---
title: "‘As The Wind Blows’ Is The Most Horrifying Film I’ve Ever Watched"
source: "https://medium.com/@ossiana.tepfenhart/as-the-wind-blows-is-the-most-horrifying-film-i-ve-ever-watched-7ff4145230b3"
author:
  - "[[Ossiana Tepfenhart]]"
published: 2024-07-01
created: 2024-10-29
description: "Tonight, my husband asked me to look for a horror movie that made you think. I’ve been reading history hoping to push out an idea or two, so I decided to think back to my commonplace book, where I…"
tags:
  - "clippings"
---
## I had to bathe the first time I watched it and also lost my lunch. My husband tapped out halfway through.

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via IMDB

Tonight, my husband asked me to look for a horror movie that made you think. I’ve been reading history hoping to push out an idea or two, so I decided to think back to my commonplace book, where I kept a short list of movies that really had an impact on me.

There, I saw *When The Wind Blows* marked with a star next to it.

I couldn't place the name immediately, so I looked it up online. I quickly remembered which movie it was. To date, it’s the only movie I ever had a hard time stomaching — to the point that I actually vomited and had to bathe for half an hour.

## ‘When the Wind Blows’ is a cartoon done to illustrate the horrors of nuclear war.

Made in 1986, *When the Wind Blows* featured an incredible collection of hyper-talented people. It’s based off a children’s (??) graphic novel book by award-winning author Raymond Briggs, written in 1982.

The soundtrack was done by none other than Ziggy Stardust himself, David Bowie. And the animation? It combines live action, carefully-crafted dioramas, and uniquely European cartooning to create truly striking scenes.

Between all this talent, it’s not surprising that this team was able to make a movie that grabs you by the throat, punches you in the stomach, and drop kicks your face, leaving you in stunned silence by the end of the film.

I just…don’t think I was prepared for how hard it hit.

## The story follows Jim and Hilda Bloggs, an elderly British couple who get stuck in a nuclear holocaust.

Half of the movie is spent humanizing the Bloggs. We all have met people who are prim, proper, and deeply entrenched in the belief of government capabilities.

Jim Bloggs spends most of the first half of the film preparing for the nuke, joyfully optimistic that it will be a quick fluke or that it will “all blow over soon.”

He misguidedly paints the windows white, removes doors from his home, and tries to get supplies. Hilda, a more proper lady, gets annoyed at him as he preps while she tries to clean the house. (I can relate to her.)

You just start to like them as a couple. You see their flashbacks, the way they talk to their son on the phone, and how much they reminisce about World War II. In essence, they’re everyone’s old-school British gran and gramps.

If you didn’t read the summary, you’d almost feel like war would blow over and that you’d just see them have a good laugh about it. That, sadly, doesn’t happen.

## The horror truly starts when the bomb drops — and they both remain blissfully unaware they are already dead.

I don’t mean that they just died in the blast. They survive it. The movie follows their every step as they remain optimistic that people will come for them, drink radioactive tea, and get sicker every day.

The Bloggs truly believe, up until the last couple of minutes, that they’ll survive. They are just waiting to get better, thinking that their sickness is just a “terrible headache” and a bad stomach ache.

As the movie progresses, you get the sinking feeling that the lovely couple you grew to enjoy aren’t going to make it. You start feeling sick to your stomach as you watch them weaken, wishing that you could yell at them through the screen.

And yet, you know that it’s futile. The amount of radiation that hit them was bound to kill them. If the rads from the blast didn’t, the tea made with poisoned water sure as hell would.

The eerie quietness of some of the movie’s scenes makes you feel like you’re choking on air. Slowly, every bit of the movie makes you feel a little more tense and nervous. And yet, you can’t do anything but watch them struggle.

At one point, Jim Bloggs seems to realize they’re both going to die. He refuses to let Hilda, his beloved wife, wallow in sorrow. He does everything he can to keep up both their hopes — a desperate move of true love.

The film ends with them both crawling into sacks, taking their last breaths, uttering a prayer, making sure their bodies will be found by whatever recovery crews are sent to get them.

## There’s something so undeniably horrifying and heartbreaking about this movie.

I can’t figure out which element of *Where the Wind Blows* makes it such a skin-crawling, squicky, and utterly nightmarishly heartbreaking movie. It’s hard to put into words.

Maybe it’s Jim’s unshakeable optimism. Maybe it’s their obliviousness to the seriousness of the situation. Or, perhaps it’s the fact that the viewer is left to piece together what is going to happen because there’s no narrator.

If you get teary-eyed at movies, this movie might do that to you. It (surprisingly) didn’t do that to me. I just ended up throwing up and having to bathe because the movie somehow just made me want to crawl out of my skin that badly.

My husband was unable to finish the movie. It made him so uncomfortable and anxious that we had to stop watching halfway through. It also didn’t help that I was starting to get queasy, either.

==If I’m going to be honest, this is one work of high art that many of us can only experience once — if we can even stomach it at all.==

## During a time when the world seems to edge closer to nuclear war, ‘When the Wind Blows’ is terrifying.

What’s truly scary about this movie is that it’s not entirely fiction. It’s based on the effects and stories of people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The novel itself was focused on real medical side effects of radiation poisoning.

While the story itself was hypothetical and geared toward Brits of the 80s, *When the Wind Blow*s is still technically a documentary about nuclear war. And it’s one that I feel every single world leader should be watching right now.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I need to have a bath. I don’t feel so good.