Personally, I find the cold-blooded efficiency taking place in command centers to be the most tense and interesting so:
The beginning of Damnation Alley was pretty scary to a 13 year old me.
The beginning of War Games with a very young Michael Madsen is harrowing. “That’s not the procedure!”…“Screw the procedure, I want someone on the goddamn phone before I kill 20 million people”
Failsafe…all of it…that melting phone sound. Gawwwd.
Twilights Last Gleaming during the fucked up raid and Lancaster is launching the missiles and everyone is screaming on the split-screen.
I thought the nuclear bomb detonation in the Clooney-Kidman movie ‘The Peacemaker’ was pretty visceral and harrowing at the time. I just watched the YouTube clip and the CGI holds up pretty well, though I don’t know what a Soviet nuclear bomb was doing with an LED countdown timer like this one was:
I think the actual nuclear holocaust and fictional depictions of “the survivor will envy the dead” are pretty harrowing. The problem is the usual difficulty of war movies making war seem exciting and/or glorious. Something like “Threads”, I suppose.
The scene that sticks with me, decades later, is in Testament, which is in the “ordinary people trying to survive the aftermath” genre of nuclear war stories.
One of the running threads in the film is people watching helplessly as family members die around them. The specific scene I’m thinking of has a mother holding her young radiation-sick son in a sink, weeping quietly as he defecates himself to death.
It is not a pleasant film. Powerful. But very difficult.
I am not sure if this counts as a nuclear war movie, but the nuclear apocalypse scene from Terminator 2 stands out for me. The scene with the families and kids in the playground above Los Angeles as it gets hit by the bomb.
While I wouldn’t call it harrowing, the most unsettling movie I ever saw about nuclear war was Atomic Café. It’s a collection of public service films and propaganda pieces that will leave you open-mouthed at the EXTREME naivety rampant in the early years of the nuclear threat.
A senator urges use of atomic bombs in the Korean War. “We could destroy them! We could destroy and contaminate them!” Whoa, down boy!
The infamous Bert the Turtle cartoon. “Duck and cover!”
And the finale shows film about using a shelter juxtaposed against stock footage of an actually test blast. Houses fly to pieces, trees flatten and snap in two, and the shelter film shows a family emerging from their basement to a few broken windows and some overturned furniture. The father of the family, a dead ringer for Ward Cleaver, looks around and says, “We’d better clean up this broken glass. Nothing to do now but wait for word from the authorities.”
Cripes! They truly had no idea of what they were dealing with!
I think the overall scariest Nuclear War movie was Peter Watkins’ The War Game (not to be confused with the American movie Wargames, which is Sweetness and Light, by comparison). Using pretty low tech, this 1966 film about a nuclear attack on Great Britain is scary as hell. It depicts the aftermath of such an attack in pretty bleak and stark terms, with people blinded by the nuclear flash, police shooting looters, firemen overwhelmed by the scal of destruction, and so on. But the scariest part of all is when the camera pans past a group of survivors. It’s all black and white, in cinema verite style. You can’t tell if that black stuff on people’s faces is dirt or blood or scar tissue or whatever. But even that’s not as bad as the sight of people rocking back and forth, or the utterly blank look in many of the eyes. It’s a good and freaky depiction of a population suffering utter devastation and shock. It’s what sets this apart from films like The Day After. Those might accurately depict the effects of a nuclear exchange, but the people pick up and start immediately dealing with and rebuilding. The War Game shows what a severe blow to perception and morale the whole this is. The later movie Threads has some of this, too, but not as much.
Everyone just fatalistically waiting to die in On The Beach. Suicide pills, the last Grand Prix.There is still time!
The last few minutes of Miracle Mile.
Although it wasn’t the point of the film, I found T3 incredibly depressing, knowing that all the damage from the early chases, all the lives damaged by the terminators, ultimately means nothing, as war comes in the afternoon. “Honey, I got a call into the insurance company, should be fine. Hmmm…What’s that light? Oh. We don’t have to worry about the car any longer.”
So many to choose from, but to me the most chilling shot was in the attack sequence of The Day After when they showed scenes of people turning into skeletons.
Then there is the infamous viral video by “Benchmarking Assessment Group” (2016), a mock BBC broadcast stitched together with scary chyron, stock nuclear test footage, and realistic government emergency broadcasts to create the sort of TV viewing you might experience as WW3 was breaking out.
Here’s a link to the final 12 minutes where things really start to heat up. It’s not perfect, but it’s really well done. It’s worth watching the full 35 mins if you enjoy scaring the bejeezus out of yourself with the inexorably growing dread of an impending nuclear attack.
I think it was The Day After that had the scenes of regular citizens who lived near the US missile silos watching dozens of missiles launching on the horizon, and talking about it. Someone mentions, “They only take 30 minutes to reach their target,” and someone else asks, “How long does it take theirs to get here?”
That moment when you realize you’re maybe 30 minutes away from being nuked, which just isn’t enough time to run.
Is that the one where people in a small town see the mushroom clouds in the distance? Far enough away not to cause any immediate damage, but leaving no doubt that those near the blast were the lucky ones.
I don’t recall that from The Day After, but there was definitely a scene like that in the opening episode of the TV show Jericho, which was largely about small towns who weren’t directly nuked trying to figure out how to survive when all the big cities are gone, and national supply lines have been devastated.
I don’t know if it could be described as “harrowing” but considering the era and budget, I think Panic In The Year Zero! is a pretty decent portrayal of one family’s experience after a nuclear attack.
