Threads, a BBC TV production, was first broadcast in September 1984 and subsequently repeated the following August to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It wasn’t shown again on UK TV until 2003 and despite owning a VHS copy since the early 1990’s, it had been more than 15 years since I’d watched the film when I sat down to watch it again recently. Looking back, I think I may have set the bar too high by selecting Threads as my first film for discussion. I’ve yet to find a more harrowing or thought-provoking PA movie.

Plot (contains spoilers):

Threads depicts the ongoing effects of a nuclear attack on the industrial town of Sheffield, UK. We witness events through the eyes of two families – the Becketts and the Kemps – whose lives are connected by virtue of Ruth and Jimmy, a young couple expecting their first (unplanned) child together. As Ruth and Jimmy come to terms with the pregnancy and go about finding a home and planning a hasty marriage, we learn about a rapidly deteriorating international incident which quickly spills over into war. A brief conventional exchange takes place between NATO and USSR forces.

In a separate sub-plot, we follow Clive Sutton, chief executive of Sheffield City Council, as he and his emergency planning team prepare for the onset of war as the diplomatic situation worsens. An official shelter is prepared under the council building.

When a tactical nuclear missile is used in battle, the confrontation between the two sides escalates with frightening speed and a full scale nuclear exchange ensues. Ruth and her family take cover in the cellar of their house while Mr and Mrs Kemp hastily build a last minute shelter from doors in their kitchen (as per the government’s hopelessly inadequate ‘Protect and Survive’ instructions). Jimmy and the rest of the Kemp family are killed in the blast, but despite being protected from the initial effects of the bomb, Ruth and the two sets of parents fare little better. Mrs Kemp suffers horrific burns and all of the survivors quickly develop radiation sickness.

After several days Ruth leaves the cellar to look for Jimmy, and the full scale of the devastation becomes apparent. There are millions of fatalities, huge numbers of casualties and the country’s infrastructure has been damaged almost beyond repair. The official response has been limited and ineffective. Clive Sutton’s team are trapped, buried under the rubble of the council house, and by the time they’re dug out they’re dead. Ruth reaches a hospital, but the scenes she finds there are appalling with barely any surviving medical staff, a complete lack of supplies and sanitation, and a never-ending queue of desperate patients.

Ruth gives birth to a baby daughter alone, biting through the umbilical cord and somehow managing to find enough food to keep the child alive. We follow her through the ensuing months as the world is plunged into a nuclear winter.

One year after the war, the first harvest is gathered in but the yield is negligible. Over the next few years the population of the country drops to barely a fifth of its pre-war level. Ten years after the bomb, Ruth dies and leaves her daughter, Jane, to fend for herself.

The film ends a further three years later. Jane is caught stealing food with two boys, one of whom is shot. Jane becomes pregnant by the other boy. Nine months later, she drags herself to a crude hospital where she gives birth to a severely deformed, stillborn child.

My thoughts:

As I’ve already mentioned, prior to watching the film for this article, it had been more than 15 years since I’d watched Threads. I expected its impact to have lessened, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s been almost two weeks since I watched it again, and I still find myself thinking about it regularly. Threads is, quite simply, an extraordinary film. Part-documentary, part-soap opera, and completely compelling.

I grew up in the 1980’s, when the Cold War was at its peak and when the world being destroyed as a result of a full-scale nuclear war seemed (to me, anyway), a matter of when, not if. I used to lie in bed at night and could swear I heard the Doomsday Clock ticking away the minutes to Armageddon. I used to freeze with fear during the regular tests of the early warning sirens, convinced I had just four minutes left to live. I stood at a friend’s house watching from an upstairs window as his neighbour built a bomb shelter in his back garden and, with a group of like-minded and equally paranoid mates, I tried to build my own in the garden shed but only got as far as painting the windows white and chipping a small hole in the concrete floor.

