The Day After was grim but not terrifying. I was afraid of nuclear holocaust my entire childhood, the result of nuns telling us Chicago would be a primary target and that we should pray The Bomb hit while we were sleeping, as well as all those duck-and-cover drills. By the 1980s, the drills were long gone, but most of us carried that fear around with us, albeit on a back burner.
Then Jonathan Schell’s superb 1982 nonfiction book, The Fate of the Earth came out and not only frightened a lot of people (IT was a bestseller and had been featured in The New Yorker) but got us talking about the unthinkable. I highly recommend it.
Oddly enough, I was scared by the last scene in Dr. Strangelove, but that was probably because I was 10 and still clinging to the hope that the Grown-Ups In Charge were sane and knew what they were doing. Quaint notion, eh?