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“Hey Neal,” the chipper email came through on the transom, “As a Gen X’er, I’m sure your life was shaped (at least a little bit) by The Day After, that crazy nuclear war movie that scared the shit out of me when I was in elementary school. The whole thing is on YouTube.”

It shaped me, all right. Why had my friendly neighborhood editor awakened this beast from my lizard brain? The years and therapy had managed to excise all but a couple of images from The Day After. One was a shot of X-rayed skeletons against a hideous bright orange light as the bomb hit, and the other was of some sort of country preacher, played by Kris Kristofferson, reading scripture to a gaggle of depressed, dirty people. The rest of the movie lay buried under 30 years of rubble of Survivor episodes and Deadwood and Seinfeld and the Mother Of Dragons emerging from the flames. Well, no more. The Day After has once again been burned into the nuclear wasteland of my mind.

Now available on YouTube, The Day After is an astringent blast of hyper-realism from the past, in direct contrast to our an age of apocalypse entertainment tarted up with zombies and Immortan Joe and Bruce Campbell wielding a chainsaw. It has briefly re-entered public consciousness after being featured on an episode of The Americans. People pretend to watch The Americans to feel smart about old-timey foreign policy, but really it’s a show about funky hot suburban superspies. But I’d rather watch The Americans than The Day After, because no one has anything close to sex in The Day After, which goes like this:

A group of characters goes about their ordinary lives in Kansas, speaking in near-Afterschool Special homilies, while a conflict unspurls in Europe on the news in the background. Then there is a nuclear attack. Half the cast dies immediately. Civilization ceases to function. The other people in the movie, including Jason Robards, John Lithgow (contractually obligated to appear in one out of every three movies in 1983) and a young Steve Guttenberg, gradually melt before our eyes, and then the world ends.

These days, audiences like our world-end scenarios served up somewhat grim, with a mixed-blessing of hope and Christian mumbo-jumbo, like in The Leftovers (or at least with the conceit that there will still be awesome car chases in the desert). The second the bombs hit in The Day After, though, cars become useless, and society is immediately tossed back into horse-drawn carriages. Then the horses die from radiation and scavengers eat them. This is what aired on ABC in November of 1983, in prime time, followed by a debate anchored by Ted Koppel. Imagine that now. “We interrupt Modern Family and The Real O’Neals to bring you this bleak, hyper-realistic depiction of nuclear holocaust.” It wouldn’t happen. We are all diaper babies. Parents are worried about showing their tweens The Empire Strikes Back, lest it upset them. A movie like this would be the ultimate trigger warning for a climate-change-denying country.

What frightened me most about re-watching The Day After, other than Guttenberg’s rapidly disintegrating Jew-fro, is how little progress we’ve made since then. Though there’s no Cold War, not really, with Russia and China, I wouldn’t exactly say that peace is a guarantee. We still live under a continual system of mutually assured destruction, now featuring even more radical religious terrorists. Pakistan has nukes, too. Most of The Day After takes place in the nice place of Lawrence, Kansas, which immediately turns to smoking garbage upon detonation. If a nuked Kansas City seems grim, a nuked Kolkata would be 100 times worse.

We have iPhones now, so scenes in The Day After of people frantically lining up to use pay phones are dated, and we also have the Internet. But none of that would matter in the case of global thermonuclear war. “The only difference from then,” said my son, the same age as I was when The Day After first aired, “is that DJ Pauly D is now alive.” True enough, smart guy, but our ironic pop-culture heroes won’t save us, and neither will our advanced tech. No one’s hopping an Uber out of town when the sky starts dropping toxic snow.

The Day After can’t be confused with The Day After Tomorrow, which is pretty grim, but it’s also kind of silly and at least Jake Gyllenhaal gets out alive. But the telefilm offers not one slender reed of hope. The most capable person in the movie, a farmer with a basement shelter, does a pretty good job of keeping most of his family alive until he gets shotgunned by a shirtless near-cannibal. That scene I remembered with Kris Kristofferson? It wasn’t Kris Kristofferson. It is someone who looks like Harris Yulin except that his face is peeling off and he’s preaching confused nonsense to a group of peasants, their brains scrambled by radiation poisoning, while the film’s romantic heroine sits in a ruined pew, bleeding from the crotch all over her best Sunday dress. No one will come to their rescue, not God or the government or Mr. Roarke or daddy on a sled.

Just like when I was 13 and watched The Day After for the first time, I’ll never enjoy anything about life ever again if I continue to replay it in my mind. I must bury the film somewhere deep. Now back to my regular streaming of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and old Iron Chef: America episodes, already in progress.

[Watch The Day After on YouTube]

Neal Pollack (@nealpollack) is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.