Other than a trip to the Pee Dee State Farmers Market (more on that this Saturday), I spent most of Saturday playing Civilization VI and watching horror movies on Shudder.
Just when I think I’ve exhausted Shudder’s extensive offerings (seriously, I watch it so much, I find myself rewatching movies I’ve already seen, sometimes multiple times), they throw me a total curveball and deliver up something fresh—and genuinely unsettling.
A side effect of watching a ton of horror movies is that one becomes desensitized to them fairly quickly. I’m still not a fan of gore-for-the-sake of gore, but I’m accustomed to it. As such, I like horror that is unsettling, and there’s not much of that these days. A lot of modern horror is snarkily self-referential, and Shudder seems to love to show lots of feminist horror. Some of that is actually okay, but does every horror movie have to be about the loss of personal identity when a mother raises children? Come now.
So it was refreshing to watch the made-for-television film Threads (1984), a stark depiction of the aftermath of a series of atomic detonations in England.