Nightmare Fuel / Public Service Announcements: Safety

"But really, I should've cleaned up the grease over there..."

Because public service announcements come in many shapes and sizes and tackle so many different subjects, it's not surprising that many of them are bound to scare even the bravest viewers straight.

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Transport Safety

The misuse of vehicles takes so many forms and has brought upon so many bone-chilling public service announcements that they now have their own page.

Child Safety

Just because we've made it past abusers and drugs doesn't mean the wee ones are safe. Children are naive, curious, and fragile, so these ads make sure to pile on the horror by showing just what will happen if we don't keep them from getting into dangerous things.

Long-form films

• The Play Safe and Powerful Stuff public information films, which were produced by the same people, are especially frightening to view, especially since you're witnessing people getting injured to out-right killed due to incidents that involve electricity. The two films were trimmed down to separate clips for television advertising.
  • It goes without saying that the "Frisbee" segment from the Play Safe film, commonly referred to as "Jimmy Gets Electrocuted", is such an infamous PIF, especially for those who grew up in The '70s. Here, we're introduced to Jimmy, who attempts to retrieve his frisbee from a substation and gets killed as a result. The Moog sounding music that plays throughout this particular spot gives a sense of creepiness, along with the escalating danger that follows as Jimmy reaches his fate (which includes his pants setting on fire). And how can we not forget the sister's horrified cry of her brother's death?
  • The aforementioned film also contained a segment based around vandalism, notably the only one not to get a television edit. In context, a boy flings a metal chain toward a pylon, which leads to an electrical blast causing a power cut around the area he lives in. This too indirectly causes his sister to get involved in a fatal traffic accident as it was too dark to see out there, which he then learns about after hearing a police officer tell his mother about what's been going on.
  • Ever wondered how you if you own an electric substation, could use a way of keeping children away from them without necessarily shouting "Stay out of here! This is not a playground!" Here's a good way.^note Allegedly, this clip from the Powerful Stuff PIF is a reworking of the "Frisbee" section from the 1977 Play Safe PIF, which is probably even more unnerving due to the creepy electronic music.
  • Another ad depicts a teenager trespassing into a sub-station and climbing up a tall electricity pylon to retrieve two kids' entangled kite against their wishes. This one is arguably worse because while the "Frisbee" PIF more or less treated the audience to a Gory Discretion Shot of cutting away to avoid the aftermath, this one actually shows us the boy being electrocuted and falling a great height from the pylon, his charred corpse plummeting towards the camera only to be freeze-framed at the last second.
  • Another one focused on the dangers of climbing near cables. A mother is on her phone as her two daughters are playing badminton outside, with the shuttlecock getting stuck up a tree near some electrical wires. One of the girls volunteers to get it, sets up a ladder (which builders forgot to take away), and, despite her sister's warnings to watch out for the power lines, climbs up anyway, believing them to be for the telephone. She tries to push the shuttle off with her net, only for it to touch the wires, electrocuting her as a low-pitched scream can be heard over her falling down. The mother, now in horror, runs outside to find her daughter lying down on the grass presumably dead.
• John Mackenzie's notorious Apaches from 1977, a 26-minute long public information film made to show the dangers of playing on farms, showed children dying in various horrible ways while playing on a farm.
  • A boy named Tom drowns slowly in a slurry pit.
  • A girl named Kim is run over by a tractor.
  • Another boy named Robert gets crushed under a metal gate.
  • But none of these scenes can compare with what is possibly the movie's scariest and most disturbing scene; a girl named Sharon unintentionally drinks some weed killer — probably loaded with ultra-deadly Paraquat — and goes home not feeling well. A few hours later, she wakes up in the middle of the night in excruciating pain, horrifically screaming and crying for her mother, while she slowly dies from poisoning. What really makes this scene especially disturbing is not just Sharon shrieking in agony, but also the fact that we are never actually shown what's happening to the poor girl, as all we see during that scene is a shot of the outside of her house as the lights in her mother's bedroom and then her bedroom turn on — and then the jarring silence of her heartbroken mother quietly removing things from her now-empty bedroom in the very next scene. It gets even worse when you consider that while the other kids died quickly and relatively painlessly, Sharon had to suffer for God only knows how many hours in the most intense pain one can imagine before she finally died, probably of multiple organ failure.
  • Danny's (the narrator) death is quite scary as well, as he helplessly plunges to his death in an out-of-control tractor off a high ledge. His screaming as he falls is absolutely bone-chilling — as is the following cut-away to his coffin being lowered into the ground at his funeral.
  • As is the final scene, where instead of cast and production credits, in plain writing over the near-silence of the wake after the funeral, it says:
    In the year before this film was made; Alan aged 15 years, was electrocuted on a farm. Anthony aged 10 years, suffocated in a grain pit. Brian aged 3 years, Mary aged 2 years, Philip aged 6 years, were killed by falling gates. Keith aged 15 years was killed in an explosion on a farm. Stephen aged 15 years was burned to death in a rick fire. Alan aged 15 years, Charlotte aged 4 years, Clive aged 5 years, David aged 13 years, John aged 5 years, Louise aged 9 years, Mark aged 4 years, Michael aged 8 years, Patrick aged 4 years, Paul aged 13 years, Penny aged 3 years, Peter aged 4 years, Richard aged 15 years, Sarah aged 2 years were all crushed to death by farm machinery.
• John Krish's infamous The Finishing Line, from 1977, a 21 minute long British Transport Films commission about a child daydreaming about their school's sports day being held on a railway track. It's quite graphic, to say the least, especially the aftermath of "the great tunnel walk" scene.
• After The Finishing Line provoked a massive outcry due to its graphic content, it was withdrawn and replaced by a much tamer film called Robbie. But then, in 1992, it was back to business as usual with Killing Time, a film guaranteed to traumatise those viewers who weren't already traumatised by The Finishing Line itself. The first half is a staged dramatization of a teenager being killed while trespassing into a rail yard and trying to cross the line, while the second half consists of interviews with both police and the mother of a boy killed in a rail trespass death. Sandwiched between the two halves are gruesome photos of real life accident victims, including a young child (thankfully pixelated in the upload).
• There exists one extremely gory PSA, entitled Children are Too Young to Die, which aims to educate its audience against "Elevator Surfing", the act of standing on top of an elevator while it's operating. It shows a young boy who ventures on top of an elevator inside one of the New York City housing projects, and as it goes up, he doesn't realize a ladder is above him, and it chops his arm off. The child screams in agony as blood is splattered across the wall of the shaft. The film doesn't show the boy's arm being chopped off, but even worse, it shows the bloody aftermath of the firefighters carrying the boy off the lift, then the desperate rush to find his severed arm so it could be saved. It then goes on to show actual photos of children in elevator accidents, and all of this is just in the beginning of the video, which appears to be far tamer. According to the uploader, this film was also shown between 8 to 14-year-olds in Germany before being pulled from classrooms due to the nature of the film scaring children. Even worse is the ending, where it's revealed that 22 days after filming, a 12-year-old boy was found crushed to death in the same elevator shaft where the PSA was filmed.
• Building Sites Bite features Ronald who is sent by his cousins to different building sites and is given the challenge to "Find his dog and get out without getting hurt." Needless to say, the poor lad stumbles upon his death in every site, being buried alive in a trench collapse, electrocuted by a frayed wire in a half-demolished house, breaking his skull on a concrete wall after falling off a pipe, crushed beneath a pile of bricks and drowns in an abandoned quarry. The moral of the story was that he simply should have declined to go or at least heeded all warning signs. The creepy part? When Ronald is electrocuted, they zoom in on his burned hand, then his pale body, dead on the floor of the building, eyes wide open. That and his cousins are unfazed by his deaths. In the end, it turns out that these deaths are all imagined by Ronald (hence his cousins not being fazed) and he ultimately decides to not go into the building sites.

