The Day After/Nightmare Fuel


 * The first creepy thing was a lack of background music. My sister could only watch part of it and that gave her nightmares for weeks. Still can't bring myself to watch it again after 25 years. (Yes I saw it first as a teenager in 90's).
 * If you're young enough to have first watched it ten years or better after the fact, long after the Cold War was over, you really aren't going to grasp the full impact of the film. When I saw it, on first run television, the US was neck-deep in very real nuclear fear. Not only was the culture awash with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic imagery, the news was on constant alert to what the Soviets were doing at any moment AND every credible expert was saying that the odds were very likely that nuclear war was at some point inevitable. I was but one of an entire generation that grew up believing that we would not survive to adulthood, and that unlike the post-apocalyptic fiction common at the time there would be NO survivors. The film wasn't presented as what "might" happen, it portrayed what everyone believed WOULD happen and did so in brutally factual fashion. And not only did it grip the nation with its vivid depiction of what everyone was already imagining and terrified of, it actually convinced US President Ronald Reagan to overrule the hawkish military establishment and begin diplomatic overtures to the Soviets. That's right, it was so terrifying it ACTUALLY CAUSED A CHANGE IN US FOREIGN POLICY so profound that it might have directly prevented the horror it depicted. That's not just nightmare fuel, or even high octane nightmare fuel, it's thermonuclear grade nightmare fuel.
 * I was freaked out by the sight of my home city being vaporized.
 * Perhaps even more nightmarish than The Day After was Testament, made around the same time. It took place in a single town and focused on the effects a nuclear war had on a small group of people. The intimacy was what did it for me, especially when it came to the main character.
 * The scene of the attack itself. Nuclear explosions ripping the sky, electricity going out the huge blasts... Is it any coincidence that when the film premiered, no one bought ad space in the minutes after the attack?
 * Actually a deliberate choice, ABC planned it that way. Commercials were shown up through the climatic events that climax with the nuclear exchange. No commercials were planned after the war, to avoid breaking the Willing Suspension of Disbelief of a wrecked world the producers were trying so hard to create.