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The Armageddon Awards: The Greatest Achievements from the Age of Nuclear Fear! Part Two
Learn about the best movies and best scenes from films about the end of the world, in all their glory and bombast.
HORROR/SCIENCE FICTION
written by Arthur Joseph Lundquist
6/17/202514 min read


Best Depiction of Fallout
Black Rain (1989): Citizens of Hiroshima helplessly look up at the ash cloud as drops of the titular black rain splash onto their bodies.
For all my meditations on nuclear war as a child, it took The Day After’s morning-after landscapes covered in gray powder to make me grasp the sheer amount of radioactive ash that would rain upon a post-bomb landscape (an idea confirmed when I walked around lower Manhattan after 9/11). The sequence culminates with a farmer’s field painted almost white, with the dead bodies of farm animals lying everywhere. This leads directly to the:
Best Depiction of All Those Dead Bodies Left Lying Around
A few non-nuclear films like The Stand (1994) make a decent stab at the idea, The Day After and People Who Own the Dark (Planeta Ciego) (1975) shows a pile of body bags being dumped into a bulldozed pit, and Threads does a decent job of showing charred and unburied corpses strewn amidst the rubble, but tell the truth, no motion picture has ever shown the transformation of the planet Earth into one huge mortuary the way M.P. Shiel so brilliantly evoked in his 1901 novel The Purple Cloud. Indeed, would any movie audience want to see it? Besides me, I mean. This is one we’ll have to leave to future filmmakers. However, it demands our next category:
The Most Pathetic Excuse for Not Showing Those Dead Bodies
Now, I can excuse the 1959 On the Beach for showing no bodies in either San Francisco or Melbourne; after all, its victims had time to go home and die in bed. And maybe I can forgive the makers of The World, The Flesh and the Devil since they established that New York City was evacuated before the fallout hit. And both films had the Production Code to worry about. However, I still get angry every time I think about:
The Martian Chronicles (1985): The Bomb goes off, and everybody just … vanishes. No, they don’t vaporize; they disintegrate like in the episode “The Invaders” (1967-68). Come on, man, who was responsible for this? What moron thought this was acceptable? Especially when this pathetic excuse for not discomforting TV viewers comes while dramatizing the uncompromising Ray Bradbury story “There Shall Come Soft Rains.” Fie upon such cowardice, let’s get to the:
Best Depiction of a Post-Nuke Hospital
You gotta admire the guts of the producers of “Medic” for even attempting to present this idea to American audiences in 1955 on an ordinary half-hour medical show. “Flash of Darkness,” written and directed by John Meredyth Lucas, presents Dr. Konrad Styner (Richard Boone) in the first 24 hours after a nuclear attack. He sets up shop in a battered school building and goes to work on an endless queue of injured and dying. For all its admirable detail, this is a best-case scenario for a nuclear attack. The social infrastructure remains intact, and at the episode’s end, fresh doctors relieve our hero. There is nothing in the film to suggest the degree of trauma exemplified by an incident John Hersey wrote about in his history, Hiroshima, in which a hospital’s utterly exhausted staff abandon their posts and hide to catch a few hours rest, only to be hunted down by an army of the injured who demand they get to their feet and continue working.
That idea is suggested in The Day After's most memorable single image. A man enters the University of Kansas basketball court to look for a sick family member. We follow him as he walks in, passing a body lying on a stretcher, then another and another. He enters the KU auditorium to find the entire basketball arena jammed from end to end with hundreds and hundreds of sick, exhausted sufferers. After his initial shock, he begins picking his way through them all. In the last shot, he cannot even be seen amid the multitudes.
And yet, and yet, for all that, isn’t this unreal? The sufferers sit in uncomplaining silence (beyond a few coughs), the corridors are clear, and the doctors do little. Surely it couldn’t be like that, could it?
The Armageddon Award must go to:
Threads for realistically presenting the mind-boggling sight of thousands of burned, traumatized, and dying citizens simply walking into the nearest hospital. While the hardy but overworked medicos of “Medic” and The Day After struggle on, the doctors and nurses of Threads are utterly overwhelmed, unable to provide aid on any level to the hordes of bleeding and dying, some of whom are becoming deranged. Barry Hines’ script caps the scene with a bone-chilling narration: “By this time, without drugs, water, or bandages, without electricity or medical support facilities, there is virtually no way a doctor can exercise his skill. As a source of help or comfort, he’s little better equipped than the nearest survivor.”