Miscellaneous

• "Mr. Yuk" is a poison control symbol, the idea being that when kids see the green, disgusted face on a product, they'll know it's dangerous. The accompanying PSA's downbeat music, creepy visuals, and emphasis that ingesting these products will make you "sick, sick, sick!", definitely help that point.
• A scary flex safety PIF shows a baby standing near an ironing tool left on a table. As the baby pulls on the ironing cord, the ironing tool falls on the baby. The mother is shocked as we see a plastic baby doll with a massive dent in its forehead while the tagline "KEEP FLEXES OUT OF CHILDREN'S REACH" appears. It's very scary that you can only see the baby doll and not the actual baby itself. The 40-second version is scarier as we actually get to see what happens to the baby. Sure, it's tamer since the baby turns out to be OK, and the narrator sounds more friendly, but the music at the end does not help.
• A 1979 home safety PIF shows a baby walking around a house, touching nearby objects. An ominous-sounding narrator tells you to watch what your baby is touching, as, near the end, the baby touches the fireplace. The music doesn't help either.
• So you're writing a Government Information Advert to prevent little towheaded British children from drowning. Why not get the late great Donald Pleasence to wear a hood and stalk them? Thus spells the origins of "The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water" from 1973, one of the most famous and iconic PIFs of all time. The horror comes from how the Spirit subtly shows great pride and amusement in watching children fall into deep water and drown. It's slightly reduced by him reverting to just his shroud and landing in the water after a group of self-described "sensible children" arrive to try to rescue a careless swimmer, but the horror comes back with him stating in an echoing voice as he sinks, "I'll be BACK!".
  "The show-offs are easy, but the unwary ones are easier still."
• Aired some point around the late 90s to early 00s, there existed a series of short electrical safety awareness PIFs in Northern Ireland, part of the little-known Power2Shock campaign by Northern Ireland Electricity Networks. All of the known ones, which can be viewed here, showcase scary scenarios on the risks of electricity that were based on actual events as the tagline claims. The thought about this makes the following spots more disturbing to the viewer, especially for those that focus on the general public’s unfortunate accidents with electricity:
  • This one, in which a boy attempts to retrieve a girl’s doll from a substation, is fairly reminiscent of the Play Safe film (particularly the "Frisbee" segment), but what makes this creepy is how the tension rises more and more before the boy reaches his fate. The way the smoke and sparks come out of the doll as the boy approaches is downright terrifying, especially the close-up shot of the doll on fire towards the end, serving as a harrowing end to an already creepy scenario.
  • Another spot that focuses on how vandalism can cause death also features quite a disturbing scenario. For that one, we're introduced to some vandals breaking open a mini pillar, which then leads to a young curious victim getting killed by the electrical blast from fiddling with the pillar. You could just imagine how unsettling this would've been for those innocent kids in the PIF here.
  • Like the “Substation” ad, another had a similar premise to a segment in the Play Safe film (the one on the “Kites” to be exact), only to take a more grim approach. The aftermath of the victim here, who appeared to be a mother, is downright depressing, going from accidentally flying a kite into the power lines to having her family around during their funeral. Not helped either is the implication of her daughter having trauma from witnessing her mother's death.
  • Aside from the aforementioned PIFs, there was also one that demonstrates the risks of digging near underground cables. This one features a shot where once the electrical explosion occurs the mother and her baby get blown away from the accident, having the pram collapse on the ground. Thankfully, the last shot features a safer alternative method of handling risks by showing the workers checking the ground for danger and having the mother happily walk beside the scene. This however doesn’t really make up for that "shocking" moment.
  • Another general work safety spot of the campaign, featuring an old man riding a tractor, is also unpleasant. For this spot, the driver is unaware of the power lines above, with the hay that he's carrying touching the lines, causing the hay to catch fire and the power of his house to shut down. To make matters worse, the tractor suddenly explodes and gets caught up in flames, making it obvious the man got killed in the accident as the camera lingers on the burning wreck. The eerie Last Note Nightmare doesn't help.
• A similar ad was aired on Dutch TV in the early nineties; there was a PSA advising kids not to try and climb the fences surrounding the giant electrical transformers that power the countries. How did they do this? By showing a distressingly realistic and graphic portrayal of a young teenager electrocuting himself followed by his distraught brother kneeling down next to him and putting a hand on the transformer as the screen goes to black with a hideous zapping noise and the warning "Don't risk your life, don't climb the fences".
• In the early eighties in the US there was a series of PSA's about electrocution that all featured eerie narration over the sound of ECG "blips". A series of advancing photo stills would show someone being Too Dumb to Live around power lines or similar electrical equipment: a guy on a ladder fixing his TV antenna, curious kids breaking into a transformer box, and here a careless crane operator. The others ended with a loud "BZZZT!" as the screen cut to black and the ECG would Flatline, as the narrator admonished, "Don't Put Your Life On The Line." They all ran during time-slots when kids were likely to be watching.
• This UK ad about the dangers of keeping your medicines in reach of young children shows a group of little children upstairs eating medicine that wasn't kept locked away, unable to tell the difference between the medicine and sweets. At the end, one of their mothers comments how quiet it is up there and the ending shot has the medicines still on the table but the children are nowhere to be seen.
• This 1973 PIF, a combination of anti-littering and general safety, is no more comfortable to watch as an adult. It depicts a boy running all across the beach, happy and carefree, but at the end, the camera pans down to a broken glass bottle as a scary voiceover says "The last place in the world to leave a bottle... is a beach." And just as the kid is almost about to step on the glass, the video freezes, but you can feel the sheer pain he'll most likely feel.
• Varokaa heikkoa jäätä (here), which loosely translates to "Beware of weak ice". Released in 1986, this Finnish PSA features weird animation, spooky music, and a scary grumbling bear in the end - traumatizing Finnish children for a few decades now.
• This 1979 animated UK ad warns of the dangers of... tying bags to the handles of prams and pushchairs (or strollers, if you're American). Sound a tad ridiculous of a subject for a PIF? Try laughing after you've seen a baby topple several feet face-first into a glass shattering on the pavement, and heard its mother's horrific, electronically-distorted scream, which is played at the beginning and at the end (where it's lower-pitched and thus creepier), and the volume of which is cranked up to levels of Sensory Abuse. According to this, the uneven weight of the bags will cause the stroller to become unbalanced and at risk of falling over if the baby shakes it too much — prams have those shallow baskets underneath for a reason.
  Narrator: This is every mother's nightmare. You left your baby for just a moment. While you're gone, the baby starts to rock. The pram tips. Don't let the nightmare come true.
• "What are your kids learning?" It's a PSA from TLC, where a boy watches a video online. It's never shown what's in the video, but there's a man panting and grunting and a bleating goat, and it's pretty obvious he's watching something... off-color. The kid runs off... and then comes back into the room with his pet poodle before shutting the door. The image then cuts out... but you can hear the poodle whimpering.
• After two children choked to death on Burger King's Poké Ball toys, this ad ran announcing a recall. It ran on stations that children would likely be watching, including reruns of Leave It to Beaver on TV Land. It's pretty chilling due to the minimalist tone and Creepy Monotone narrator talking about suffocations. Even worse, some versions of the ad were preceded by an extremely loud and hellish beeping sound guaranteed to scare the shit out of anyone watching.
• During the Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, Nationwide Insurance aired this ad. It starts off rather cute, with a child lamenting that he'll never do certain things until the kid says that he will never grow up because he died in an accident. Then it shows an overflowed bathtub, some spilled cleaning supplies, and even more horrific a flatscreen that's fallen on the floor with broken glass, implying a child had been crushed by it. Remember that this aired during the Super Bowl, where the ads were expected to be funny, or at the very least uplifting. People were upset, and made "Nationwide Insurance" a trending topic on Twitter, with many talking about how tasteless and horrible the ad was.
• Watersafe Auckland did an advert that shows three women in bikinis getting ready to sunbathe on the beach. If you're too Distracted by the Sexy, you probably won't notice what's happening to the kid in the dinghy out on the water until it's too late.
• In one advert, a man and a woman are in their kitchen cooking breakfast when they get into a playful Food Fight. She throws an egg at him and he dodges, causing the egg to smash against the sliding glass door. Mood Whiplash sets in when the wife suddenly freezes, staring in horror at the yolk running down the glass. A voiceover intones: "Child seatbelts. Forget them once, and you'll remember it forever." as the couple turn to look at two empty high chairs in the corner.
• This PIF shows a woman what the world looks like from the perspective of her young son. What may resemble a puzzle, a jump rope or a roller coaster to a child is in reality an electrical outlet, the hanging cord of hot iron, and a flight of stairs, respectively. Not helping in easing the fear is the creepy Soundtrack Dissonance which sounds like warped lullaby/calliope music.
• A 1993 UK PIF about child bath safety shows a mother placing her son Michael in a bathtub, before leaving to answer a phone call. While she's gone, Michael turns the handles of the faucet, filling up the bathtub to the point that he begins drowning. The mother notices the eerie silence in the bathroom and realizes what is happening, rushing in to save Michael in the nick of time.
• "Know Before You Mow", an ad campaign targeting lawn mower safety around children, has four television adverts. They each depict children doing everyday things — including coloring, playing video games, swinging on a swing set, and sitting in a sandbox — as a lawnmower audibly plays in the background. Then, the children suddenly run off-screen, and you can hear the sound of the mower blades hitting something other than grass, before the ad cuts to black with the text "Every year almost 10,000 children are injured in mowing accidents. Always know where your kids are." The website also has disturbing stories told from the perspective of both children and parents about horrific lawnmower accidents.
• This PSA from a foundation named Abbey's Hope features a young girl speaking to the audience and explaining how she's about to drown in a swimming pool surrounded by family and friends because no one is watching her and each of her parents think the other one is accountable for her. As she then tries to explain further, she's eventually overcome by her struggling and sinks underneath mid-sentence.
• This unsettling 1970s pond safety ad from the UK starts off with a little girl going outside with a balloon and jumping around and playing with the cat with happy music in the background. She walks over to a pond and attempts to fill a watering can up, with the synth music turning sinister. A splashing noise occurs, and the camera cuts to the girl lying face down near the pond, not moving. The narrator then gives tips on how to prevent that from happening, such as covering the pond with a strong mesh, draining the pond, and making a sandpit for the child to play in until he/she grows up. We're told not to expect children to keep away from water just because you told them to. The music turns dramatic again as we see the same clip of the little girl attempting to fill her watering can up, followed by a freeze-frame.
• This British ad about preventing burns. We see a first-person shot of a father putting his cup of drink on the edge of the table and grabbing his newspaper. We then get a first-person shot of a child running over to grab a newspaper, but accidentally knocks over the mug, causing the drink to spill on the child's face. We're to look at it from their point of view as the father moves his mug to the middle of the table as the child successfully grabs the newspaper and walks away.
• This chilling British ad about cycle safety has a child crying in a dark corner near some bikes as he tells a story about his brother who refused to wear a helmet because he didn't want his hair to get messed up and thought his mates would laugh. The boy reveals that he died as he turns to the camera, his eyes bloodshot from grief.
  Child: Didn't think it would happen to him, did he? Well, it did! And now he's dead!
• This 1984 water safety ad from Britain shows a family going for a walk, with the daughter and son starting to run while their father calls out for them to slow down. They ignore this warning, resulting in the girl falling into a river as she gasps for breath and struggles to stay afloat. The father then attempts to save his daughter, to no avail, as we get to see the two of them drowning as his wife cries out in despair. We then get one last shot of the father and daughter struggling to swim, leaving their fate unknown.
• This 1977 child safety ad from Britain about the dangers of your child traveling in the front seat. We see a lonely and sad-looking man walking around a park with sad music playing in the background. While all this is happening, we hear some voice clips of a coroner talking about identifying the body of a deceased girl, implying that said man was a father. We hear some voice clips of the daughter asking her dad if she can sit in the front seat, in which her father lets her, and some voice clips of a policeman talking about the damage and finding out that the father's daughter was in the front seat. The music then ends with a Last Note Nightmare as we see the man shedding a tear and getting up to leave the park.
  Narrator: Make sure your child always rides in the back of your car, strapped in safely, if possible. Never let a small child travel in the front.
• This 2004 advert from Mexico features a rubber ducky in a full bathtub which turns to the side to reveal rather graphic burn marks as a child reveals how he and many others are victims to hot burns. The disturbing music doesn't help.
• This one from 2014 in Australia shows a boy doing a cannonball in the pool. Everything seems fine, at first, until the boy slips over and bangs his head on the edge, with the mother screaming to see if he's okay. She then tries to get into the pool, but there is a barrier blocking her way. The mother tries to break the barrier while she sees her child lying unconscious in the water, but it's no use, as she has to see her child die.
  Tagline: If you don't know first aid, you can't help.
• This live advertisement in the United Kingdom from St John starts off with a history of popcorn, which cuts to a family getting ready to eat the snack until one of the girls starts choking horrifically, with the happy music still playing. The mother gets increasingly more worried to the point of tears, with the family having no clue what to do. Luckily, a nurse is able to help and somehow enters the movie itself. The music changing into an ominous windy droning noise makes it clear the nurse arrived in the nick of time, and only stops once she dislodges the obstruction with three solid slaps to the back. The nurse returns to the theater to a well-earned round of applause.
• This one from the Indiana Department of Child Services starts as a home video made by a dad of his wife and baby asleep on the couch. They try to get the baby's attention... only to realize she's not breathing, as we hear the family panicking. It then tells you that you should absolutely never sleep with a baby, even for a minute.
  • Another PSA from the same people starts off as a home movie for a toddler's birthday party, only to take a turn for the worse as the toddler falls into the pool & begins to drown. As we cut to the tagline, we can still hear the cries of her mother trying to find her daughter.
• This 2001 PIF from The Netherlands shows us several cleaning products cleverly disguised as candy and chocolate, all while the captions unveil to us their true nature. It's somewhat normal on paper, but its' execution is quite a bit unnerving due to the camerawork, ominous music, and creepy text, as well as the darkroom and the idea that children could easily mistake them for candy and get themselves hurt or killed.
  Tagline: If you can't tell the difference, how are your children supposed to?
• This ad from the Netherlands shows a compilation of home-video clips of babies and young children being involved in small accidents, complete with a laugh track, goofy music, and wacky sound effects a la America's Funniest Home Videos. However, we're then told, via text, that, every day, parents watch their kids break bones, suffer serious injuries, and even die. While we're told this, more clips play, but the music and sound effects stop, being replaced by the sounds of the little kids crying. Eventually, we're told that parents must keep track of where their kids are. It's haunting in its execution.
  Tagline: Learn faster than they do.
• Another ad from the Netherlands shows us a first person view of a baby and its mother. We see the baby's perspective as it cries from falling from walking, losing its toys/teddy bear, and being awake. The message is straightforward: a baby's main form of communication is crying when something's wrong. However, things take a turn for the worse when the mother gives the baby a bath. When the mother turns around to get something, the baby moves enough end up sinking into the water. The baby tries to cry but is unable to because it's drowning. We're then told, "A baby's natural alarm doesn't work underwater." We're then told that drowning kills infants more than any other accident. It's enough to make any parent keep a better eye out for their infants.
  Tagline: Be alert.
• Yet another ad from the Netherlands talking about the dangers of co-sleeping with babies starts out rather innocent, with a compilation of various parents holding their children — one mother holds their child close to them after he's crying by himself, another mother holds their child close to her while they're riding on an elevator, a father holds his baby close to him in order to protect it from a dog rushing at it, and finally, a baby holding onto its mother while the two of them ride an escalator as text onscreen explains that your instincts would tell you that your child is safe close to you. At first, it seems to be rather innocent, until the final scene shows a baby sleeping on the same bed its mother and father are sleeping on. As the father pulls their blanket close to him, the blanket ends up covering the baby completely as well; text then comes onscreen, explaining that "the chance of suffocation is forty times higher when a child is not sleeping in its own bed".
  Tagline: Be prepared.
• The New Zealand organization Poolsafe made this rather unsettling ad. We see three children playing at a pool and falling while circus music and a laugh track plays and a goofy, Mickey Mouse sounding narrator tells jokes in the background about the kids' predictament. Then we quickly cut to the three kids now in the hospital for injuries caused by the falls. The third child severely hurt their back after landing on a diving board, the first one has scrape injuries on their face, and the second child, by far the scariest portion, is in a hospital bed, implied to be unconscious, because they hit their head on the tile by the pool. Making matters worse is that the circus music and laugh track still play in the background, the latter can be heard during the replays of the falls, along with the narrator. It's VERY chilling in its execution.
  Tagline: It's time to think seriously about pool safety.
• This Canadian PSA is a lesser example that relies more on suspenseful buildup and being realistic about a situation that's otherwise resolved. A woman and child are simply walking down the street before noticing that someone's watching them, so they attempt to run while more and more people start to surround them until they're cornered at the park. As it turns out, the woman is being caught for an attempted child abduction, while the other people had gotten an amber alert reporting the missing child and were tracking them down for the police.

Strangers and Predators

What you're about to see is just why (and how) ad campaigns implore the viewing public to be Too Smart for Strangers.

