As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
A shot from the infamous vaporizing scene.
The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States. It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert that fateful day.
— The ending disclaimer to the film.
Ah, the 1980s. Politically, the 80s were a period where nuclear armageddon became more relevant than ever, levels not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 60s.
The filmmakers behind The Day After didn't make the movie for fun or entertainment. They made it as a stern warning to the world of what would happen if nuclear war broke out between the USA and the USSR. And they damn well succeeded.
In the end, it was considered terrifying enough to have helped end the Cold War. So it's safe to say there's gonna be a lot of Nightmare Fuel. And since this is a film with a very detailed and realistic description of nuclear war and the aftermath, there are tons of it.
- The poster, as shown on the main page. A tranquil, picturesque room...with a nuclear missile launching outside. Its haunting beauty helps sell that this movie truly is about the end of the familiar.
- A major creepy thing for some was a complete lack of Background Music, aside from the opening and closing credits, and the scenes from First Strike.
- 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. On first run television during the time period, the US was neck-deep in very real nuclear fear, levels not seen since the sixties. ABC even had to open a temporary hotline during the film to calm viewers down during the original broadcast. Not only was the culture awash with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic imagery, but the news was also 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. Two entire generations grew up believing that they 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 a 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 U.S. President Ronald Reagan to overrule the hawkish military establishment and begin diplomatic overtures to the Soviets by co-signing nuclear weapon proliferation treaties. That's right, it was so terrifying it actually caused a change in foreign policy so profound that it might have directly prevented the horror it depicted. Pretty much, this movie helped ended the Cold War. That's not just nightmare fuel, it's thermonuclear grade nightmare fuel.
- It may help to get a feel for the tenor of those times to think of the "Sword of Damocles" nuclear scare that the world experienced in 2022 due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, especially after Putin's nebulous and saber-rattling decision to put his nuclear forces on an undefined "special alert status". Just remember that the US and Russia have, as of 2022, somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 devices each. And those 6,000 devices have factored heavily in the calculus on the part of the West in providing aid to Ukraine without accidentally crossing a nuclear tripwire. in 1985 (2 years after the film was released), The United States had an estimated 21,392 devices, and the USSR had a whopping 39,197. A nuclear war today would be horrific. In 1983, it would have been literal Armageddon.
- Some were freaked out by the sight of their home city being vaporized.
- The scenes in which the nuclear bombs make people turn into skeletons. The effects may be a little hokey today, but considering the nature of the film it's incredibly effective. Especially as we hear their horrified screams as they're instantly incinerated.
- The scene of the attack itself. Nuclear explosions ripping the sky, electricity going out the huge blasts... it's no coincidence that when the film premiered, there were no ads after the attack. It was planned by ABC to be shown 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.
- Shortly before the film aired, a diplomatic misunderstanding in Germany led to extremely heightened tensions, which some consider to have come even closer to nuclear war than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yes, the original audience was extremely lucky that they were watching the film, rather than living it.
- Around that same time, the Soviets almost pulled the trigger as well, due to a malfunction in their radar network that falsely showed five ICBMs inbound to Moscow. It was only thanks to a Soviet colonel
on duty who realized that the United States, first-strike policy or no (and the Americans did have such a policy, to help perpetuate MAD by making the Soviets think twice about playing chicken), would not be so suicidal as to fire a mere five warheads as their first strike and correspondingly did not pass the alert up the chain of command that World War III may have been averted.- In fact, the Petrov save incident (as it's known), is part of a small handful of World War III close-calls in the 70s and 80s. Other famous examples include the NORAD computer failure of 1979, the Able Archer tensions of 1983, and the Yom Kippur War.
- The last message of the film (which is the page quote above) states that its events were far from the worst possible scenario of an actual nuclear exchange. Bleak as it was, the film was extremely optimistic.
- Not helping is that it is a Wham Line. While watching the movie, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is what will happen, maybe a worst-case scenario, yet that message, "The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States", tells it viewers that it is extremely optimistic in its depiction of nuclear war.
- The images of the immediate aftermath of nuclear war. It can be permanently scarring to see the farmers, at the very end, looking out over their ash-covered fields, covered with dead livestock and fallen corn, that hasn't even started to rot even weeks after death — because radiation has even killed the flies and bacteria that would start decomposition — wondering how the hell they're even going to grow a crop to feed the survivors.
- Survivor Joe Huxley repeatedly tries to contact other survivors with a shortwave radio, but gets no responses. The final lines of the movie are him broadcasting again: "This is Lawrence. This is Lawrence, Kansas. Is there anybody there? Anybody at all?" It is truly chilling.
- A woman is unable to feel any joy over the impending birth of her child, knowing that she will likely die before her child is fully grown, her child will likely have a drastically-reduced lifespan, and the years they do survive will be hellish. When the doctor advises her to stay hopeful, she respondsHope for what? What do you think is going to happen out there? You think we're going to sweep up the dead and fill in a couple of holes and build some supermarkets? You think all those people left alive out there are going to say, "Oh, I'm sorry. It wasn't my fault. Let's kiss and make up"? We knew the score. We knew all about bombs, we knew all about fallout. We knew this could happen for forty years. But nobody was interested.
- A character is horrified when he learns the military is executing looters, thieves, etc. without trial, but later passes by a firing squad execution and doesn't even blink. The nightmare fuel isn't the execution, but rather what it illustrates: the breakdown of society. The legal system has become largely irrelevant and by necessity people may need to resort to behavior that would have been unacceptable before the bomb. They have to rethink the most basic ideas about the value of human life or dignity (for instance, euthanasia may become widespread/accepted because of severely limited medical supplies and food). Essentially, the survivors are damned to a hellish new world, and the new "normal" is a constant struggle to survive.
- Before the attack scene there's a shot of a little girl wearing a dress with her father being led into the shelter. Later on, when the nukes hit there's a shot of a panicked crowd trampling over that same dress, and presumably her as well.
- The Workprint version provides more scenes, and more nightmare fuel:
- The father of the girl in the dress asks a nearby woman, Marilyn Oakes, where the shelter is, and once they're inside, Marilyn tries to calm down the girl by sitting down with her and giving her some paper to draw with. When the bombs hit the city, the boiler starts to explode, causing a massive stampede that pushes the father and Marilyn out, and tramples the little girl. Marilyn runs with the crowd, and finds an exit from the shelter that leads outdoors. In the final version, she is vaporized instantly (as seen on the page image), but here, she catches on fire and is burned alive. A little later, it cuts to her completely engulfed in flames, running and screaming. The shot of Marilyn on fire running made it into the final cut, but she's quickly engulfed by a wall of fire to avoid creating a Plot Hole.
- As mentioned elsewhere, this film and Threads are very realistic interpretations of nuclear devastation. Most horrifying of all, even now the world's governments still have some amount of nuclear weapons in their arsenal (although they had largely disarmed), or are still researching nuclear superiority. Even if the Cold War is over, even if something to the implied level of devastation this film shows probably won't happen, even if it's just a regional nuclear war between, for example, India and Pakistan,... the possibility still exists that somewhere, someone will end up suffering the horrors of this film for real.