Best Depiction of Order Breaking Down
This Is Not A Test (1962): Highway patrolman Dan Colter single-handedly mans a roadblock to keep the highways clear for evacuation. His outpost is so close to ground zero that his entire assignment is a useless suicide mission. Yet the man single-mindedly does his job, issuing orders and backing them up with the power of the law and his unhesitating use of force. The other citizens obey his orders with an air of sometimes-amused detachment since nothing they can do will make any difference. At first, they blindly follow him. Then, some start to rebel. Then the looters and rapists arrive, and everything dissolves in chaos.
Spending your money to buy groceries like there’s no tomorrow, taking them at gunpoint when you must. Finding a refuge and guarding it against friend or foe, dispensing justice when the looters and rapists come. It’s all there in Panic In Year Zero! as an American family learns about survival in a world without cops. It’s not No Blade of Grass (1970), but it's pretty good for a 1962 drive-in flick.
Best Depiction of a Hunger Riot
Alas, the sight of starving civilians attacking a food distribution center has occurred in so many movies with so little difference between its depiction in The War Game, The Day After, and Threads that it has become a bit of a cliché. In each film, soldiers passing out supplies announce to a queue of starving survivors that the day’s ration has been distributed and that everyone must wait until tomorrow. The crowd starts shouting and grows violent; guns are fired, the soldiers are overwhelmed, and people run off with everything they can carry. The scene practically writes itself.
Best Bomb Shelter Story
It’s a three-way tie from three different films for television:
“The Twilight Zone” episode “The Shelter” (1961): When a CONELRAD (remember CONELRAD?) alert goes off, everyone in a suburban neighborhood comes running to the one privately-owned bomb shelter on the block and demands entry.
“Twilight Zone,” episode “Shelter Skelter” (1985): On their wives’ night out, a suburban father and his best buddy share a few beers at home when the bomb hits. They take refuge in the family fallout shelter. Then, there is nothing for them to do but sit quietly. And wait.
Threads: Government officials in an underground bunker are protected from the initial blast and fallout but are trapped by debris piled above. Using all the databases at their command via radio, they coordinate the response and recovery outside. When a rescue party finally digs them out, the entire crew is long dead of starvation.
Most Haunting Use of a Geiger Counter
One of the great props of Cold War science fiction, the clicks of a Geiger counter create wonderful shock moments when Macdonald Carey points one at a child in These Are the Damned or when Howard Duff aims one at his own body in Panic in the City (1968), or when Bob Peck accidentally passes one beside a lock of his late daughter’s hair in the British mini-series Edge of Darkness (1985).
Still, who can forget the shot of pure Cold War dread when the 1956 British radioactive blob movie X: the Unknown opens in a barren crater where a soldier in protective clothing walks, warily testing the icy mud before him.
Or the doctor in Godzilla: King of the Monsters! who listens to the clicks as he examines a child, shaking his head wearily.
Or the moment on board a submarine in On The Beach (1959) where Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins stare at a Geiger counter gauge to see if there is any hope for humanity. (A beautifully underplayed scene, hopelessly botched in the 2000 remake). But given my druthers, I’d hand the Award to:
In The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1959), Harry Belafonte stands before the vast open doors of a cathedral, holding a Geiger counter, not daring to go in until he has tested the air.
Sexiest Decontamination Scene
Yeah, yeah, I’m being petty, but come on, wouldn’t the mass decontaminations be at least a momentary diversion from the unending horror of post-nuke life? Well, you won’t find relief in Silkwood (1983). Merle Streep can be hot (ever see The River Wild?), but director Mike Nichols works overtime to scrape every bit of fun from her numerous nude decontaminations. Which I suppose the man had to do, being a serious filmmaker. But even a film of severe intent, such as Dirty War (2004), included at least one seriously hot woman among the hosed-down public. Still, in all the history of world cinema, there is nothing to compete with the gold standard for movie decontaminations:
Sean Connery and Ursula Andress getting thoroughly soaped over in Dr. No (1962).
Okay, back to serious stuff.
Most Uncompromising Depiction of Radiation Poisoning
Well, you weren’t going to get it under the Production Code. The 1959 On the Beach shows one man vaguely suffering from something like a stomach virus. These Are the Damned makes it look like a bad case of the chills followed by sleeping sickness. The irradiated anti-hero of City of Fear (1959) spends much time coughing. But after that:
Testament (1983) got the ball rolling and does a good job at showing its characters dropping off, one by one, its heroine experiencing nausea, and her children making messes on themselves.
The Day After goes further, showing the sheer variety of spots, lesions, bruises, and hemorrhages on people suffering varying exposures to radiation. A light bruise on Jason Robards’ forehead slowly becomes a long-running sore. We follow in detail one woman’s slow decline: the moment she discovers herself bleeding through her white dress to her end on a cot in that overcrowded auditorium, most of her hair fallen out, her pale face dotted with spots, her lips chapped and broken.