Strangers and Predators

• This radio PSA from 2006 about Internet paedophiles has two young girls talking about a girl that their friend Sal met on the internet. She's 17 with her own car and wanted to meet them, but Sal didn't want to go. One of the girls wonders whether Sal went alone, and the other reflects that she hasn't heard from her since.
• Another PSA on Internet and chat room safety was made for TV with a bright-looking and attractive 16-year-old communicating with someone she believes is her age, and that he can't wait to meet her. Reveal the other side of the conversation, and it's actually a middle-aged man, and the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions about whether the meeting took place.
• A radio PSA about sexual exploitation had a man describing how he uses child prostitutes. The ad becomes creepier and creepier as he says he likes very young girls and doesn't have to bother using condoms with them. We're led to believe that he goes abroad to find them, but at the end, he says there's no need for him to travel when he can get child prostitutes in his own hometown.
• A PSA from the Ad Council and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children features a grown man talking about chatting with teenage girls online and how easy it is to gain their trust (by playing on their insecurities and acting more mature than boys their age), while a young girl talks about how she enjoys the attention she gets from older guys on the Internet. As the two finish each other's sentences, it quickly becomes clear that the man does not have the girl's best interest at heart. And then there's the ending.
  Girl: I know what I'm doing. If you really care about each other, there's nothing wrong with—
  Man: Meeting is the goal. Once I get them out of their house, well… that's when things get really interesting.
  Narrator: Online predators know what they're doing. Do you?
• This advert from the Scottish Government has the voice of a pedophile speaking through the character on a girl's phone case.
• These Canadian PSAs against online child sexual abuse all follow the same formula: an adorable little game character introduces themselves and lists their superpowers which ends with them glaring and still smiling while telling the parents what they will do to their children (sending them nude pictures, tricking them into sending nude pictures, and luring them to meet in real life) with a Drone of Dread playing.
• There was a missing children's PSA from the mid-2000s. At the beginning of the commercial, we see a little girl explaining to us that "A stranger once offered me a ride home...", then the camera pans back quickly and the color fades as she is then talking from her "Missing" poster and says, "...and I haven't been seen in two years." We then see a little boy explaining to us, "A man once offered me money to help him look for his dog... and I said no." It is then that the picture of the little boy is freeze-framed into a photo in his family living room as he himself is walking outside to play catch with his father.
• One advert about Internet safety features one of the most terrifying examples of Vocal Dissonance. It starts with the camera looking up at a ceiling, and a young boy's voice speaking. The camera slowly pans down to reveal a grown man speaking in a child's voice, looking right at you. The message is that people on the internet may not necessarily be who they say they are.
• The television series Missing (not to be confused with the series of the same name starring Ashley Judd or with 1-800-Missing) assists in locating missing persons of all ages. The series also has child safety tips to keep them safe in many different situations, with the escalating danger involved in each one:
  • "Amusement park" involves a family out for a day of fun. While initially the mother just gives her two sons vague instructions on what to do, in a redo of what to do, she then tells them to synchronize their watches, meet up with the parents at the food court at lunchtime and always stay together.
  • "Department store" has a woman with her young son take her eyes off of him for a few seconds, only for him to vanish. She then asks a store employee for help who radios a coworker, and they lock the store down until he is found, which he is, just innocently wandering off.
  • "Directions" has a little girl being dropped off at home after school when a man pulls up asking for directions. After initially heading towards the car to assist, she then declines in helping the man, who drives off, in a situation that could have easily gone either way.
  • "Lost dog" has a man approaching two young boys ostensibly looking for his dog. After offering $20 to help in the search, the one boy agrees while his friend decides not to. The redo of the situation has both boys refusing and then saying that they'll get their fathers to help him, which scares the man off.
  • "Field trip" has a group of children on a field trip to a museum when a woman gets one of the young girls' attention by calling her by her name and walking off with her. The redone scenario has the young girl asking her teacher if she has to go away with the woman, which gets her and a security guard's attention and causes the woman to run off.
  • The last one, "Plane ticket", is probably the scariest scenario. It has a teenage girl angry with her mother for not letting her use a plane ticket that an online friend mailed her for her birthday. After getting in contact with the friend's father, who assures the mother about the situation, the girl gets back in contact with her friend saying that her mother let her go... and the friend is really the man himself posing as her. Even worse, there's no indication that she ever realized whom she was talking to and didn't meet up with him.
• This subtly horrifying PSA from Singapore shows a man walking with a seemingly happy girl as she skips alongside him; we're at first led to believe that this man is the girl's father. The true horror of the situation is revealed when a sentence appears on-screen, explaining that a police officer would probably think that the man is the girl's father, but a neighbor would know that the man is a stranger.

Safe Viewership

With all the disturbing imagery these organizations have put out, some viewers might insist that they Think of the Children!! Well, it looks like they saw fit to fight fire with fire...

Safe Viewership

• An anti-violence PIF for German network SWR Fernsehen is either horrific or, as easportsbig899 calls it, a horror movie fan's wet dream. It depicts a bunch of graphic clips from horror movies and the like (such as The Shining and It), overdubbed with voices singing Brahms' Lullaby.
• A similar ad from the same people as the above ad is more gruesome than this straight-up shows graphic death scenes from various action and horror movies with a child's voice counting them one by one like counting sheep to fall asleep. It ends with a tagline asking parents what their children count to fall asleep and reminding them to watch what they see on TV.
• Another ad from the same network depicts a father taking his young son on a trip into a big city, filmed through a creepy fisheye lens view. During the spot the father shows his son such horrific sights, including a car accident, a man being assaulted, another shooting up in a public bathroom, a woman getting raped, a dead body wrapped in plastic... All of it set to an upbeat song from a 1950s German flick about how The World Is Just Awesome. The message at the end is that if you wouldn't show your kids this in real life, don't let them see it on TV.
  • There also existed another variant of the ad that replaces the track with Aphex Twin’s “Fingerbib”, which lessens the scariness of the PIF only by a small margin.
• Yet another one from the SWR has a young girl asleep, but she is suffering nightmares as screams and other violent noises are heard. What started off as unsettling quickly becomes horrifying as she opens her eyes to reveal a static screen on each one.
  Tagline: Violence on TV always has a sequel.
• South Africa's Parents For Responsible Viewing released three downright morbid ads in 2004 to remind parents to control what their kids watch. They feature the titular "Biggie Bear" doing seemingly child-friendly things as the PSA begins, only for each ad to take a dark and disturbing turn by the end, where Biggie proceeds to show his true colors and torture (and, in the first one, kill) the poor schmuck who runs into him. The third one is arguably the worst, as it shows him downright raping Miss Pussycat, the "friend" in question.
• This odd but creepy 2002 British ad which acts like a horror trailer where a young boy watches a film on TV that wasn't meant for him in the first place. We then get shown all the film certificates, which are 18, 15, 12A, PG, and U while talking about content advice.

Fire Safety

Once you have seen these, you'll definitely remember to take every precaution to prevent a fire from breaking out, and make sure that everyone's prepared in case one does, lest everything you hold dear goes up in smoke.

Fire Kills

What the US Partnership to End Addiction is to drugs, UK Fire Kills is to fire safety.

• There was a fire safety PIF in the UK a few years ago. The ad starts with a close-up on a man's face, emotionless and apparently dead. He then suddenly breaks down in tears as the camera zooms out to reveal him standing in a house that's been completely destroyed by fire, to the accompaniment of a disembodied voice (a small child saying "Goodnight, daddy.") and as his sobs echo, a voiceover says "A fire doesn't have to kill you to take your life", implying that his family died in the fire. See it here.
• An even scarier film urged the public to plan how they would escape the house if a fire started, and anticipate potential dangers. It showed children trapped in a burning house screaming for their dad (because no one had taught them what to do in an emergency); an old woman screaming for help and banging on her door because she can't find her keys, with a shot of the empty street outside that makes it clear no one will save her in time, and a man who fails to escape from a fire when he trips over a bicycle lying in the hall. It was eventually removed from the air after complaints that it terrified children. View it here.
• This 2012 example features a coroner narrating the (out-of-frame) autopsy of a child who died in a fire, intercut with home videos of the dead child. As if the dispassionate description of the effects of smoke inhalation weren't grim enough, the final line is "Parents survived everything."
• This PIF about chip pan safety. A woman's voice-over provides information on what to do and what not to do in the events of a chip pan fire, such as turning off the stove and not moving the pan, however, the ad ends with a bit of a shock factor. For those who would rather not watch: After the audience is informed that they must not throw water over the fire (with a shot of someone doing exactly that, followed by the fire practically leaping for the ceiling in an instant) the camera pans to the right revealing the woman narrating the video watching the footage on a screen. She ends the video with a short reminder that "the effects can be devastating" with a close-up on her deformed face, showing that either due to ignorance or just a plain mistake, she hadn't followed those instructions.
  • The ad gets slightly more horrifying if you've taken an actual cooking class that teaches you about grease fires. For the curious, the ad states that in order to smother the fire, one should run a washcloth under the sink faucet (or tap), wring it out, and drape it over the pot until it cools. In actuality, doing so will actually more likely make the fire worse, due to the fact that if the cloth was decently wrung out, the fire can dry out the washcloth completely and then use the cloth as fuel. Conversely, if the cloth wasn't wrung out enough, the water trapped inside can drip down into the fire. This ends up resulting in exactly the same kind of problem that the ad was trying to prevent in the first place. For this reason, fire departments in the UK have recently started advising people not to attempt to put chip pan fires out themselves but to get out of the house and call 999 instead. (They also recommend that people buy deep-fryers instead of using a chip pan.)
• This eerie smoke alarm PIF, which compares smoke inhalation to drowning.
• Another creepy Fire Kills PIF depicted shots of funeral services and tombstones, featuring quotes from people who made excuses for not having a smoke alarm, all set to a very creepy rendition of "Down by the River to Pray". The ad ends with a close-up of a tombstone featuring a quote from a woman who said "My husband should've done it", then a quote from her husband who said "My landlord should've done it"... and a shot of the name of their 3-month-old baby. They were briefly pulled due to the unfortunate timing of premiering in September 2001.
  • There’s another version of the PIF which shows a hearse and a burnt house.
• Another one about smoke alarms shows a clock on a mantelpiece slowly melting from the heat, as the rumble of the fire can be heard in the background. And that's all there is to it.
• Some of their radio ads aren't much better. The scariest of the bunch is perhaps "Silent Night". While a rather peaceful rendition of the titular Christmas song plays in the background, we hear the voice of a woman frantically calling 999 to report a fire in her home. A siren plays as firefighters are heard noting the smoke billowing out of the front door of the home and that there are four people trapped inside. A paramedic is also heard taking in one of the victims for severe smoke inhalation and possible brain damage. The ad ends with the now-hysteric woman screaming that her children are still inside the burning home (her daughter can even be heard weakly crying for her "Mama"). A horrific roar suddenly drowns her out, suggesting that the house collapsed and subsequently killed her children.
• Another paranoia-inducing radio ad had a little girl narrating how she woke up in the middle of a house fire. She got separated from her mother and baby brother when the fire prevented them from escaping down the stairs. The girl's dad eventually saved her by taking her out of a window onto the roof, and she reflects that she wishes they'd planned for this before the fire, "then maybe we would all be alive."
• The London Fire Brigade released this 1990 PIF warning the dangers of foam furniture catching fire. The woman in the PIF was smoking and carelessly let her ash try to fall onto her foam chair as she walks out of the room while her cat looks worryingly at its owner, only for the chair to be quickly set ablaze and expelling cyanide gas. The chair then sports glowing red demonic eyes, and spews out cyanide gas out of its "mouth" at the cat and scaring it away, then proceeds to breathe streams of fire throughout the room until it was burned down along with everything else.
• This 2004 ad starts off innocent enough, with the narrator mentioning that most people forget innocent things like Valentine's Day, illustrated by a family who seems to live normally... until the narrator mentions the smoke alarm batteries; cue a shot of the burnt house, as the poor father grieves over his family's death as the cheerful music playing abruptly stops. The downright brutal Mood Whiplash does a good job of getting to the point.
• This 2004 fire safety ad about a doll, named Matilda, pulls no punches. She is afraid of the dark, so her parents light up a candle, which starts melting and burns up the bedroom and Matilda herself. Sadly, this is where the story ends as we get a final shot of her burnt bedroom and her disembodied arm.
• This 2004 ad which is a perfect reminder to not take the batteries out of smoke alarms. A narrator begins explaining about a smoke alarm and its features, such as detecting the smallest traces of smoke, having an 85-decibel alarm, etc. We then pan up to a man's eerily lit bedroom filled with smoke. The narrator informs us that the man took the batteries out of his smoke alarm because it kept going off.
• This 2000s ad shows a man called Brian, who always wanted to stop smoking, and so he did, as we see him drop a cigarette on the carpet as he falls asleep on his armchair.
• This chilling 2000s ad which really gets its point across and also counts as a Tear Jerker. We start off by zooming into a picture of a house while we hear a somber version of Deck The Halls. We then see a Christmas tree flickering inside the house, then the camera pans over to a plug socket, which is also flickering and apparently blows up, causing it to smoke. We then cut to a couch with a cigarette on a black container, which then falls on the couch. We then cut to a room with a candle that is really close to the curtains. We then cut to zoom and pan of a family picture painting, which then transitions into an actual family, wrapped up in wrapping paper, looking sad while watching their house burn.
• This one shows a man laughing maniacally while we see split-second clips of a kitchen in flames. It turns out that he is watching some funny shows on television, not realizing what is happening in the kitchen until he exits the living room.
• This smoke alarm PSA has a person slowly placing down a handbag, a picture, a shoe, and a camera on a table, with the objects making a creepy echoing thump when they’re put down. The message "Value your stuff?" appears, and shortly after, all of the objects turn into ash with a loud swooshing sound, with the text "Value your life. Check your smoke alarm."
• This PSA about chip pan fires has a woman noticing a chip pan fire. The text "DON’T" appears on a black screen and it shows a man swinging a flaming chip pan. The text "DON’T TRY" appear on a black screen again, and it shows the said man dropping the pan and igniting the floor around him. It then shows a woman filling a cup of water with a flaming pan in the background, then cutting to black with the text "DON’T TRY THIS". It then shows the woman pouring water on the flaming pan, which causes it to engulf the whole room in flames and the woman staggers backward. The text "DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME" appears on a black screen, and it shows the inside of said burnt house, with a partially burned drawing of a house, with the text and voiceover "GET OUT, STAY OUT, CALL 999". Creepy ambient music plays throughout the whole ad.
• Another smoke alarm ad has the text "This is the warning you’ll get if you don’t fit a smoke alarm" over complete silence. Then it shows the tagline "Smoke. The silent killer.", still over complete silence. In fact, the whole commercial is completely silent.
• This harrowing PSA features a living room where a Christmas tree catches on fire caused by a spark due to being too dry. The fire quickly grows and, within less than a minute, smoke engulfs the entire room. All of this is set to a (surprisingly creepy) rendition of Silent Night. It ends with text telling the viewer to turn out the Christmas lights at night. The impact is slightly deadend by the fact the footage was taken from a demonstration, and thus isn't real, but the visuals and music more than make up for that.
  Tagline: It only takes a minute.
• This one from 2004 follows the point of view of a firefighter as he narrates about an incident that had happened a year ago, where a family's house caught up in flames while the family was sleeping; he talks about how the mother escaped with her baby, while the husband tried to get their children but found their beds empty. The husband managed to escape, but didn't see the children outside, and when he tried to come inside to get them he was unable to due to the strength of the flames. The story being told to us is horrific enough on its own, but the final line of the entire PSA manages to be even more of a Gut Punch.
  Narrator: I found their bodies in the wardrobe -- where they'd hidden.

