The most unsettling scene - The Day After (1983) Discussion

It was. Showing the last few minutes of normalcy before destruction.

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[–] Martian1962 9 years ago

I thought it was the scene where the airmen were at the launch control facility arguing about the helicopters being en route after the missiles were launched and one of the sergeants said they would be hit before the choppers arrive while one of the airmen is looking at the sky looking for the inbound missiles. They all knew there were going to die.

"We're paratroopers lieutenant. We're supposed to be surrounded"
Captain Dick Winters, Bastogne, 1944

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[–] masterjedi-2 9 years ago

I thought the worst scene was watching the disintegration of the people around ground zero, seeing their skeletons glow and hearing the screams. In particular, there's a shot of a classroom and you see the kids glow for a millisecond. They may have been the lucky ones, but the clips are horrific.

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[–] Chien_Noir 8 years ago

I thought the skeleton scenes were cartoonish and hokey. I also doubt that kids would be in their classrooms or people having a wedding during a nuclear alert. The most unsettling scene for me was Airman McCoy walking unprotected through the fallout. I had a nightmare with fallout coming down like that after watching the movie on TV.

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[–] ryan-anderson 9 years ago

Yeah, sort of the calm before the storm.

To me, it was always that scene where John Cullum's character dragged his wife (played by Bibi Besch) into the basement after the ICBMs are launched. It's symbolic, sad, and disturbing all at the same time: she realizes her world is shattered forever and all the plans for the wedding, her children, and so forth are gone and she just can't accept it.

I used to sort of laugh at it because Cullum gets this look on his face like: I'm gonna get 'er down there one way or the other....looks like it's the hard way. But psychologically, its a pretty heavy scene.

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[–] Beeracuda 7 years ago

To me, it was always that scene where John Cullum's character dragged his wife (played by Bibi Besch) into the basement after the ICBMs are launched

This was the scene that got me too. Her blood-curdling wailing as he drags her down to the basement sealed it, knowing her life and everything she knows is either about to end or be forever changed. Very powerful scene.

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[–] BigMeanieHead 9 years ago

To me

the most unsettling scene was with the Dahlbergs at church a couple days after the bombs dropped.

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[–] euro4569 9 years ago

For me, it was when the little girl and her grandfather were debating on whether or not to go down into the basement shelter. However, during the attack she trips and is trampled on. Needless to say, she was one of the lucky ones. However, do you suppose that all of those people were told to take shelter down there because of incoming nuclear missiles or something else to keep the panic low? Also, do you think any of them remained in the basement and survived?

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[–] ughmoretodealwith 8 years ago

on. Needless to say, she was one of the lucky ones. However, do you suppose that all of those people were told to take shelter down there because of incoming nuclear missiles or something else to keep the panic low? Also, do you think any of them remained in the basement and survived?

Supposedly a deleted scene shows those people suffocating to death due to all the debris on top of them.

Fallout shelters like that or any basement can help survive a nuclear blast. The problem is air supply, food, ability to remove waste and not being trapped by debris. Not all shelters were devised to have people actually survive and live for weeks for the radiation to get down to tolerable levels. If doomsday nukes weren't used that is. By doomsday I mean the bombs are coated with real nasty stuff that makes an area have lethal radiation levels for millions to even billions of years.

A lot of fall out shelters or shelters from disaster is to just give you a slightly smaller chance of survival then being outside when the bomb goes off.

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[–] [deleted] 6 years ago

That was the BBC (before it became Marxist TV - MTV) movie Threads.

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[–] Kawada_Kira (7269) 4 years ago

How insanely off-the-charts right-wing does a person have to be to think the freaking BBC is Marxist? Every Marxist I've ever known hates BBC.

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[–] [deleted] 4 years ago

How insanely off-the-charts leftwing does a person have to be to think that the BBC is NOT Marxist? Every lefty I've come across defends the BBC.

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[–] brux (14666) 4 years ago

> bombs are coated with real nasty stuff that makes an area have lethal radiation levels for millions to even billions of years.