But you would have to wait until the year 2000 to see the TV miniseries remake of On The Beach go all the way, showing people we care about suffer from lesions, nausea, and pain, making it dramatically clear why they would choose to poison their children rather than let them succumb that way.
Most Believable Depiction of Civilization Slowly Unwinding
No competition: Testament. A suburb is cut off from the rest of the world after a nuclear attack. Almost all their men were at work and never made it home. People begin getting sick. Supplies start running out. Some begin to die. The citizens turn out to see their children perform a class play, which may be the last performance in human history. A priest’s faith unravels as he presides over funeral after funeral. A mother attacks the last jar of peanut butter. She sews a shroud over her eldest daughter. In the face of the mounting end, she continues to retain her composure until, after yet another burial, she falls on her knees at the gravesite to shout: “Who did this? God damn you!”
Most Haunting Walk Through a Deserted City
In the most memorable sequence of Arch Oboler’s Five, a woman walks through an empty, though not ruined, town months after radiation has wiped out all inhabitants. She passes through streets strewn with papers and abandoned cars and into empty buildings littered with tokens of the people who should be living there. Searching for her husband’s remains, she glances at empty suits of clothing filled with picked-clean skeletons. One sits hunched over an automobile steering wheel, another lies on a sidewalk, and another still reaches for a telephone switchboard. It is a surprisingly gruesome sequence for 1951 (though undoubtedly, in a predator-free environment, those skeletons would not be picked quite so clean). Hauntingly shot in a dingy black-and-white, backed by the ever-present drone of an air raid siren which no one lived long enough to turn off, the scene has an extra poignance because the woman carries in her arms her newborn baby. Arch Oboler’s films always had more ideas than the technical where-with-all to carry them out, and Five is more admirable for what it tries to do than what it accomplishes. But this one scene of this low-budget film would be hard for even a more expensive film to beat.
One that does is The Day After. See Best Ruins.
But the award goes to The World, The Flesh and The Devil for devoting all of its creative energies to creating variations of walking in a deserted city. They pull out all the stops, and if you saw this movie at a specific time in the Cold War, you might be haunted for the rest of your life by Harry Belafonte’s wordless wanderings through familiar New York City streets that every instinct tells you should be bustling with life. The silence is broken now and then by his yells that echo and slowly fade away. For once, I’m willing to excuse the lack of dead bodies because there is nothing to repulse our contemplation.
Most Obsolete Signage
Five: Outside a grocery store: “Back in 5 minutes.”
Five: The last woman on Earth returns to the hospital where she survived the holocaust in a lead-lined X-ray room. On a blackboard, her name is scribbled in chalk, along with her appointment time, beside the names of other women who never made it into the X-ray room.
The World, The Flesh And The Devil: “Support National Civil Defense—Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow”
Dr. Strangelove: In front of an Air Force base: “Peace is Our Profession”
The Day After: A fortune-telling machine offering to predict: “Your Future.”
The Single Most Haunting Piece of Debris Blowing Down a Deserted Street
The World, The Flesh and The Devil: An empty baby carriage.
Best Ruins
The 1959 On the Beach gets brownie points for its periscope views of deserted California streets, but we were all disappointed not to see any rubble. Where was the charred debris of San Francisco, the Golden Gate, reduced to warped and twisted metal? We’d have to wait until after the end of the Cold War for the film’s 2000 remake.
The set design budget for the 1950s live TV space show “Space Patrol” rarely rose above the level of college theater, but in “The Wild Men of Procyon,” “Marooned on Procyon IV,” and “The Atomic Vault” (1955), their depiction of the blasted surface of Procyon IV is a masterpiece of suggestion. Director Dick Darley places the camera at foot level, looking up at his actors against a backdrop of gray sky. In the bottom of the frame are a few rocks and a bit of rusted girder. Some twisted tree branches, dead and barren, stick into the frame. Except for those details, most of the frame is a gray void backed by the howl of the wind. It would take a lot to beat that stark depiction of the end. The idea would even be borrowed in The Day After.
Not that The Day After was any slouch when it came to rubble. Using a combination of full-scale rubble piles, miniatures, and a couple of matte paintings resembling photos of flattened Nagasaki, it concludes with a dying doctor (Jason Robards) searching the remains of Kansas City for his home. He wanders among piles and piles of shattered concrete, still smoking long after the attack (I remembered this as I watched the smoke rising from the ruins of the World Trade a few days after 9/11)—masses of shattered masonry, and wood, twisted metal, here and there a blackened corpse.
