10 Utterly Bleak Post Apocalyptic Movie Worlds

While Hollywood apocalypses tend toward the outlandishly grandiose, you can trust our homegrown armageddons to be more grittily low-key in a distressingly realistic way. Seeing the prosaically familiar locations of Sheffield in the throes of destructive collapse is just so much more impactful than the same happening in Panem.

In the vein of Raymond (The Snowman) Briggs's heartbreaking When The Wind Blows, Threads is a very British and very bleak story of the aftermath of the nuclear war which in the 1980s was still an ever-present fear.

As the Cold War turns hot, the tens of millions dying from the original bombing is just the start. Soon we find ourselves in an all-too plausible nuclear winter where crops don't grow, hunger and disease is rife, looting and stealing leads to the death penalty, and children are born mutated and underdeveloped.

Made on a shoestring (extras' burn makeup was achieved using Rice Krispies and ketchup), Threads's cheapness arguably makes its post-apocalyptic world of squalor and deprivation all the more horrifically real.

The TV film was so bleak that it wasn't aired at all on the BBC between 1985 and 2003, making it the only post-apocalyptic movie deemed too grim by its own backers.