Miscellaneous

• This 1982 FDNY PSA about a real 1977 incident of a woman’s family burning to death in their own home. The commercial depicts two arms holding up a black and white photo of the woman when she was younger, as she recalls how the fire started due to her husband falling asleep in bed with a cigarette, killing her family and leaving her as the only survivor. This is followed by her saying "I guess you could say I was the lucky one..." while lowering the photograph to reveal a horribly scarred face — a final twist which terrified audiences.
• Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service has made some creepy adverts throughout their time.
  • One memorable PIF consisted of a dark and grim waiting room in the afterlife featuring a ghoulish receptionist mocking the victims of people killed due to fire accidents, including an elderly couple with overloaded electrics, a group of children who had been playing with matches, and a woman and her daughter, who looks up at her and says "You forgot the battery, mummy". A narrator informs the viewer to book their free home fire safety check as the PIF concludes with a close-up of the woman looking at you with a Kubrick Stare as she calls out "Next".
  • A campaign with several ads were filmed from the perspective of a firefighter in a burnt-out house, complete with the sound of heavy breathing from inside their mask. Each one would end with a chilling message scrawled on the wall in soot: "YOU FORGOT THE BATTERY, DADDY" or "YOU SAID YOUD BE TWO MINUTES". The worst of the bunch depicted a child's handprints in soot where they had tried to reach the door, ending in a jumble of prints and the words "I COULDN'T FIND THE WAY OUT."
    • An even scarier version of the commercials was based around dangers in the summer (crop fires, barbecues, etc) and would show the scene of an accident with a message left nearby. In one, a child's football is floating down a river while his mother frantically screams for him out of shot, and the words "YOU THOUGHT I WAS SAFE MUMMY" appear on a bridge piling.
• A terrifying PIF reminding people to shut their doors when there is a fire was even more unsettling. It shows a little girl going to bed, walking toward her door, while being chased by a giant tank that spits fire. A burst of ignited napalm from the tank's flamethrower almost hits the girl, but she closes the door, blocking it. The announcer concludes that if you close the door, "it will give you ten precious minutes to get out", before the flamethrower tank moves closer and the burning door falls down to reveal the terrified girl, as he continues, "leave it open, and it'll give you no time at all". The tagline Fire. Shut it out. fades in as another door slams shut. A variant of this ad has a slight difference in the script. Instead of the announcer saying "ten precious minutes", he says "valuable minutes".
• There's a US variant, too, produced by the New York City Fire Department. It lives up to the general creepiness level that's apparently required of its type.
• A haunting PIF on smoke alarms showed a girl tucking a doll in a dollhouse at night. An eerie-sounding narrator tells that they rely on you to wake them up when there's a fire as the dollhouse sets on fire. The music doesn't help.
• A chilling 1979 PIF titled "Don't Leave Your Children Alone". A girl narrates how she and her brother Steven decorated the Christmas tree, and later, their parents were out at a party. She explains how she woke up and smelled smoke, hearing Steven crying (and we hear him do so as she narrates the story). She then says that Steven stopped crying, and concludes with "That was last Christmas". During the narration, the camera shows the Christmas tree, then the picture of the brother and sister together. Then, it moves through the hallway, up the staircase, and into the girl's bedroom, revealing her to be sleeping alone in the dark. A narrator then says "Fire can break out at any time. This Christmas, don't leave your children alone in the house" as the tagline "DON'T LEAVE YOUR CHILDREN ALONE" appears.
• This UK PIF from 1974 called Searching, directed by John Krish. It shows someone looking around in their fire-destroyed house while a disembodied voiceover of the family screaming for each other can be heard. There is no mercy with this one.
• George and Betty, a 90's PIF about the dangers of old electric blankets, is pretty terrifying. It features an elderly couple whose romantic night in doesn't quite go as planned, complete with a harrowing shot of their burnt-out bed at the end. It's made worse because the visuals and music are upbeat and light-hearted before the Wham Shot at the end, with no indication of what the sport is about, and the juxtaposition of the burned bed and the narrator's obvious amusement is very unsettling.
  Narrator: On George and Betty's night of romance, things got a bit... too hot to handle.
  • Adding in some Fridge Horror: The narrator in this PIF is John Alderton, who happens to be the voice actor of Fireman Sam. Hearing such a heroic children's mascot show such callous amusement at a housefire claiming two elderly peoples' lives is nothing short of horrifying.
• This New Zealand one advocating fire alarms. It's tame in content compared to many others on this site, but the narrator's voice alone is more than unsettling.
• The late 1970s brought a PSA depicting the dangers of using space heaters too close to flammable items, including curtains. In it, an elderly couple is sitting in the living room, watching TV, when the woman notices that the curtains are being blown about by the space heater's fan and are getting past the safety guard and too close to the heated coils... and that a fire is likely to happen if he doesn't move the heater now. The man gets up to move the heater, but the action stops a split second before he reaches it. No conclusion is given, leaving the viewer to come to their own conclusions.
• The Scottish Office brought us this beautiful PIF showing a nightmare scenario in which an entire family burns to death. All we see is flames engulfing a family photograph. The man then wakes up from the horrible nightmare, having to live with the guilt of losing his family in a fire as he clutches the photograph.
• The Netherlands has a series of fire safety ads in which an invisible narrator visits random people, asking them to participate in a test to see how quickly they could get out of their house in a hypothetical fire. They inevitably screw up. Sure, they are all just tests, but it's still unnerving by how you look at it.
  • This woman manages to get out of the house but forgets to rescue her child.
  • This man goes back to get his photo albums and runs out of time.
  • This family fails to get down the stairs in time.
  • Most unsettlingly of all, this woman doesn't even get a chance to try escaping because she doesn't have a working smoke alarm.
• This ad about smoke alarms features an adorable little boy playing in the burned-out remains of a house and then making the people and especially parents watching the ad swear to promise on their child's life to test their smoke alarms, only for him to then ask a few seconds later, "You did promise, didn't you?" We then see him holding an alarm clock and looking at it sadly as we then see that dried blood has now formed underneath his nose, and he says, "'Cause you can't turn back time." only for him to last be seen in what was once his bedroom and walk off as a ghost...
• This ad, courtesy of Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue, has a creepy-looking man with a head that looks to be charred black and glowing orange with flames sprouting up at random. He looks at the camera and addresses the viewer in a soft, yet creepy, voice.
  "I love people. I love to be around them, see them smile, see the laughing faces of their young. And children in turn are drawn to this flickering hypnosis, to reach out as I do in fateful embrace. My name is fire. Be careful when you're near me... I can't help myself."
• This ad begins with a home video from Christmastime of a little girl receiving a gift from her mother and them embracing, and the video are rewound again and again as we then see a close-up of the mother's saddened and tear-streaked face. Soon the father comes in the room and takes the remote from her to turn the television off as she breaks down in his arms over their daughter, who died from smoke inhalation. The announcer says that smoke inhalation can kill a child in less than a minute, letting us know that it can happen that fast and to be sure to have a working smoke alarm/detector.
• This haunting PSA from the American Red Cross shows a girl named Stacy sleeping in bed while smoke fills her room. A smoke alarm sounds in the distance, and shortly after, the alarm presumably in her bedroom sounds — which alerts the girl's mother offscreen. The mother rushes to her daughter's bedroom and wakes her, and the two escape the house while text onscreen reads, "Without the sound of a smoke alarm, she may never wake up. The American Red Cross has installed more than one million free smoke alarms. Help us install millions more." The PSA was created for the Red Cross's "Sound the Alarm, Save a Life" campaign.
• This 1990 ad shows a man having a nightmare while a witch-like voice starts talking. In the nightmare, he finds out that a plug socket is smoking, and pulls the plug out immediately. The voice calls him a spoilsport. He then finds out that his daughter is trying to grab a matchbox, followed by the voice encouraging her to grab them until the father successfully puts them out of reach. He then finds out that the oven is turned up too high, and turns it down in the nick of time. He then spots a heater that is too close to a curtain, which starts up a massive fire, followed by the voice taunting his misfortunes while laughing maniacally. Eventually, he wakes up from his nightmare to smoke a cigarette in bed, only for the voice to come back, saying "Uh-oh!" and giggling menacingly, with one final creepy synth pound. The visuals in this ad are very trippy, and the music doesn't help either. It was later remade in 2002 in widescreen format.
• This horrifying 2002 ad from the New Zealand Fire Service., which reminds us to never underestimate the speed of fire. And boy does it get to the point; it shows a mother smoking with her son playing, and they both leave, the former foolishly leaves her burning cigarettes on the couch, while a cold female narrator asks to keep watching. It takes less than 3 minutes for the room-and eventually the house- to go up in flames, all while both mother and son yell for each other. What's worse is that we never find out whether they survived or not. The narrator's tone at the end all but clarifies how serious this is:
  Narrator: "What you just witnessed took just under 3 minutes. Never ever underestimate the speed of fire. Get out, call the fire service, and for God's sake/whatever you do, stay out."
• This eerie 1996 ad from the United Kingdom shows moths flying around a candle with disembodied voices in the background and eerie music. Suddenly, one of the moths touches the fire, catches flames, and falls down to the ground while a child is screaming in the background. We then get an unsettling shot of the burnt moth on the ground, which transitions to a match, also on the ground.
  Narrator: Do you know where every match is in your house? They probably do.
• This eerie 1980s PIF from the UK starts off with a man entering a room to find out that his armchair is in flames. He tries to put it out with a pillow, while we cross-cut to the whole living room in flames, but to no avail. He then goes to fill up a bucket with water as we cross-cut to three shots of his child, his wife, and himself in horror as smoke surrounds them. The cuts are accompanied by a jarring Scare Chord to boot. The water finally fills up and the man turns to the doorway to the living room, which is now completely charred as a weird hissing noise can be heard. The advert concludes with the narrator suddenly raising his voice, shouting "Get out, get the fire brigade out, and stay out!".
• This 1990s ad from the United Kingdom from Fire Kills (later re-used by Fire Kills), starts off with a close-up of an elderly woman sleeping in bed while a narrator points out that she is actually dying because there is a fire in the house and the smoke is already in her lungs, killing her while she sleeps. Her only chance is her husband, who is sleeping on an armchair and is also dying because of the same reason. His only hope is their dog, Max, lying down on his bed and is also dying because... you guessed it... the same reason, as the narrator's voice fades away to the sound of a smoke alarm.
  Narrator: Wake up. Get a smoke alarm.
• This simple-but-effective Scottish 1987 PIF shows footage of a Christmas tree burning in flames in a dark living room while an announcer says that a few seconds is all it takes to turn a party into a nightmare, and the sound of a woman screaming in terror is played twice as the announcer says "Fire kills. Think about it." before suddenly bellowing out in a haunting echo "FIRE... KILLS!"
• This 1985 British ad which tells us that that last cigarette could be our last. We see a woman smoking a cigarette in a room where a firing squad is while we hear the firing squad shout. We then transition to the same woman dozing off in her armchair and dropping her cigarette. We then see a photo of her burning as we hear the firing squad shout "Ready... take aim ... FIRE!"
• This 1986 British ad begins with an old couple leaving a room and entering the hallway. We then see bits of a fireplace drop down on the floor near a cable, causing the cable to sparkle like a timebomb, followed by dramatic music. The trail of sparks travels near some plug sockets burning a curtain, and a cigarette tray with a cigarette falling off. The sparks then travel up the stairs and we get a shot of outside the house while Psycho Strings play. The house suddenly blows up in flames. The creepy music and the fact it is shot at night don't help.
• This British 1994 ad which warns us about clothing fires. We start off with a woman moving her pot to the top right of the stove, only to accidentally set her sleeve on fire. We then see an old man trying to grab his clock from the mantelpiece, only to catch the bottom of his shirt on fire. We then see a man sleeping with a cigarette on his lap, only for the cigarette to start burning on his lap. The way this ad is eerily lit and that cold voiceover, in the end, is quite chilling.
• Remember the Bradford City stadium fire? This one from The Netherlands uses a split screen, with one side depicting a cigarette slowly burning down in an ashtray while the other shows real footage of the fire that claimed 56 lives (which was also started by a cigarette), including agonized screaming, the fire growing bigger and bigger, and the crowd desperately trying to flee — all while a running timer informs the viewer that both scenes are taking place over the exact same span of time. The point of the ad is that the speed at which a fire spreads is unpredictable, so it's important to be prepared (specifically by having working smoke detectors) because it could be either of those two extremes or anything in between.
• This animated British public information film from 1984 begins with two people offscreen talking about what they are going to do. We then see a lady entering a room and telling her cat that is cold outside. She then puts some trousers on a stool and puts them next to her heater. Dramatic music starts playing as the heater reveals its red demonic eyes looking at the trousers, ready to do some damage. We then see a man putting a newspaper on his lap, while his heater also reveals its eyes. We then see a woman hanging a shirt up near a heater, which also reveals its eyes and sets it to flames. The man's newspaper drops while his heater begins to burn his newspaper. We then see the woman's heater who hanged up her trousers, which not only burns her trousers but the whole room. The ad ends with all three heaters on a white screen roaring at the audience.
• This one from New Zealand shows a girl sleeping while a fire is starting, all while we hear her father in her dreams begging her to get up and get out in a scary Poltergeist-like effect. The girl eventually wakes up and runs out of the house in the nick of time. Cue to the morning, where we see the dad put up a smoke alarm, followed by the girl whining.
  • Another version has a man sitting on his couch playfully throwing a piece of popcorn at his flatmate's face to try and wake him up. He then gets increasingly more worried as he tries to get him to wake up, with the same Poltergeist-like effect as before, with his flatmate finally waking up and escaping the house. The ad ends with the flatmate playing video games and complaining about the smoke alarm beeping.
• "Don't Give Fire A Home" was this ad's tagline, as this grim PSA shows a reversed footage of a heartbroken couple breaking down over the implied loss of their son who apparently died in a house fire while barely escaping with their lives as firefighters put out the fire. The ad reveals that the whole mess was caused by the lady leaving her washing machine on before tucking the boy in bed.
• This 1993 PSA from Energizer advising viewers to replace the batteries in their smoke detectors when they change the time on their clocks takes place inside a house at night as said house suddenly catches fire, surrounding a smoke detector with a dead battery in it. During this time, text appears onscreen saying "Nearly one third of all smoke detectors have dead batteries, so if your home catches on fire, this might be the only sound you hear." While no humans are seen in this scene, it is implied that they are in the room behind the door that the smoke detector with the dead battery is above. As the flames engulf the smoke detector, the screen fades to black and the announcer reminds the viewers "This weekend when you change your clocks, change your batteries. This message is brought to you by Energizer."
• In this 1996 North West Fire Brigade PIF, a woman lights a match and tells viewers that everyone knows that matches aren’t toys. Her voice cracks when she mentioned that her 5-year-old child didn’t know that fact. She lights the candle on top of her now-dead child’s coffin. The orange-glowing background turns out to be an empty church at night, illuminated by several candles. The camera pans across the sanctuary as she tearfully prays before the coffin.
  Mother: Matches aren’t for playing with. Everyone knows that. Everyone. (tearfully) Unless they’re only 5.

