Formative Fears is a column that focuses on horror movies revolving around young people or adults reliving something that scared them at a young age. There is no age limit on fears like death, monsters, and the unknown. Overall, this series expresses what it felt like to be a frightened child – and what still scares us well into adulthood.
While televised public service announcements are virtually obsolete these days, the classic ones inspired action and conversation. From “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” to “This is your brain on drugs,” a PSA’s power often rested in targeted slogans or indelible imagery. Their messages answered urgent concerns and appealed to people’s sensibilities long before social media could do the same but on a larger scale.
Effectiveness aside, the frankness and oftentimes over-the-top nature of safety ads sometimes led to tragicomedy. A prime example is the 1977 public information film called Apaches, a British short notorious for its grisly content. The brutal, 27-minute PIF was made to educate agricultural areas about farm safety, but it instead scared the living hell out of a whole generation of children.
Along with Graphic Films, the now-defunct Central Office of Information (COI) produced Apaches for the United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive. However, it also reached places outside of rural UK, including Australia, Canada, and the United States. The infamous short was quickly shot in a home-county farm in England with its child actors hailing from Maidenhead, Berkshire. This PIF is a direct response to the inordinate number of children’s farm-related fatalities from the year before the short’s release; the casualties’ first names, ages, and causes of death are displayed during Apaches’ end credits. Today, the film can be readily found online as well as on home video.
‘Apaches’
The Long Good Friday director John Mackenzie does not hold back when picking off the kids in Apaches. With the exception of cousin Michael (Ian Scrace), Kim (Louise O’Hara), Sharon (Sharon Smart), Danny (Robbie Oubridge), Tom (Fion Smith), and Robert (Wayne Tapsfield) all meet an unfortunate and weird end on an especially hazardous farm. Writer Neville Smith has the boys and girls playing “cowboys and Indians” when their adventures turn deadly. Their deaths take place at different points in time, but each one of them is a result of their immersive roleplay.
The PIF’s nastiness begins with Kim getting crushed by a moving tractor. His fate is indirectly shown, yet the blood dripping from the tire thereafter indicates the gruesomeness in store for everyone else. Anyone who grew up with the belief quicksand is everywhere and an automatic death sentence may feel validated when watching Tom fall into a slurry pit and never resurface. With four to go, the survivors later discover a bottle of an unknown chemical and pretend to drink it. Unfortunately for Sharon, she swallows some of the lethal liquid and perishes in the middle of the night; her agonized, dying screams heard off screen say more than a direct shot of her passing ever could. Finally, Robert is crushed by a falling iron gate in a pretend shootout, and the film’s narrator Danny buys the farm after driving a tractor into a ditch.
‘Apaches’
Apaches is notable for its dreamlike atmosphere, unusual scale of time, and the eerie fact that Danny is narrating the story’s events from beyond the grave. Smith pens credible dialogue, and Mackenzie convincingly mimics post-war Western movie imagery in spite of limited time and funding. Aside from the deathly howling accompanying every slaying, the children have no realistic reactions to their peers’ sudden departures; the parents mourn in silence, if at all. Everything here is so surreal and unsettling, so it is no wonder this PIF is ingrained in people’s memories.
Apaches is not a one-off in the COI’s history of scaring kiddos; it is only one of several vintage shorts where children are imperiled by threatening environs or unscrupulous adults. A robed, Death-like spirit watches reckless youths play around lakes and ponds in 1973’s Lonely Water. Preadolescents are viciously punished when ignoring railway rules in British Transport Films’ controversial 1977 short The Finishing Line. And two boys’ carelessness and impatience in 1983’s Cyclist Turning Right lead to a fatal traffic accident. The distinguished Never Go with Strangers from 1971 lacks the pedicide of its peers, but Sarah Erulkar’s 18-minute PIF affrights just the same. Distrustful men lure and stalk vulnerable youngsters by offering car rides, candy, or cute animals to play with. On top of the stressful dramatizations, the film boasts disquieting, animated sequences of fairytales like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Hansel and Gretel.”
‘Building Sites Bite’
In 1978, David Hughes warned children of the risks of playing around construction sites and derelict structures. Building Sites Bite is just as grim as Apaches, but the execution is sillier. The setup has Paul and Jane imagining what would happen if their foolhardy cousin Ronald, who aspires to be an architect or a surveyor, was placed at various worksites. They wager whether or not Ronald will disobey advisory signs, and when he indeed dies from his mistakes, his cousins instantly resurrect him in hopes that he will change his behavior. No such luck seeing as he expires each and every time – Ronald is buried alive, run over, electrocuted, and finally drowned. Mackenzie’s short behaves like a supernatural slasher à la Final Destination, whereas Hughes’ has a Saw-like sensibility; the bemused Paul and Jane watch remotely as their relative succumbs to his own rashness within various deathtraps.
Once upon a time, shock tactics like those in Apaches were all too common when recommending child safety in potentially treacherous situations. Taking children’s lives in storytelling is taboo nowadays, but there was a time when quelling kids’ impetuous habits was put above all else. Scaring grade schoolers back then into obedience with vivid depictions of injury and demise was more admissible, and hand-holding was frowned upon. Today, social climates are entirely different, and a gentler approach often yields better results. Even so, a vestige of TV like Apaches can be appreciated for its accidental entertainment.
‘Never Go With Strangers’
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3670179/horrors-apaches-vintage-british-safety-films-formative-fears/
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