For me, even at such a young age, Threads put everything into perspective. It is utterly unflinching in its portrayal of the terrible effects of a nuclear attack and made me reassess my immature survival strategy. Like one of Jimmy’s friends in the film, I decided it would probably be better to be pissed and right under the very first bomb than to live through the nightmare which would inevitably follow. I’ve written before about the frustrations of being a horror fan in the UK during the 1980’s when anything remotely horrific was taken off the shelves and banned (I realised just how much things have changed only last week when I was flicking through the channels on TV and couldn’t decide whether to watch ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ or ‘The Exorcist’). Back in 1984, however, I was totally unprepared for the horror of Threads. I challenge anyone to watch the film and not be left with a series of images forever burned into their minds: the charred bodies in the wreckage, melting milk bottles, the woman literally pissing herself with fear and unable to run from the blast, Mrs Kemp’s horrific burns and subsequent radiation sickness, blood running down the steps of the hospital, Ruth giving birth…

But this most definitely is not sensationalism. Much of the success of the film, to my mind, hinges instead on the way it crosses traditional genre boundaries. The first hour of set-up is almost pure soap-opera (save for the scenes with the council officers and the documentary-style interruptions explaining political developments, military tactics, governmental plans etc. etc.), and the familiarity of these scenes serve to heighten the impact of the bomb and its after-effects. It’s not that you become particularly attached to the characters, it’s just that they seem so normal that when you see them burning and dying and throwing-up in their inadequate bomb shelters, the effect is immense.

The part-documentary style that I just glossed over is equally important to the success of the film. After allowing the viewer to invest emotionally in the characters and their plight, in stark contrast the film-makers continue the story in a completely detached and unemotional way. With an unflinching eye and through the use of captions and voiceovers, they leave us in no doubt as to the enormity of what would happen to the world in the aftermath of a nuclear conflict. Imagine being forced to watch a car crash, an operation or something equally horrific, and being unable to look away, and at the same time you had a cold, unwavering voice telling you exactly what was happening in uncomfortable detail… that’s how watching Threads feels to me.

Anyone who has read my books will know that I’m not one for happy endings, and I think that Threads is part of the reason for that. Until I saw it, I’d been used to movies where everything somehow always turned out all right in the end, but that’s certainly not the case with Threads. The fires may have burned out within days and the radiation lessened over weeks and months, but with each subsequent scene it becomes clear that no society would ever completely recover from such an event. The breakdown of everything – government, families, people… even language – is chilling and completely plausible. As impressive as the secret nuclear bunker I recently visited was, I know it was also completely pointless.

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just me. Maybe Threads caught me just at the right time. Whatever the reason, I know I’ve never been quite so affected by a single piece of drama. In the 26 years since I first watched it, it’s never completely left me. As a teenager, I had nightmares for weeks. In my twenties I worked in Sheffield for a time and I remember finding myself standing in some of the locations where the film was made, feeling genuinely uneasy. After such a long time, I fully expected the impact of the film to have lessened this time around, but it hadn’t. It’s certainly dated in some respects, but the 1980’s settings and the occasional shaky special effects can be overlooked and forgiven because the film retains its stark power and ability to shock without resorting to horror movie frights or sensationalism.

If you haven’t seen Threads and you have any interest in post-apocalyptic drama, get hold of a copy and watch it today.

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Threads

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Freedom Book Club – I need your help please

As I mentioned in a previous post, the AUTUMN website will be relaunching shortly and over the course of the next 18 months, a huge amount of free zombie fiction (more than 120,000 words at last count!) will gradually be made available.

I’m looking for artists to illustrate a scene from each story (and there are between 30 and 40 of them). If you’re interested, please get in touch. Here’s a pdf which lists what I’m going to be looking for.

I’ll be completely upfront – I’m looking for volunteer submissions and I’m not offering any payment (at this stage). But if you’re looking for a way to get exposure for your artwork, this might do the trick!

If you’re interested or have any questions, please get in touch. Thanks in advance.

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Autumn artwork

Editor John Joseph Adams has just launched the book’s official website which can be found by clicking here. Head on over to read about each of the individual stories and, starting today, interviews with each of the contributors.

As a bonus to whet your appetite even further, you can also read several full stories for free, direct from the website. And I’m really pleased to tell you that my story – Who We Used to Be – is one of them. Click here to read it and please spread the word on Twitter and Facebook etc.

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The Living Dead 2 – read my story for free!

I never really intended to use this website to tell you what I did on my summer holidays, but today I’m making an exception.

I’m sure any writers who are reading this will agree: we never really stop working. Even when you’re not sat at your desk staring at your computer screen, banging away at the keyboard or reading through reams of papers, signing and posting books, answering emails etc., you’re still working. You’re still thinking – thinking about the book you’re writing now or the book you’re planning to write next, or the one you were supposed to have finished last month… Being away on holiday is no exception, and often the new places you visit and the people you meet along the way provide huge amounts of unexpected inspiration.