Firework Safety

As fun to watch as fireworks are, keep in mind they're essentially colored explosions. Things are fine when they're set off high in the sky away from people, so let's make sure to follow proper guidelines to keep it that way. If not... well, you won't have to imagine what could happen. Even now, centuries after fireworks were first made popular, some people still don’t get the memo that you shouldn’t be stupid when it comes to things that can explode, hence why there’s quite an abundance of PSAs on this subject.

Firework Safety

• One PIF takes us down darkened hospital corridors as ominous music plays and the agonized screams of injured children can be heard. We see doctors, nurses, and surgeons going about their work. We're also given statistics about how many people were injured by fireworks in the previous year, including the wince-inducing fact that "295 suffered damage to the eyes". It ends with doctors rushing into an operating theatre, but we're not shown what grisly sight awaits them behind the doors. We're told, "Visit a casualty department on November 5th and you'll wish you'd been blinded too." It's little wonder that PIF reviewer Peachy considers this to be the scariest PIF she has ever reviewed. An alternate version of this PIF has slightly different text throughout it, with the final message being "Visit a casualty department on November 5th. It's not a pretty sight." This version is arguably worse since we actually get to see what's happening at the operating theatre before one of the surgeons blocks the camera with his hand.
• Another PIF tried to drive home the message of the damage that fireworks can do by showing us the gruesome image of a child's horrifically scarred hand with two fingers missing. Watch it at your peril. This one apparently got a U rating.
• The Netherlands aired a number of firework safety campaigns which show someone lighting fireworks and listing everything the person did right, but they've made a fatal "mistake": "What are you doing wrong? You have five seconds." The outcome is always terrifying:
  • One has a firework fly in from off-screen and land in the back of a guy's hoodie and explode (the mistake was wearing a hood).
  • Another involves a bottle rocket tipping over and flying straight towards a girl (the mistake was not weighing down the bottle sufficiently).
  • The last one (and possibly the worst) involves a child getting his fingers blown off because he tried to re-light an unexploded firework, meaning he didn't have as long as the voiceover said he did — in fact, the explosion happened before the voiceover finished his sentence. Compared to the other two which fade to black before we get to see what happens to the victims, this one actually shows the gruesome aftermath of the accident in all its horrific glory.
• Also from the Dutch: the "Je bent een rund als je met vuurwerk stunt" campaign from SIRE^note The organization's name stands for Stichting Ideële Reclame (lit. "Ideal Advertising Foundation"), a Dutch-based private advertiser focuses on social problems in the country. (which translates in English to "Only jerks mess with fireworks" or "You're an ass (literally, an "ox") if you mess with fireworks.").
  • One ad, released in 1995, shows a pair of hands in front of a red background counting down to the new year from ten. With each number, the hands become increasingly mangled (with fingers severed or completely blown off). The real kicker is when the countdown reaches one -— an explosion takes place, and we see that the victim's hands have been blasted down to wrists. The jovial soundtrack of people cheering and shouting "Happy New Year!" in the background doesn't help much, either. The impact is lessened slightly if you recall the audio of people counting down is from The Poseidon Adventure.
  • The hands on the red background appear in another ad, this time using sign language to recount what happens when someone is injured in a firework accident. It becomes all the more horrifying if you do understand sign language, as the mangled hands cause some of the sentences to lose letters. Also unnerving is the ringing sound that begins when hearing loss is mentioned and continues towards the end, as it was complete silence until then.
    "4% of all fireworks victims suffer from loss of hearing, approximately 58% receive serious injuri[e]s to the han[d]s, and i[n] 2% of the cas[e]s, a co[m]binatio[n] [o]f both. So j[u]st in case th[e] mes[s]age wasn'[t] clea[r]: Only jerks mess with fireworks."
  • In another ad, a pair of hands display shadow puppets of various animals (including a dog, bird, and swan) as whimsical, happy music plays in the background. But when the last animal shown is a "rund" (ox in Dutch), the music suddenly takes a sinister twist as it's revealed that one of the puppeteer's hands is completely blown off while the other is splayed out to imitate an explosion.
  • This entry in the series employs some disturbing imagery like repeated shots of a man's face and monstrous-looking silhouette, along with extreme close-ups of his eye before showing the victim's disfigured hand at the end of the ad. Did we mention that a Howie scream can be heard at one point of the ad?
  • Another presents us with victims of fireworks accidents in the hospital — one with a blown-out eye and another with a mangled hand — with the accompaniment of tense music, ominous shots of surgical equipment, and a horrifying distorted scream. As the tagline is displayed at the end, the unsettling sound of a heart rate monitor plays over the image of an empty operating table, with the surgical tools at the ready on a table nearby.
    Narrator: It's New Year's Eve. We are ready. How about you?
  • One ad begins normally, showing a person dressed as a chicken advertising a chicken shop while being harassed. After failing to successfully advertise the shop, he heads towards a dark alley. He takes out his chicken head to reveal that he was disfigured in the face, implying that he was involved in a fireworks accident and that the chicken job was probably the only job he could get.
• This ad from the Philippine Department of Health warns people of the injuries and dangers brought about by fireworks. The scary part is the victims' bloody injuries. Watch it at your own risk.
• Another terrifying Dutch fireworks PIF showed a house party where the CD player suddenly breaks down, so the host goes to fix it - causing a huge explosion that blows him across the room in graphic slo-mo and destroys the house, apparently killing everyone at the party. The message was that you shouldn't try to "repair" a faulty firework once it's been lit.
• The infamous rare 1976 Parents PIF, with its sudden shots of a burnt kid screaming in agony, and later his bandaged face as he's being taken to an ambulance, was considered so graphic that it was pulled off the air and remained lost for decades.
• This British 1970s ad which warns us not to pick up a used sparkler. We start off with a family getting the sparklers ready, then giving them to each of her children, including her young daughter, then lighting the sparklers. We’re then get told that even a sparkler can be dangerous if you don't take care and that a sparkler stays hot, even when it's out. While the announcer is talking, we see the little girl playing with the sparkler happily, before dropping it on the ground where the light goes out. We then see her attempting to pick up the extinguished sparkler and let out a jarring squeal. We then see the aftermath of the girl staring at the camera with most of her hand bandaged up.
• This British ad from the late 1980s warns us not to throw fireworks. We see someone light up a firework while we also see a dummy. We zoom in on the dummy, which also has flash frames of real-life people, accompanied by dramatic synth chords going up every time. The firework eventually blows up, which then shows an unsettling closeup of the dummy's burnt eye. We then hear a child shout out "DON'T BE A DUMMY! DON'T THROW FIREWORKS!". The end, however, was pretty much a Nightmare Retardant due to the tone of the child shouting and its ending line.
• This one from the Northern Ireland Fire & Rescue Service shows close-ups of people's hands cracking a walnut, typing on a cellphone, opening a can of beer, and holding a sparkler, as the narrator requests to think about how much you use your hands, talks about the dangers of messing with fireworks or sparklers, and gives tips such as making sure they're legal, following the firework code, and refraining from giving children under five sparklers. The most important tip is that if a firework fails, leave it alone, as we get a CGI-animated scene of someone trying to grab a faulty firework, only for it to suddenly explode as a creepy ringing noise is heard.
  Narrator: Use your head, or lose your hand.
• This shocking PIF from 1974 focuses on a child "whose life has changed". He is seen standing near groups of children playing football, walking out of a shop, and watching a fireworks display, as the narrator informs the viewer that he won't be able to play football or cross the road by himself due to his poor eyesight, nor will he be seeing much of the fireworks "because last year, a firework was thrown and blew up in his face". The next scene shows a group of children standing motionless watching the sunset as the PIF ends with a close-up of one of them suddenly turning to face the camera, revealed to be wearing sunglasses, giving the implication that he was blinded by fireworks.
  Narrator: Somewhere, there are other children whose lives are going to be changed. Will one of them be your child?

Gun Safety

It goes without saying that guns can easily kill, hence why there's a protocol for Gun Safety. If one is not kept in responsible hands, they could very well end up killing the wrong person.

