in the vicinity of NORAD. Weird how our minds work.
Weird coincidence, I just watched _When the Wind Blows_ with my kid yesterday. Then I watched scenes from _Threads, The Day After,_ and _Miracle Mile_ . Then you guys upload this. Weird.
Can't remember what year it was, I was working an afternoon shift. I got home sometime around 1 am, grabbed a beer and turned the TV on to relax a bit before bed. I had never seen Count Down to Looking Glass before, flipping through the channels and hit what I though was a news broadcast about the tensions growing. I thought it was real, it scared the living daylights out of me. I couldn't figure out what was going on, flipped the channels and not a single other channel had anything on about war breaking out. I must have went on for a good 10 minutes before a commercial break and they then returned to the "movie" As a kid in the 60's and 70's, doing all the nuke drills in school and such it was such a trigger. I didn't sleep that night, I couldn't sleep that night. I have done some crazy things in my 67 years but that was the most scared I think I ever was.