Back in 2004 when I was writing Autumn: Purification, I started looking into the large number of underground structures which can be found along the length and breadth of the UK. Have a look at Subterranea Britannica if this isn’t something you’ve come across before – it’s fascinating. Bunkers are a mainstay of countless end-of-the-world stories and I’ve been researching them again recently for something I’m currently working on (not telling you what!). Just before the school holidays began in July and my daily writing routine went completely to pot, I posted Remain Indoors – a brief article about my intention to re-watch and write about as many post-apocalyptic movies as I could get my hands on. The response was phenomenal and even now, more than six weeks later, I’m still getting film suggestions emailed to me regularly. (Thanks to everyone who got in touch – please keep your ideas coming).

So as you can probably imagine, even though I was supposed to be on holiday, with my head swimming with post-apocalyptic movies and stories of Cold War bunkers, when the opportunity to visit such a site unexpectedly presented itself, I was in there like a shot.

Kelvedon Hatch is a small village in the Essex countryside, a short distance from Brentwood and about twenty miles from central London. Just outside the centre of the village, nestled on a hillside in a patch of woodland, is a modest-looking bungalow. To all intents and purposes, if you’d just stumbled across the building by chance (and believe me, that’s the only way you’d have found it previously) you probably wouldn’t even have given it a second glance. And yet, incredibly, behind the unassuming front door is a three storey, 100 foot deep nuclear bunker. Protected by 10 feet thick, reinforced concrete walls, is a maze of rooms from where the devolved central government would have tried to coordinate the running of what was left of the country in the event of a nuclear war. The site was in operation from the 1950’s right up until the early 1990’s and at its height could accommodate more than 600 (yes, six hundred!!!) government personnel. As well as vast administration and control rooms, a huge communications room, dormitories, kitchens and a sick bay / morgue, the bunker also housed its own BBC radio studio (though I’m not sure who they thought they’d be broadcasting to if the unthinkable had actually happened!). I swear, you couldn’t make this stuff up! Since it was decommissioned, the bunker has become a tourist attraction and if you share my fascination with the Cold War and all-things apocalyptic, I’d definitely recommend a visit. It’s a unique experience – unsettling and strangely quiet (apart from the ghostly, BBC-esque, plummy-voiced announcements which frequently drift from the PA system… cloudburst over Brentwood… high fallout levels detected around Maidstone… etc. and the public service films – ‘Protect and Survive’ remember that? – showing on TV screens).

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As you walk through the site (you start via a long, sloping access tunnel, pass through the first set of blast doors, then work your way back up), you can’t help but question whether anyone ever seriously believed that a nuclear war ravaged country and its decimated population could have been put back together from a network of places like this bunker. The occasionally sarcastic audio tour you follow certainly seems to imply that the usefulness of these regional command centres was questionable at best: ‘This is where you’d fight off any civilians who’d stumbled across the bunker…’ the narrator enthuses, ‘note the cardboard coffins and plastic body bags in the corner of the operating theatre…’ Frighteningly, there were even plans put in place to prevent regional commissioners from assuming dictatorial control. As you walk back out into the daylight, you can’t help thinking how pointless places like the Kelvedon Hatch bunker would have been in the event of a full-scale nuclear war.

And that brings me to the main reason I’m sharing details of my bizarre family day out! The Post-Apocalyptic Movie Club (as I’ve decided to call it for want of a better name) is about to screen its first film, and that film will be Threads – the 1984 BBC TV movie which, to my mind, remains the most frightening, honest and realistic portrayal of the effects of a nuclear attack on the UK. I’m about to watch the film again (for the first time in about 20 years), and will be posting my thoughts on it early next week.

One last thing about the Kelvedon Hatch bunker. It’s relatively well known now for the slightly surreal road signs which lead you to the site (see picture below), but before it was decommissioned, very few people knew of its existence. How do I know that? Because – when the Cold War was at its peak in the early 1980’s – my wife lived in Kelvedon Hatch. Her house was less than a mile from the bunker and her school was literally across the road but, until we visited a couple of weeks ago, she didn’t even know it existed.

