For Brits of a certain age, the 1984 TV movie Threads remains the most terrifying film they have ever seen on the small screen.
Telling the story of the survivors of a nuclear blast in the English city of Sheffield, Threads chilled viewers with its realistic portrayal of how society would crumble in the event of a nuclear attack on the UK.
CHECK OUT THREADS' TERRIFYING BOMBING SCENE BELOW:
Now the director of the multiple BAFTA-award winning film has spoken out in an interview with VICE, saying he fears that nuclear war could strike again - and the West might be responsible.
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Mick Jackson, who also directed Whitney Houston smash The Bodyguard, said that with US President Donald Trump and North Korea throwing barbs at each other across the Pacific Ocean, the nuclear situation could 'very rapidly get out of control'.
"What worries me at the moment is President Trump and many in his administration are using the same kind of language about winnable [nuclear war and a] bloody-nose strike against North Korea without realising the consequences of that," Jackson told Matthew Gault of VICE.
"They have a failure of imagination. They can not believe that it could be anything other than surgical.
"The lesson of everything in nuclear policy through the Cold War is that we've come so close to so many times to stumbling into war by miscalculation, by not knowing what the other side is thinking."
Filmed in the backdrop of Cold War paranoia, Jackson's film sought to set right the BBC's cock-up of The War Game, an anti-nuclear docu-drama which the BBC filmed then suppressed twenty years previously.
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Jackson - then a young producer with a background in science - felt that people didn't know the true impacts a nuclear war might have, leading him to try to educate them by filming Threads.
"That period had seen Reagan starting the Strategic Defense Initiative, the downing of the Korean Airliner by the Soviets, and [Reagan] calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire," Jackson said.
"It was perhaps the most dangerous time for the world since the Cuban missile crisis and...there was this feeling that BBC wasn't dealing with this in any way. Everyone was very paranoid. The world was on the brink of nuclear war and no one knew anything about it."
Threads' style and setting - a drama set in a working-class Northern city - shocked viewers at the time, as it made the horrors of a potential nuclear holocaust realisable for everyday people.
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The film was so disturbing that it was only ever repeated once, a year later, on the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. Now it has been released on hi-definition Blu-Ray so modern viewers can learn its lessons too.
"I'm glad I did it," Jackson told VICE about making Threads. "If there's anything I'm proud of, it's this."
Jackson concluded by warning that today's politicians - especially the current US President - may have forgotten what it was like to live on the brink of nuclear war.
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With the doomsday clock ticking thirty seconds closer to midnight at the start of 2018, Jackson hinted that we need to remember those lessons sooner rather than later.
"This sense of things...getting out of control very quickly is a lesson that we've forgotten," Jackson said. "I hope we don't learn it in the wrong way. This is what you're risking when you talk about fire and fury."
To read the full interview with Jackson about Threads, read here.
Featured Image Credit: BBCTopics: UK News, Entertainment, TV and Film, BBC, threads