Gun Safety

• A campaign about firearm responsibility, produced by the Ad Council and the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) in 2000, featured the narration of a child recounting how he or she discovered a gun and accidentally killed their sibling. Each story was accompanied by crude, childish drawings displaying what happened, and ended with the text "An unlocked gun could be the death of your family. Please lock up your gun." Billboard and radio versions were also made for each of the ads in the series.
  • The first ad involves two siblings jumping on their mother's bed when her gun fell on the floor. The boy pretends that he's a cowboy (complete with a hat and badge), and goes "Bang bang bang bang", shooting his sister, who collapses on the ground covered in blood. The boy says "Jenny, wake up. Wake up. It's just pretend." The ad pauses as the boy stares down at his sister. Then he says "But she wouldn't wake up."
  • The second ad has a boy talk about how he played with his father's gun that he found in the garage, which accidentally discharged and shot his brother Omar ("There was a hole in his tummy.") who then died from the resulting gunshot wound. "I didn't mean to shoot Daddy's gun! I didn't mean to shoot Daddy's gun!" he weeps at the end.
  • The third ad is a girl talking about how her little sister Kalie loved the color pink, but she found a gun in a drawer and shot Kalie while they were playing with her dolls. In the end, a drawing of the narrator is shown to be scribbled out as she sadly says "I made Kalie go away. I hate me." What's worse is the implications that — even aside from the parents having to deal with one child's accidental death at the hands of the other — the surviving daughter now knows the kind of damage guns can do, hates herself, and may still have access to the weapon...
• Cease Fire ran a PSA in the nineties about keeping your guns away from children. It showed a young boy and his two friends, playing some sort of cops-and-robbers game with squirt guns. The boy runs through the kitchen and hides upstairs as his mom tells him and his friends to play outside. He hides under a bed in his mother's room, and his friends go into his mother's bathroom to find him. Then the kid pulls out a real gun that was hidden under the bed, aims at his friends, and we cut to his mother and baby sister in the kitchen, startled by a sudden gunshot. As the narrator speaks, we realize it's a little too quiet in the house now.
  "If you think you can hide your handgun from your kid, please, think again."
• This 2014 firearm-safety PSA, aimed at parents, does a really good job, literally subverting Chekhov's Gun by showing it at the end when we never even suspected it was there, then having the kid play with the gun for a little while before the horrible inevitable happens while his oblivious father keeps mowing the front lawn outside.
• There was once a grisly Scottish PIF about airgun safety, with the message that "an airgun is not a toy." It features shots of a doll being shot by an airgun and a horrible lingering shot of the resulting mess. Even worse, the whole thing is accompanied by a tinkly music box tune.
• This anti-firearms ad involving Alice in Wonderland has Alice chasing after the White Rabbit and ending up in the room with the drink me potion. Instead of drinking the potion just like she did in the story, she instead walks over to a cupboard where she finds a gun and ends up accidentally killing herself.
  • There’s another one where a boy fatally shoots Peter Pan. Now he’ll definitely never grow up...
• This one from Mothers Against Guns in 2004 in Britain conceived by grieving mums willing to get replica toy guns banned due to the fact that some people were modifying them into actual weapons to get around the country's gun laws. It begins with a group of kids getting ready to play some sort of shooting game. We then see the kids hide. Suddenly, one of the boys shoots someone, causing the person to collapse, all while we see a little boy getting more nervous each time. We then see a little girl approaching the boy, causing the little boy to attempt to shoo her away, but she doesn't budge. We then see a boy shoot the kid in the head as blood gushes out of the little boy's head, all while the girl looks on. We then hear a female narrator tell us that replica guns are being converted into real guns and that they are easily available and require no license. The narrator then says that they are toys that kill, while we see rather unnerving shots of dead kids lying on the grass.
• One gun safety PSA in the form of an 8-year-old's unboxing video. The kid "unboxes" a gun and some bullets that he finds in his parent's bedroom, loads the gun on camera, and is implied to have accidentally shot himself at the end. The PSA emphasizes the need to lock guns by mentioning that 8 kids are shot by unlocked or misused guns every day.

Mass Shootings

Accidental gun deaths are tragic enough, but more often, the blood spilt by firearms is no accident, and plenty of murderers aren't content with just one. Are you sure there's no way to prevent this, only nation where this regularly happens?

Mass Shootings

• Some cities and companies have made PSAs about surviving an Active Shooter Event:
  • In Houston there's RUN. HIDE. FIGHT. The fact that the situation is all unpredictable from the very beginning like it was just a normal workday alone is Fridge Horror.
  • Los Angeles County's SURVIVING AN ACTIVE SHOOTER.
  • ALERRT Center's AVOID. DENY DEFEND.
• The Sandy Hook Promise has made several terrifying PSAs regarding school shootings. Justified in that the organization was founded by families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims:
  • Evan is hugely effective. The main story of the PSA appears to be the story of a young boy at high school named Evan who, after scribbling how bored he is on a desk at a library, forms a friendship with an unknown person who replies to his messages. The two eventually meet at the very end of the year while signing yearbooks. And then, another teenage boy walks into the building and cocks his gun, causing everyone to flee in panic. It is then revealed that the teen was showing signs of planning a shooting while we were watching Evan. We are then shown past scenes replayed with him marked more visibly (the obsession with guns, the self-alienation, being bullied by peers, and posting violent threats online), while a creepy version of the background song from the PSA "Jonny Met June" plays, and it is carefully shot so the average person doesn't even notice him among the other kids. It is very shocking to see.
  • "Back-To-School Essentials", released in 2019 quickly went viral on Twitter for how effective it is. It disguises itself as a back-to-school supplies commercial, with students showing off what their parents bought them for school, before a shooting suddenly starts happening and switches to other students using their supplies to escape the school or battle against the shooter, with scissors and colored pencils being used as weapons, new socks being used to wrap wounds, and a skateboard and new shoes being used to get away from the shooter. What makes this really gut-wrenching is the ending where a terrified little girl hiding in a bathroom stall uses her new cell phone to text a final "I love you" to her mom with a forced smile, as footsteps of the shooter outside the stall get closer and closer. We can hear her whimpering even after the screen fades to black.
  • "Point of View" has a first-person POV of a teenage boy walking to and around the school during the day of school elections. We witness him being alone and getting bullied by some of his schoolmates. It ends with the boy walking up to a trophy case in a school hallway and dropping a large black duffel bag. We see his reflection in the trophy case as he opens his bag. He pulls out a large assault rifle and heads for the auditorium doors as he screams “LOOK AT ME!” as the students in the auditorium begin to scream.
  • "The Other Side" from the Sandy Hook Promise shows a teenage boy in his bedroom talking about how people see signs of a shooter but do absolutely nothing about it. The camera pans out to reveal that he is loading an assault rifle and his bedroom filled with other assault rifles and ammunition. The PSA then ends with him casually saying that those who didn't do anything will wish they did tomorrow.
  • Their Fall 2023 PSA shows comedians such as Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, and David Cross making insensitive "jokes" about shooting up schools. At the end, it's revealed that the jokes made were real threats by school shooters that were ignored because people thought they were joking. The message? Don't laugh off threats of violence.
• Two ads by the Society for Threatened Peoples featured realistic skeletons arranged into the shapes of an AK-47 rifle◊ and a hand grenade◊, with the words "Every 43 seconds, someone dies from gun violence".
• SWR has this PIF that poses as a shooting video game. Except for the place the game takes place is Columbine High School, complete with what appears to be actual footage of the attacks.
• An ad for the Half Staff Project has a video of a 4th of July show with people cheering and applauding. Suddenly the bangs become louder, more frequent, and more different, as the crowd and the cameraman realize that those bangs are actually gunshots, and run away screaming as the video cuts to black. It ends with the gunfire drowning out the fireworks as you can hear the crowd screaming, with the message being that over 40,000 Americans die from gun violence every year, with the biggest spike being the 4th of July.
• This fake ad from IKEA showcases "bulletproof" furniture targeted towards schools to use in the event of a shooting, condemning the US government for allowing it. Making it more disturbing is a distorted version of the national anthem and actual archive footage and audio from various school shootings.

Workplace Safety

There are a lot of dangerous jobs out there, but someone's gotta do them. Better make sure that someone knows how to stay safe...