The Bed Sitting Room (1969) gets a Special Award for Most Creative Rubble. Richard Lester took his crew to the already-existing industrial wastelands of 1968 Britain. He devised the most imaginative ruins in movie history, all evocative of life before the Bomb. The rusting remains of a traffic jam are locked in a clay river. A hillside covered with broken crockery. St. Paul’s cathedral, half-submerged in mud. And most evocative of all, a giant mound of empty boots. The Bed Sitting Room is hard to beat for haunting, evocative rubble. But one movie does:
Yeah, as a New Yorker, I’m prejudiced. But if you want an image plucked from your nightmares, nothing can beat the sight of the Stock Exchange, Radio City Music Hall, and St. Paul’s Cathedral incinerated, abandoned, and weathered with age in Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (1970). Which brings us to:
Most Unforgettable Use of the Statue of Liberty
There is no competition. Planet of the Apes (1968): I don’t have to describe it to you, do I?
Best Closing Narration
“The Twilight Zone” episode “The Old Man in the Cave” (1963): “Mr. Goldsmith, survivor, an eyewitness to man’s imperfection, an observer of the very human trait of greed and a chronicler of the last chapter, the one reading ‘suicide.’”
Beneath the Planet of the Apes: “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.”
The Most Terrifying Picture of the Long-Term Effects of Nuclear War
Again, no competition. Even films of such serious intent as The War Game and The Day After are content to leave us in the immediate post-nuke rubble. None of them have the guts to investigate the void ahead and come back with the bleak picture of Threads. In a world without fuel, trade, medicine, and shelter, former suburban couch potatoes must wrest their meals from the soil with little more than their bare hands. We even glimpse the generations to come without education, burdened by radiation-caused learning disabilities and cumulative birth defects, born into a third-world existence in a new dark age where no first world exists.
Indeed, Threads is a serious contender for Best Nuclear Doomsday Movie of All Time. By comparison, the quick extinctions of The Final War (1960), The Last War (1961), Testament, and both versions of On the Beach seem downright merciful.
Except, except ... No movie has ever dramatized the ultimate nightmare of humanity’s fate should we somehow escape total annihilation so well as a forgotten Japanese film, Last Days of Planet Earth (Prophecies Of Nostradamus) (1974). In the future, two wretched creatures, mutated beyond human recognition, fight each other for grubs. Yes, that is how I’d always dreamed it would be.
Best Last Words for Humanity
The Final War (1970): “Why did it have to happen? Why did it have to happen?”
Planet of the Apes: “Damn you all to hell!”
Beneath The Planet Of The Apes: “Bloody Bastards.”
All are worthy sentiments, but ultimately, the Armageddon Award must go to:
On The Beach (1959): “There is still time, Brother.”
Because there was, and in the 1990s, the thing few of us dared hope to see happen. The Cold War ended. And we won. Everybody won. Without a single nuke dropped. This leads the Armageddon Awards to one final, hopeful if melancholy category:
The Film Most Harmed by the End of the Cold War
Not that there aren’t still thousands of nukes in their rusting silos at this very moment, but with the end of the Cold War, a kind of pall went out of the world, for nobody expected anyone to want the civilization-ending, full-scale nuclear conflict that had hovered over us for so long. The remake of On the Beach in 2000 had to invent a U.S./China arms race to make its premise plausible. That same year, Fail-Safe was remade as a live-broadcast TV drama, and it was treated almost nostalgically as a Kennedy-era period piece. As we slogged into the age of terrorism, films of nuclear fear continued to be made, including Dirty War (2004) and Team America: World Police (2004), but they lacked that extra “Is this the day?” frisson of the first time you saw On the Beach or Fail Safe. Even films such as The Wolverine and Z for Zacharia (2015) seem to have no first-hand fear or knowledge of nuclear war.
The actual fatality of our unexpected survival was what should have been the ultimate film of nuclear doomsday: Miracle Mile. Steve De Jarnatt’s script was famous in the industry for years before it was put before the cameras, and the final film contained, in a single movie, my private nightmare of suddenly discovering that our time on earth had run out. But as I watched it, late in its run in 1988 (I was too scared to see it until it was about to leave town), something was… missing. That tickle of fear in my spine, that aching hole of dread in my stomach. They seemed somehow distant. Somehow less bone-hauntingly real than the first time I saw Five or These Are the Damned. When Miracle Mile came out, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we could all sense light waiting at the end of the Cold War’s heart of darkness. And so, instead of being a monument to apocalyptic dread, Miracle Mile became an interesting oddity whose day had passed. Which hopefully will continue.




GODZILLA (1954)
THE WAR GAME (1966)
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