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The Post-Apocalyptic Movie Club and the Secret Nuclear Bunker

As I’m currently trying to finish up and polish the final book in the HATER series, I thought a little tease would be in order. Please don’t read any further if you haven’t yet read HATER and/or DOG BLOOD!

I can reveal that the title of the third book will be THEM OR US, and it will hit the shelves in late Summer / Autumn 2011 (exact date to be confirmed). Just to whet your appetite, here’s a short blurb I recently prepared…

The war which has torn the human race apart is finally nearing its end. The population has been devastated and the world reduced to a poisoned, rubble-strewn ruin. With most towns and cities now uninhabitable, and with the country in the grip of a savage nuclear winter, both Hater and Unchanged alike struggle to survive through each day.

Hundreds of Hater fighters have settled on the east coast in the abandoned remains of a relatively undamaged town under the command of Hinchcliffe – a ruthless bastard who’ll stop at nothing to eradicate the last few Unchanged and consolidate his position at the top of this new world order. This fledgling society is harsh and unforgiving – your place in the ranks decided by how long and how hard you’re prepared to fight.

Danny McCoyne is the exception to the rule. His ability to hold the Hate and to use it to hunt out the remaining Unchanged has given him a unique position in Hinchcliffe’s army of fighters. But as the enemy’s numbers reduce, so the pressure on McCoyne increases until he finds himself at the very centre of a pivotal confrontation, the outcome of which will have repercussions on the future of everyone who is left alive.

A year ago, Danny McCoyne was an overlooked nobody living a miserable, empty life. Today it’s down to him alone to make a crucial series of decisions and decide who prevails. Will it be them, or us?

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THEM OR US

AUTUMN will be released on 26th October in the US and on the 28th in the UK. The next three books in the series (which have been slightly reordered and are now AUTUMN: THE CITY, AUTUMN: PURIFICATION and – being released for the first time – AUTUMN: DISINTEGRATION) will be released in 2011 at three monthly intervals, starting in January/February. They’ll be hardcover releases from Gollancz in the UK (with paperbacks to follow later), and paperbacks from St Martin’s Griffin / Thomas Dunne Books in the US. Here’s the cover for the American edition of AUTUMN: THE CITY. Nice, eh? Just wait until you see what they’ve put together for PURIFICATION!

So what about the rest of the series? As it stands right now, AUTUMN: THE HUMAN CONDITION will not be re-released yet (except in Germany / Austria – more news on that later). The entire book, however, including a bunch of short novellas and over 20 ‘ECHOES‘ (short stories about some of the supporting characters from the saga) will gradually be released free online to enhance and expand the rest of the series. I mentioned an opportunity at the start of this post: I’ll shortly be relaunching www.theinfected.co.uk, and I want all this free content to be illustrated. I’ll obviously be approaching some artists I’ve worked with previously, but there will be ample opportunity for you to submit artwork for inclusion on the site. Drop me a line if you’re interested and I’ll send you a list of character sketches / scene descriptions. I don’t mind what medium you want to work in – traditional, video, photography, comic book… anything’s fine.

So there you have it. That’s the position of the books right now. Just one last thing to tease: AUTUMN is still a five book series, so there’s still something I haven’t told you…

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An AUTUMN update

Back to business. I’m really pleased to announce that I’ll be a guest at the Grimm Up North festival in Manchester this Halloween, talking about book to film adaptations and signing copies of AUTUMN which will be released on 28th October. Click here for more information. I’ll hopefully see some of you there.

Right. Back to work while the kids are temporarily occupied…!

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Grimm Up North 2

Cheers Scott!

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Kind words from the FDO

My brain needs some serious recharging right now, and talking about all those classics has made me want to watch them again. So that’s what I’m planning to do. And I’ve decided I’ll write something about each of them for this site: what I liked about them, what I didn’t like, how they’ve been an influence etc. etc. etc.

There are many comprehensive lists around the internet (such as this one over at www.quietearth.us), but I was thinking – what are your favourite apocalyptic films? I’m always on the lookout for new films or ones that I’ve missed, so please leave a comment and recommend your top end of the world movies. As a starter, here are the first few I’ve got lined up:

• Virus
• Threads
• The War Game
• When the Wind Blows
• The Quiet Earth

And remember, as fans of BBC’s Mitchell and Webb know, Armageddon doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. Just Remain Indoors!

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Remain Indoors!