This weekend brings Halloween holidays, and that means everyone is looking for the best horror movies to watch. For our modern times and , here are 10 nuclear war movies for your Halloween watchlist.
Rebecca Ferguson stars in “A House of Dynamite.”
Source: Netflix
Nuclear War In Cinema
Before we get to the list, let’s talk about nuclear war cinema. The most recent and important example is director Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite at Netflix.
A House of Dynamite seems inspired by the combination of general anxieties about the rising risk of war and nuclear war, and the specific recent pop culture phenomenon around Annie Jacobsen’s best selling 2024 novel Nuclear War: A Scenario, which also posits a real-time telling of how our government’s chain of command responds to an attack against the United States by (initially, at least) a single ICBM.
Both stories focus on the ways in which confusion, human emotion, and certain unexpected complications all make it easier for everyone involved to defer to “the process.” But it’s a process explicitly designed to keep everyone moving toward the goal of a retaliatory launch of America’s nuclear arsenal.
Likewise, Nuclear War: A Scenario itself mirrors previous nuclear war literature and films, including the 1990 HBO original film By the Dawn’s Early Light (including certain delays and a presidential helicopter incident), and bear similarities to the hyper-realism and specific details about nuclear war preparations and launch processes in author Eric L. Harry’s brilliant but underappreciated 1994 novel Arc Light.
We now face real-world political tensions and escalating military conflicts, including Russia’s war against Ukraine and Moscow’s constant threats of nuclear attack against Europe; China’s aggression toward Taiwan and military preparations against the island nation; North Korea’s perpetual nuclear threats and unannounced ICBM launches; Israel’s war against Gaza and threats of wider Middle East war involving Iran; nuclear-armed Pakistan and India shooting at one another and threatening use of their arsenals; and sadly too many other conflicts and wars to keep up with.
It’s no surprise, then, that public interest in stories about possible world-ending threats, especially nuclear war, increase. We use these stories to think about and confront fears and dangers we otherwise are either afraid to address most of the time and which we feel little control over, and to help ourselves consider what we would do in those situations. It’s helpful to make plans for what you’d do in a given crisis, and then tell yourself you’ve done what you can to face it and prepare, so now you can only wait and see, and in the meantime live your life as best you can.
We saw this during the first several years of the Covid pandemic, when audiences sought out films and TV shows about diseases and world-ending plagues. Previously, during the Cold War, audiences flocked to films and stories about war, threats of war, and what life after war would be like.
The Day After, Threads, Testament, WarGames, and Special Bulletin are just a few of the better-known examples. These stories built upon a history of such movies, including Dr. Strangelove, Panic in Year Zero!, On the Beach, and others from earlier decades.
Most of those films, however, focus on the experiences and perspectives of civilian populations during nuclear war, or on those same people in the aftermath. Only a relative few focused specifically on the government and military processes and actions leading to and during nuclear war. That’s partly because details of what really goes on were not widely known, nor did we have the level of detailed information and data about other nations’ nuclear weapons and our own specific processes and outcomes.
Portraying a grounded, realistic scenario around how our government and military respond and run a nuclear war wasn’t as easy until we knew more about it, as more was declassified and as our government itself learned more about the outcomes. Likewise, a realistic cinematic portrayal of actual nuclear war and the aftermath was harder (especially in terms of successfully depicting the scale) in the 1960s through the 1980s, due to limits of technology and visual effects.
One film that did a good job in terms of the technology for depicting the outbreak of nuclear war is WarGames, since it dealt with a simulated nuclear war mistaken for an actual attack. It’s a wonderful portrayal of NORAD and people’s reactions, as well as the theme that the process is so unemotional and clockwork that it turns people into automatons following procedure even as their hearts and minds scream at them to stop.
The Day After mortified the public and governments worldwide, including U.S. President Ronald Reagan. There’s a reason a conservative pro-military president who came to power promising to increase our military and nuclear scale in hopes of destroying the Soviet Union, who in his early years in office rattled nuclear sabers and at one point in 1983 almost led to a global nuclear holocaust during the 1983 NATO military exercise Able Archer (which the U.S.S.R. misinterpreted as real preparations for a nuclear attack against them), suddenly reversed course and negotiated a massive reduction in nuclear weapons and created treaties to limit the development and placement of nuclear weapons.
Today, we have more information than a lot of people probably want about the precise processes and details regarding how easily nuclear war can happen, and all of the nightmarish specifics about what life (if we can call it that) would be like for survivors. Our filmmaking technology is such that we can pretty accurately depict what it will look like to experience a nuclear attack and to witness the incinerated post-war world.
At the same time, we see a resurgence of nuclear threats and rebuilding of arsenals, development of higher-speed missiles to make Armageddon quicker, proliferation of nuclear technologies, unannounced missile tests by North Korea that could at any time be mistaken for a real attack and result in nuclear retaliation by the USA. Or such a test could go wrong and hit Japan or South Korea. Or perhaps a seeming test could turn out to be a momentary whim of a deranged dictator who knows he will survive deep underground and continue to rule over his cult until he dies.
The upcoming film adaptation of author and screenwriter-producer Annie Jackobsen’s bestselling novel Nuclear War: A Scenario will be directed by Denis Villeneuve and is slated for a 2027 release. That timing feels like it could be missing the boat public interest, as two years from feels like long enough that either our current crises around the world will have either resolved, or we won’t need movies to show us what nuclear war looks like anymore.
10 Nuclear War Movies For Halloween
So, without further ado, here is my list of the best nuclear war movies to watch for a more realistic and terrifying viewing experience on Halloween…
- The Day After (1983) – The gold standard, depicting every level and layer of nuclear war as it turns a Spielberg-like middle America into a charred hellscape.
- Threads (1984) – The gritty and rougher, more brutal alternate telling compared to The Day After, and very little distance separates them.
- Testament (1983) – This is why the living will envy the dead after a nuclear war, even those who seem initially untouched cannot escape the nightmare.
- When the Wind Blows (1986) – Another UK entry, this one animated and heart-crushing in its simple portrayal an elderly couple facing the world’s end.
- A House of Dynamite (2025) – The clinical and mechanical, dehumanizing nature of the process of nuclear war demonstrates the banality of our apocalypse. You can read my full review here.
- Countdown to Looking Glass (1984)
- Fail Safe (1964)
- By the Dawn’s Early Light (1990)
- Godzilla Minus One (2023)
- Miracle Mile (1989)
I think this list of nuclear war movies guarantees that you can pick any two or three and know you’ll experience some great and uniquely disturbing stories that scare you more than imaginary killers and monsters can.