Workplace Safety

• In 2006 and 2007, the Workplace Insurance Safety Board (WSIB) of Ontario, Canada, produced a series of PSAs detailing the consequences of neglecting safety in the workplace. The spots took on two formats, one with the worker being killed at the beginning, before "suddenly regaining consciousness" and describing what safety rules were violated and other factors that led to the deadly incident; and the doomed worker, after detailing what he/she is looking forward to, explaining that he is about to be killed (or badly injured) and why. And the injuries look very realistic, to the point that internet humorist Seanbaby was only half-joking when he said that after watching the spots several times to figure out how the gruesome effects were achieved, he was convinced the ads' producers skipped the special effects and just killed a bunch of stunt people.
  • The most famous of the commercials did not involve a death (or an immediate one, anyway); it featured a young sous chef at an upscale restaurant, talking about her plans to become head chef and her upcoming wedding, before explaining that — because of a grease puddle that had not been cleaned up earlier — she is going to have a "terrible accident", after which she grabs a vat of boiling oil, slips, and takes the full brunt of the liquid; she lets out a blood-curdling and painful scream that makes horror films look tame, and as a co-worker yells for help, there's a split-second shot of her skin boiling (as pictured above), and then the picture cuts to black as her co-worker continues to call for help. The worst part? These commercials air during not only primetime hours, but during shows aimed at children. This PSA got worse when a video surfaced of a McDonald's worker slipping and falling into a bucket of hot oil.
  • Here is the link to all five Prevent-It Ads. The chef one is first, but the most disturbing are when the accident victims sit up and describe their mishaps while dying. Without pain. The creepy, otherworldly music/ambient noise that plays when they get up certainly doesn't make things better. Probably the second most notable one (behind the chef ad) is the one where the corpse at a funeral gets up and explains why his face and hands are covered in burn marks (something to do with high-voltage power lines)^note ; his company's manager is attempting to deliver a eulogy when the deceased victim interrupts, explaining the true circumstances of his accident and the mourners look shocked and begin murmuring amongst themselves about the revelations.
  • Other ads in the original set of commercials included a young, attractive, college-age woman attempting to hang a "sale" banner at an upscale department store, unspotted and reaching precariously from a tall, rickety, ladder to hook it... only to fall into a glass display case below, suffering horrific injuries; a forklift driver who crashes into a shelf, which promptly gives way, and the steel beams stored on it crush him (one beam even impales his chest, severing his heart and lungs); and a middle-age construction worker who — while describing his plans for an extended family vacation — is blown off a building under construction after his torch gets too close to gas tanks (which hadn't been inspected in several years), and after crashing onto the roof of a passing truck is bounced onto the cement below. Another ad ended with someone narrowly escaping severe injury — the sleeve of a machine shop worker's uniform becomes tangled on a knob, and as the man is panicking as a power saw slowly approaches, sure that the safety switch hasn't been repaired... power is cut, the saw literally almost touching his skin; the safety switch had been repaired that morning.
• A second series of commercials was issued in 2008-2009, and featured an exhausted trucker being involved in a head-on fiery collision (to deliver a load by deadline), window washers (after the outrigger beams were neither secured nor checked), and a construction worker who is severely burned after his piledriver hits a gas line (his boss had failed to give him the blueprints detailing where the utilities were located).
• Another WSIB PSA is tamer in comparison, with a construction manager talking about how he makes sure everything and everyone is safe. Midway into his speech, however, a pack of zombies suddenly attack him and his crew, gory details and all.
  Narrator: Workplace injuries and deaths are preventable. If there is a random zombie attack, run like a motherf**ker.
• A series of Australian workplace safety ads featured, among other things, a chef pouring boiling water on himself (but is less graphic compared to the above PSA) ^note Or, alternately, worse, as we see the kid's face actually melting away instead of just being covered in horrifying grease burns, a teenager in a bakery having a finger cut off in a bread slicing machine, a woman falling off a ladder and breaking her neck, and a builder's apprentice shooting himself in the eye with a nail gun (or maybe it was a splinter hitting him in the eye).
• This PSA from ISS Facility Services' UK division is basically a 69-second ripoff of the Canadian sous chef PSA.
• There is a workplace safety video called "Will You Be Here Tomorrow?" that skips the "what is workplace safety?" and goes straight into a montage of people being maimed, dismembered, and killed in excruciating and extremely graphic ways, including a man being hurt by a nail after it jumps into the air and forces itself into his eye just because he hit it wrong. For some viewers, though, the sheer overwrought nature of the video is enough to push it into Narm territory instead. There is a similar video from the same people called "Think About This". Severed body parts and crush victims galore. The music doesn't help, either.
• This Canadian PSA depicting a man getting his shirt caught into a conveyor belt and having his arm squished into oblivion like a steamroller. There's no blood in this one, and it even lampshades it by ending with the tagline "Seen enough? Us too.", but the image of the man's finger bending back will surely make your toes curl.
• Also from the CSST, here is a pair of ads regarding workplace safety. The first isn't bad at all, and is actually quite effective without being violent; a worker attempts to start a machine but finds that it's been locked out. He goes to check why and finds his supervisor monitoring a maintenance man, who is inside the machine and repairing it. However, the second — in which the padlock isn't installed — shows exactly what would have happened if the machine were turned on.
• Similar to the "There are no accidents" Canadian PSAs, the Workers' Compensation Board of Nova Scotia released a series of PSAs back then where a narrator happily tells the "story" of objects in the workplace that are about to cause a horrible accident.
  • "Story of Tape" compares a shoddy repair job of some high-pressure pipes to a disgruntled employee who quits "right when you need him the most." This happens to be when a generic woman representing the viewer walks by with the "repair" (some duct tape) at eye level. It cuts to black; rushing water and the woman screaming for help is heard, with the implication being that it blasted her eyes out.
  • "Story of a Nail" ends with a man getting his head stabbed with it while his co-workers panic.
  • "Story of a Ladder" hard cuts as soon as the ladder breaks and you get to hear the man falling off the ladder painfully.
  • "Story of a Bucket" highlights a tripping hazard with someone tripping painfully on a forgotten mop bucket.
  • "Story of a Blade and a Guard" has a construction worker implied to have had his hand cut off with a table saw without a guard, complete with blood spatters as it cuts off.
• WorkSafe Victoria made several print ads showing the aftermath of grisly workplace accidents, showing people with stitches, amputated limbs, and burns with slogans like "I thought I could wing it", "I was new and afraid to ask", and "I thought I'd look stupid if I asked again"◊.
• Another WorkSafe Victoria PSA has this regarding work-related violence. It depicts a montage of numerous workers facing these serious violence and threats from angry customers who treat them as crap and abusing the so-called "customer is always right" policy. And it can be very horrific and anxious to watch, especially for employees.
• The Construction Safety Association of Ontario commissioned an entire series of fucked-up PSAs in the 1980s in an effort to teach future construction workers about the dangers present at building sites. The worst of the lot involves a man getting a piece of metal shrapnel lodged in his eye because he didn't use proper protection, accompanied by an ear-piercing synthesized scream. There's no gore, but the horrible noise combined with the camera work still make it a pretty wince-inducing affair. Other "highlights" of the series include two crane operators getting electrocuted as a result of unloading next to some power lines, a worker being run over by a reversing dump truck, another worker being buried alive in a trench collapse, yet another worker falling from a step ladder and presumably breaking his pelvis, and two montages of people being killed or injured in various accidents. Perhaps the creepiest PSA in the series is this one, which shows a man slowly dying from asbestos-related disease, while the narrator talks about how there is still no known cure for it and how asbestos can be handled safely. The creepy Goblin-esque synthesizer music really doesn't help, nor does the eerie sound of the man breathing through a ventilator in the latter.
• In 2008, there was a workplace safety campaign in Alberta called "Bloody Lucky", which featured PSAs that depicted incredibly gruesome workplace incidents (arguably more gruesome than the above examples). The scenarios in the PSAs included a woman accidentally getting doused in toxic chemicals, a shoe store worker falling off a ladder and suffering a bloody head injury and left barely conscious, a chef accidentally cutting his finger, a deli worker getting his finger severed while preparing pepperoni, a construction worker getting his ankle crushed by a forklift, and finally a kitchen worker getting a huge blast of boiling grease after accidentally knocking an aerosol can into the fryer.
• The Dutch posters from TNO have fridge horror messages about burn-outs, workplace accidents, brain damage and other things that could happen. For the other ones who doesn't speak dutch, there is a poster, made like a comic about a painter who talks about his job and life (He doesn't smoke and drinks not too much, he is very happy with his job and likes his co-workers). After this he shows his face, the skin is melted away and his skull is exposed. he says he feels good in his skin (literaly translated). And the horror part is that paint isn't acidic, so it would not burn. At least not your skin.
• The premise of a series of Australian work safety ads from WorkSafe Victoria is unique — they start from the future and work backward to the day of the accident.
  • For starters, Beth's Story begins with the titular woman, viewed from the side, waving to some children in a swimming pool. However, a girl passing by gives her a look of disgust, which we later learn is due to the scarring on the left side of her face. At a wedding, Beth attempts to hide her scars using her hair, and in another scene, she blocks the scars using her hand while looking in the mirror. The ad then cuts to a burn unit, where Beth is being treated with her family by her side, where we see that her scarring is visibly worse. Finally, the day of the accident is shown, and we see what caused her injuries: after impatiently glancing at her manager talking with another employee, she handles a container of poisonous liquid, causing her to slip and get some of the liquid onto her face. Although the ad doesn't show much gore, we hear Beth's screams of agony, even as the ad cuts to its tagline.
  • From the same campaign, there's Nick's Story. The ad begins with Nick at an event, where it's immediately noticeable that one of his arms has been amputated. We then follow him through a family gathering and a game of pool before he's seen looking in the mirror, holding the stump of his amputated arm. The ad then cuts back to the day of the accident, revealing that Nick's injury was caused by recklessly sticking his hand into a machine, which ultimately results in the loss of his arm. Similar to the "Beth" ad, we only see blood splatter onto his face, but Nick's screams of terror continue even as the ad cuts to its tagline.
  Tagline: If you're not sure, ask.

Crime Prevention

Sometimes people need to be reminded that they too can play a part in taking a bite out of crime... and that the unthinkable may happen if they don't.

Crime Prevention

• This anti-car crime ad from the UK shouldn't be as effective as it is, but the tone of the narrator and the horrible yelps of the hyenas — combined with the violation of having one's car broken into — work to make it very, very unsettling. Two other PIFs, which are shorter, are arguably more terrifying.
• A sinister 1980 PIF about house crime shows a couple of shots of burglars breaking into one's house. The narrator's tone alone is extremely scary, especially near the end.
  Narrator: Crime: Keep it out. Keep it shut!
• "Sunday Lunch" , a PIF produced by Southwark Council, has a family, consisting of a mother and father, a teenage brother, two of the brother's friends, and a younger brother and sister, sitting down for Sunday Lunch. While the three teens chat about another friend of theirs named Anton who may have killed someone and the possibility of retaliation by the victim's associates, the mother silently walks into the corner of the room, retrieves a pistol from a high cupboard and promptly shoots her youngest son through the head, splattering everyone at the table with his blood. While everyone at the table breaks into sheer terror and abject despair, the mother, as if possessed, simply drops the pistol and slumps down the wall as the screen goes black, though the sounds of her family's broken crying continues.
  If you keep quiet about gun crime, it's like pulling the trigger yourself.
• An ad for the prevention of identity theft depicts a man having his pocket picked while walking down the street, another man being mugged, and a woman just not paying attention in a restaurant as another woman watches, and in all three scenarios, the victim's smartphone is stolen. What makes the commercial nightmare worth is that the people committing the crimes have no faces. Their noses, mouth, and eyes are obscured... and then when the woman at the end takes the other woman's phone and walks away with it, her features morph into those of the woman whose phone she just stole.
• This Canadian PSA instructing viewers to use their eyes to record certain details in the event of a robbery sounds harmless on paper, but in practice it's terrifying thanks to the camerawork, ominous lighting, and creepy droning background music.
• This PIF begins with a terrifying image of a young man's body on a slab as the coroners remark that he died of gun violence, but it only gets worse from there. Although it's off-screen, we can still hear the saw cutting the man's body open as they begin to perform the autopsy, and as this happens, not only do we see his body shake from the vibrations, but also the sight of blood beginning to trickle upwards on the table and pool underneath his corpse.
• This Colombian PSA meant to discourage consumers from buying stolen cell phones begins with people smiling as they are talking and taking pictures with their cell phones. Moments later, everyone's devices start to ooze blood, which then spills onto their hands. A message crawls across the screen stating "Buying a stolen phone is like carrying a dead person. Don't do it." in Spanish.
• This other one starts with a woman sleeping when her cellphone starts ringing at 3:00 A.M. When she answers, no one responds, so she hangs up. A second later it starts ringing again, this time with an unintelligible voice behind it. The woman then disarms the cellphone... it rings a third time anyway, her dog starts barking, and when she tries answering, the door behind her slowly opens, a wind suddenly charges at her, and she drops the cellphone to the floor, screaming in panic.
• Several Crime PIFs with the slogan "CRIME — Together We'll Crack It".
  • One unsettling PIF shows a burglar with the camera focusing on his feet as he walks down a deserted street at night and approaches the end of the street. The camera sometimes focusing on just his eyes as he makes his decision, the burglar is halted when some of the lights turn on inside one of the houses. The two other houses turn on afterwards, causing the burglar to turn around and leave as the house was actually empty and the lights were left on to keep burglars out.
  • Another spooky PIF showed a now-burgled car with windows smashed, wheels removed, and the radio ripped out. It plays out as an eye-catching advertisement, with the narrator explaining the features of the car in a persuasive tone before another narrator butts in with the serious message "Don't treat car security as an optional extra!" as the full shot of the car is revealed.
• Michigan State Police's "Look Again" uses a similar gimmick as the Sandy Hook Promise PSA. It opens with what appears to be a service industry ad, with a voiceover explaining how workers improve the safety and quality of life for their customers. All well and good, until the voiceover mentions that they work hard every day, "because you don't want to miss a thing... like you just did." Cue the footage being shown again, this time with attention drawn towards easily missed signs of human trafficking. There's a girl being shoved inside a van, a window with closed curtains and bars, a boy being made to wash shop windows, a padlocked door with a clipboard listing 30-minute appointments hanging nearby (implying that whoever is inside is being used for sex work), and a man violently pulling a girl away from the window. The PSA encourages service industry workers who spend their day inside others' homes and businesses to help stop human traffickers.
• Some of the "We Prevent" PSA's from the Ad Council and the National Crime Prevention Council in the '90s can be nightmare-inducing as well.
  • For instance, this one shows a woman with her dead son on her lap. She sings "Hush, Little Baby" to him as a policewoman comes to comfort her. Her husband runs to the scene and cries over his body. The PSA ends with the said boy's funeral.
  • Another features Peter, Paul, and Mary's song, "Where Have all the Flowers Gone?" remade as "Where Have All the Children Gone." Just listening to the song is sure to work those tear ducts, and haunt you at the same time. This PSA is a montage of actual footage of crime scenes, memorial vigils, families reacting to their relatives' and friend's deaths, funerals, etc. Even worse? This ad also appeared during the morning when kids were most likely to be watching.
  • Speaking of the "Not One More" PSA's, here's another one. It's about a girl who talks about inviting her mother and her friends. She talks about having nice music and a pretty blue dress. But she isn't talking about her sweet sixteen or her quinceañera — she's talking about her funeral when she gets fatally shot. Before we cut to the NCPC phone number and the Ad Council logo, an unnerving shot of a white casket is displayed in front of an open window.
  • "Quiet Time" is also another Ad Council PSA that would haunt your dreams as well. A group of kids in their Sunday best are standing quietly, only to have the viewer find out that they are attending the funeral of a classmate who has been murdered by a gun.
• This one starring Samuel L. Jackson shows the man himself walking into a room, looking directly at the camera and telling you who's to blame if you shoot people with guns, such as the victim itself (for challenging you for not looking away and for not backing down when you pulled out the gun), your mother (for bringing you into this world when she was but a kid herself and for dragging you up instead of bringing you up), society (for not giving you hope), your father (for not being there and looking after himself instead of looking after you), and the gun in your hand (for making your target and making you more likely to be picked on). He concludes the lesson by shouting at the viewer to "blame anyone but YOURSELF for not being strong enough to put down the gun! To break... the cycle!".
• This horrifying PIF (NSFW/NSFL) features footage of an actual presentation on how to treat stab wounds. It features real images of graphic wounds with plenty of gore. Please DO NOT eat while watching this.
  • Another equally disturbing PIF from the same campaign portrays potentially real footage of a teenager being stabbed on the streets by a group of fellow teenagers after being egged on to fight one of them, while a voiceover of the stab victim's mother talks about how she felt when she found his body.
  Voiceover: I couldn't believe it when I saw a large white bag zipped up on the table in the tiny room. I screamed out asking who was responsible for doing this, and I frantically began to unzip the bag, to find him curled up in his boxers, and a tube taped into his mouth. I put my arms around him and my fingers were feeling the holes in his back, making me more aware of his injuries. He was still warm, and his hair smelled like it had just been washed, and I could feel the softness of his face against mine, and his beautiful pink lips had turned to a deep shade of blue. I held him and I kept his warmth next to me, begging him to wake up. My blood began to boil, and the fear that my son had faced came into my mind, as if I was there at the stabbing. And I was led from the room, my mind was in bits. It was a mixture of pain, and suffering, and anger, and vengeance. It was the most awful thing that I've ever had to experience.
• This PSA from the early 2000s by South African state-owned energy supplier Eskom about reporting cable theft and illegal electricity connections. It starts off with an intubated patient in a hospital when the hospital's electricity suddenly shuts off and the patient begins suffocating. It then cuts to a man, who is the supposed cable thief, walking down a dark street at night with his back to the camera. He turns around, and his facial features briefly take on a freakish, snake-like form. The next few scenes show him cutting cables at a railway station, tampering with a junction box to get energy illegally (leaving an exposed live wire in the middle of the street, where children are playing. A young boy playing with a tyreless bicycle wheel runs over the wire.) and trading the cables on the black market, all while shapeshifting in and out of his snake form and looking threateningly at the camera while in said form. The PSA ends with the narrator (who is speaking in a very unsettling voice the entire time) encouraging the viewer to report these criminals so they can get locked up, over the scenes of the cable thief and the merchant he made business with (who also has snake-like features) being locked behind bars.
• A Boy Scouts of America commercial from the early 80s starts off innocently with a preteen to early teenaged boy cheerfully reciting the Boy Scouts' swearing-in oath as he salutes. However, his speech is randomly intercut with harrowing, black and white footage of a body being carried out on a stretcher, a man shooting up heroin, another dead body lying on the ground covered with a sheet, and other disturbing images as James Earl Jones announces to correspond with the imagery about how much crime is committed every day in America. While it seems that neither of these two scenarios is connected, the alternate footage ends with a man standing behind jail bars initially facing away from the camera, only to look at the audience and reveal (as Jones also finishes his statement) that it's a teenage boy and that the foreseen crimes were committed by young men instead of adults. The end of the commercial has him plead "Boy, do we need Scouting."
• This PIF from Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency for paying road taxes has a mechanical laughing clown at the end of a pier, representing the kind of person who refuses to pay their taxes and laughs at those who do. It's unnerving, and the fact that the pier is deserted and that it appears to take place at night does not help.
• A certain ad from the DVLA, which portrays their computer as an unstoppable monolithic thing that will personally hunt you down if you don’t pay your car tax.
• A trio of PSAs from the Swedish Alcohol Committee tell the viewer to report alcohol being sold to minors. The eerie, music box-like tune alone propels them into horror, and the shrieking noises that play in conjunction with the drinking scenes push them over the edge.

