In the garage of Mick Jackson’s Los Angeles home there is a portrait. The British director recognises himself in the painting, as a younger man – but there is something not quite right.

“I look at the eyes and they terrify me,” Jackson, now 75, tells BBC Culture. “They’re completely haunted.”

Jackson sat for the portrait shortly after he’d finished making Threads, the nuclear war film. It premiered on the BBC on 23 September, 1984, which was described as “the night the country didn’t sleep”. According to Jackson, so immersive was his experience behind the camera that “it took years to get out of my head”.

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Threads was born out of an era of paranoia – the early 1980s. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan had launched the Strategic Defense Initiative – also known as ‘Star Wars’ – a program designed to develop an anti-ballistic missile system to fend off a nuclear attack. In the same year, Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”.