That's nonsense. There is a tradeoff to radiation. The longer it lasts the less the intensity, and the more he intensity the shorter the half-life. Don't get me wrong, radiation is definitely something to respected and very careful with, but if you look at the worse radiation disasters we've had on his planet they were not nearly as destructive as what we have done with toxic pollution and burning hydrocarbons and the chemicals we put in and near our bodies.

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[–] Muttley_McLad 8 years ago

When John Lithgow's character says 'Those are Minuteman missiles...'

Put yourself in his shoes. He was just a member of the public, but he knew what there were and he knew what it meant.

SEX - Breakfast Of Champions!

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[–] creatorof2002 8 years ago

from what I remember it was the young man freaking out because he knew there was a good chance he and his loved ones would die of radiation poisoning and he explained that that was what killed the pigs. As a child the big explosions did not scare me so much, maybe Star Wars and similar movies had desensitized me to explosions but a slow painful disgusting death from radiation poisoning scared me a hundred times more than being blown up.

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[–] TheLordofTheHarvest 8 years ago

I'm surprised no one mentioned this one but for me it was the birth scene at the end. Good grief what a nightmare that was to watch. I about started bawling watching it for the first time. It's so freaking rough to watch.

The mom is screaming her lungs out and everyone around while in the real world would be cheering her on they are just lifeless and eveything is dark and joyless. The baby crying is the one since of humanity in the room and it didn't help to make anything better for anyone. So freaking sad and haunting. Ugh I get an awful feeling even thinking of it.

Add to that the scenes earlier of Oakes more or less accepting his fate, Sam breaking down realizing Oakes was going to go and Nancy died, all that happened to the Dallhenburgs and Stephen, ugh such an awful way to go. I was do numb by the end of watching it. Thank goodness I had football practice that day or else I couldn't have let the anger out. What a well made but negative movie.

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[–] lavenderspirit2005 8 years ago

To me, the most unsettling scene was when the father of the rural family goes out to confront the squatters on his farm, and one of them shoots him dead, and calmly goes back to the fire they built. Chilling!

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[–] CorpseCandle 8 years ago

Am I crazy or is there a cut version that just cuts before any violece erupts and all the viewer notices is a chilling tnesion, a stand off.

I might be remebering things wrong but from my memory that always played out as one of the most disturbing points in the film because of what you imagined to have happened.

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[–] ajay05 7 years ago

I've definitely seen two versions

In one the scene cuts to the Dahlberg kitchen and you hear a gunshot

And in the other you not only see Dahlberg shot in the side but the large male of the survivors then starts to warm up his knife over the fire as if they were going to use him for food

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[–] TheLordofTheHarvest 7 years ago

Yeah the dad's death was awful too. Cullum spent the whole film being level headed and the moral and thinking guy of the of the film. He was pissed his daughter was getting hitched but he was aware of the awful things going on (the scene where he steps out of the house after the news during the ruckus completly oblivous to the petty drama going on between his girls was priceless. He was more worried about the world going to hell.)

He along with Robards was the movie's heart. And to see him go in such a awful way was horrendus to watch. Robards's guy had the worse death in terms of suffering but he had the least noble way to go. Such a tragedy for a likeable chracther.

Then add to it the awful fate of the rest of the family; ugh. The creppiest part of it was that it was left vague in terms of the wife and the little girl. We won't ever know what happened to them. Maybe they survived but sadly I don't think so. Once Cullum got cocky and big headed that was the end of all of them. Going out there vs. a crew of many people with 1 gun was stupid; but even worse it set the wife and the daughter up for a worse fate.

Well maybe it's a good thing we don't know..

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[–] greg-233 7 years ago

A scene I found unsettling was where Dr. Oakes and Nurse Bauer look at a couple of cockroaches. Oakes says something about "Man's legacy... the only guaranteed survivors of a nuclear war." A woman's head with bandaged eyes suddenly leaps into shot, screaming. That was pretty unexpected.

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[–] Kawada_Kira (7269) 4 years ago

I last watched this movie about 13 years ago or so, and that moment is one of the few parts I still remember really clearly.

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[–] 7 years ago

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