Editorials
The Very British Apocalypse of ‘When the Wind Blows’ Feels Horrifyingly Relevant Today
The many warnings about just how bleak and terrifying the 1986 animated film When the Wind Blows is still doesn’t prepare you for the reality of it. After all, this is based on a book written by Raymond Briggs, the author of the quaint, nostalgia-inducing animated film The Snowman, a heartwarming festive film that is as synonymous with Christmas to me as Santa and Wham! How could it possibly be terrifying?
When you’ve watched so, so much brutal and intense horror in film, it’s understandable that you’re going to question when something is declared ‘terrifying’. That’s obviously subjective anyway, but in this context of overexposure to terrifying things on film, it’s an important point because it takes something that really hits you in the wrong spot to shake you out of that casual response to terror and fear.
The passage of time and having your own family certainly opens up a whole new box of things to be afraid of. Death and illness become more than morbidly romantic passing notions, they gain weight.
In When the Wind Blows, a fairly typical old couple, called Jim and Hilda, potter about, living their delightfully mundane lives in an English rural town. The early conversations are eerily reminiscent of those my own parents and grandparents have had; gentle bickering over things being out of place, opinions on the things in the news are injected with personal ignorance and mild intolerance, while the daily routine of chitchat and cups of tea steadily rolls on.
Jim keeps hearing and reading about the threat of war. This evokes powerful nostalgia in him, as he recalls his own glory days of fighting for Queen and country. Sweetly, naively, disturbingly, a part of him wishes he could do it all over again, and while it’s flippant talk from him generally, he does want something to happen.
Both he and Hilda don’t fully comprehend the way war has evolved at this point. The threat is literally nuclear now, and it becomes chillingly clear just how little they know, and how much they assume. Jim takes the impending threat somewhat seriously, reading up on how to prepare for a nuclear explosion and preparing their home just in case by setting up shelter, getting as many supplies as he can. Unfortunately, he really just wants to play at being a soldier again, and through a mixture of old-age forgetfulness and bullish naivety, he and his wife cut corners on this prep repeatedly. A bomb hasn’t even dropped and already this couple made me extremely anxious with their whimsical ways.
Again, for those who grew up on Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman, seeing that same kind of style here is incredibly deceptive at first, as it’s just a slightly humorous, and well-realized depiction of an old couple going about their day to day lives, and that just makes what follows even harder to watch.
Because of course the bombs drop, and it’s a strangely beautiful depiction of devastation that acts as the intermission between the twee doddering of a fussy old man and wife, and the creeping death and horrific decision-making of the second half.
There should be relief that the old couple survives, in part thanks to the shelter they’ve made. Maybe they’ll be okay? Maybe there’s something magical about all this like The Snowman? Well, in a manner that’s become unsettlingly familiar as of late. The seriousness of their situation gets diluted by skewed reasoning and impatience, and this ultimately proves lethal.
Sure, they’re probably doomed already – after all, their shelter is just a bunch of doors nailed to a wall, hardly a sufficient shelter for nuclear fallout – but it doesn’t matter, as safety and sense are soon forgotten so the couple can just ‘get on with their lives’. You know when you scream at a character in a slasher film to not go into that room because it means death? That’s how every moment of the second half of When the Wind Blows feels. Disbelief turns to dread, turns to the bleak realization of just how fucked they are.
In a lot of post-apocalyptic drama, there’s a clear drive to make you see the human cost of what happens. The problem is, the situations are usually from the same perspectives of ‘man is the real enemy’, whereas When the Wind Blows is about survival against the threat itself; and it picks a pair of protagonists who don’t ever seem to realize just how close the enemy is, and don’t really put up any kind of fight against the invisible threat. They just blithely walk towards a slow, unpleasant and painful demise, and we have to watch.
What made all this hit harder, was seeing that same attitude present in reality about an unseen killer. It’s made When the Wind Blows disturbingly relevant in a new way. Two perfectly normal people misinterpreting advice and guidelines, stoking the fires of wartime nostalgia as a way of ‘fighting back’, and shockingly going about their daily routine when death itself has moved into every cabinet, drawer, door, and hallway of their house. In both cases, life has changed, almost irreversibly so, and not adapting to that costs lives.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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