Piracy

It seems obvious that advertisers would insist that Digital Piracy Is Evil, and as such they'd put forth a lot of effort in swaying viewers on their side.

Piracy

• It definitely counts as Narm, and may even have a cool aesthetic to some, but this anti-piracy warning from the Federation Against Copyright Theft can be downright terrifying, especially for children (and this was featured in most PG-rated and some U-rated VHS's from 2002-2005). The dark atmosphere, loud explosions, close-ups of this demonic blacksmith (at one point his eyes blaze fire), gloomy music, and the haunting voiceover, detailing what happens with the profits of pirated videos (including the infamous "Piracy funds terrorism") and pulling in much Paranoia Fuel ("The pirates are out to get you"), all contribute to a highly unsettling viewing. And woe betide you if you ever saw it in a cinema, where the loudness (and therefore the scariness) only increased.
• The anti-piracy ads in Japan are well known for their humor, but one obscure PSA has a girl crying black tears. And if that wasn't bad enough, her tears fall to a puddle, which makes the tear turn into a picture of a skeleton. The music makes it all worse. If you see that, you're kissing your sleep goodbye.
• This British 1995 ad about anti-piracy. In this one, we see a couple talking about a videotape that their daughter wanted. The mother mentions that the film isn't out yet, then the father leaves for work. We then see their daughter watching the pirated VHS video while her mother is going some gardening. We also see a few seconds of black text explaining about video piracy with a loud BOOM! every time. The VHS tape then shows a terrorism clip while the girl turns to her mother looking all concerned. We then see a VCR in a dark room collapsing to the ground while we see a tagline "Video Piracy. It's not worth it." on the top. The loud bangs would be loud in a cinema, and the ad was even given a U rating.
• Another British anti-piracy ad from 1990 shows The Last Emperor... until two men enter the theater and begin painting over the screen in black, while the film plays along as normal. Soon enough they've covered the whole screen in black. Then they draw a TV and turn it on. The same film is shown on the small drawing of the TV but with distorted sound and picture quality.
  Tagline: The first place to see films is at the cinema.
• This one from 2011 in the United Kingdom shows clips of inside an abandoned movie theatre, which is called "The Last Cinema". As we enter one of the theatres, we see people staring with lifeless eyes, while a narrator talks about how a moment of cinematic joy, a shared experience, can be all gone if piracy continues, as we see the people vanish away.
  Tagline: Love cinema? Hate piracy.
  • This has probably become unintentionally hilarious in the wake of the COVID pandemic, which has done a much better job of killing off theatre showings.
• This horrifying cinema ad from the Philippines, which compares illegal film camcording to stealing gas for money, hijacking a motorcycle, sexual harassment, and corruption. The ad ends with a message that illegal film camcording and stealing are the same, and that film piracy is a crime. The dark backgrounds at the end are what makes it scary, along with the music.

Water Safety

Heed these warnings lest you wind up sinking to the bottom of Davy Jones's Locker...

Water Safety

• Sortie en Mer, an interactive French-British website by Guy Cotten on wearing life jackets when going out to sea, is more widely known as a "Drowning Simulator" for good reason. It features a live-action video first-person view of a man who is in the middle of the sea on a sailboat with his friend. Innocent enough, until your person falls into the water (who, of course, doesn't have a life jacket). In what turns into a scarily realistic drowning simulation game, you then have to start using the mouse to scroll upwards in order to keep your person afloat as he waits for his buddy to turn the boat around and rescue him... but sadly, the friend can't/doesn't turn the boat around and/or is unable to see your player (due to your player being carried away by the current of the water as soon as he falls in), and your player eventually gets exhausted from trying to stay afloat and drowns. The fact that the site afterwards reveals that a person without a life-jacket can keep afloat for 79 minutes before succumbing to fatigue and subsequent drowning just makes it even worse. And there's a moment in which your character tears off his fingernail, plate, and all. To say nothing of the hallucinations you begin to experience as you approach the auto-fail time (typically between 5 and 6 minutes) and hypothermia and exhaustion begin to take their toll on your person's sanity — they change depending on how long you last, and if you make it far enough that the game auto-fails you instead of you simply failing to keep up with the increasing pace, the last thing your person sees before perishing is his friend from the boat waving at him with a creepy smile, in black and white. Notably, it terrified Markiplier and Jacksepticeye.
• The RNLI has a 15-certificate advert shown in cinemas. It's shown from the perspective of a man in a harbour trying to stay afloat, the audience is asked to hold their breath every time he goes under the water. After a minute or so of seeing him struggle, we are told that you'd be okay holding your breath like that on land, because the average person can hold their breath for 45 seconds, but in the water, you'd stand less of a chance because of shock from the cold. It ends with a murky shot of the drowned protagonist as he sinks towards the bottom.
• In 2016 the RNLI did a series of 15-rated adverts about being responsible around rivers and the sea which were also shown in British cinemas. These adverts are in a first-person point of view of someone struggling to stay afloat in a river while their friends or loved ones struggle to save them, only for the person to sink down to their watery demise.
• This one from Hong Kong in 1985 includes a narrator telling you how to stay safe and keep your speed on your speed boats while footage of speed boats going dangerously close to people is shown. The most unnerving part is when a speed boat goes through a restricted area reserved for swimmers. The boat zooms through the people swimming, and the PSA ends with a swimmer drowning in the rough water, then showing his unconscious (and presumably dead) body floating.
• "A Great Day to Go" was a 1971 PIF produced by the New Zealand Water Safety Council.
• This PSA from the Coast Guard, called "Can't Walk Away," delivers its message in a manner so terrifying that the scene wouldn't be out of place in a surreal horror film. A man casually walks into a parking garage and gets into his car, preparing to drive off somewhere, but as he backs up, he accidentally hits the rear bumper lightly against one of the columns. No big deal, and he simply swears a little as he continues forward... only for the car to start driving like it's on top of the ice, wheels spinning fast but the car barely sliding anywhere. And that's when it begins to sink into the ground. As liquid concrete pours into the man's car, he screams desperately for help and honks his horn, vainly hoping that someone will come to rescue him, and within just a few seconds, the car sinks beneath the ground's surface, never to be seen again. Turns out this is because the car is ACTUALLY a representation of one's boat, and how, unlike a car, even the slightest accident with a boat can easily cause it to sink. And out in the open ocean, you may be days away from any form of help.

Other

Other Safety

• While they don't seem nearly as extreme as some of these examples, New Zealand ACC ads are incredibly scary indeed, and all focus on common dangers found in the home. They start off as ads for other products — house paint, muesli bars, etc. — and then accelerate rapidly into horrible domestic accidents.
  • In the house paint ad, a man falls off a ladder and onto the concrete below, breaking his back.
  • Another (in the guise of a shower advert) has a man slipping on his wet bathroom floor and smacking his head on the base of the shower.
  • This one, which plays out as a home loans advert, involves a man falling down a flight of stairs in his home.
  • Possibly the most horrifying of them all is the muesli bar advert; the woman advertising them trips on a Tonka truck and lands, face-first, on a glass table. A lingering long shot ensues of her trying to get up off the table and whimpering softly as the narrator reminds viewers that preventing such an accident from happening would be as easy as tidying toys away when they're not being used, all while the camera pulls back to show the woman lying face down on the glass, now crying weakly.
• This PIF about the dangers of carbon monoxide leaking into your home. It shows a young woman coming to her house, turning the heating vent on, and eventually going to bed... and dying the next morning. Will almost certainly press your Paranoia Fuel buttons, and incidentally, it was made after two students were killed from carbon monoxide poisoning for an extra bit of nightmare fuel. Another version was made which cuts out the first part, and only shows the dead woman in bed. The Drone of Dread adds to the horror.
  Narrator: Carbon monoxide from faulty gas appliances can kill. By law, landlords must have all appliances they provide safety checked by calling registered installers. Ask for proof now, or tonight it could be you.
• A British PIF shown in cinemas, which advises against buying drugs from the internet, shows a man taking a pill from an envelope and swallowing it. He looks confused for a moment and pulls from his mouth a whole dead rat, then coughs and retches into his sink. A close-up of the rat on the floor is then shown while the narrator talks about rat poison being used as ingredients in non-prescription drugs. View here.
• Any and all of the Protect and Survive Public Information Films detailing what to do in the event of a nuclear war. Picture being a child in the 1980s in the UK. Sitting happily, watching The Smurfs on TV, then the commercial break. One of these plays. Your parents, who have been acting oddly already today, break down completely. Your mother starts to cry. Your father's face is white, and he's shaking. Every single member of your family, everyone you could possibly talk to, is terrified. And none of them dares tell you why. That's what those films would have done if they ever aired for real. Thankfully none of these had to be used, or have ever had to be seen, but some have made up mock nuclear attack adverts that are chillingly realistic and would have been nightmarish during the Cold War or for anyone concerned about nuclear proliferation, such as this Australian version. Alongside the American Emergency Alert System, other similar alert systems from around the world, and PIFs and PSAs like these, many Analog Horror series have found their inspiration.
• This ad from Disaster Action shows us the inside of a dark warehouse via a night vision camera. The camera wanders over dozens of dead bodies wrapped in newspaper, with each set of bodies representing a different disaster and covered in the respective papers, such as the King's Cross fire, Piper Alpha explosion, the Lockerbie bombing, Herald of Free Enterprise capsizing, Clapham Junction rail crash, Marchioness sinking, and Hillsborough Disaster. Finally, the camera zooms in on a body covered in blank paper, with the message that "it's time to put safety first before the next disaster", delivered in a horribly chilling voice. Anyone with a fear of the dark probably shouldn't watch, especially with that godawfully creepy music and the faint ambulance sirens.
• In 2012, British Red Cross began running a horrendously creepy advert to drive home the message that a crisis can happen to anyone. It features a hooded teenage girl and her dog walking around a city at night as she delivers the narration, all set to horribly unsettling background music.
  Girl: I am the fire that leaves you homeless. A heart attack in aisle six. The prescription you cannot collect. I am the boiled sweet stuck in your child's throat. The motorway pileup that leaves you traumatised. The food shopping you cannot do. I am the reason you need a wheelchair. The flood that leaves you stranded. The empty house when you return from hospital. I am a crisis. And I don't care who you are.
• Belgium launched a campaign aimed at 10-to-14-year-olds about the new safety symbols, called "Red de Emoji" (save the emoji). There was a game where you could win prizes if you could save the emojis by placing the right safety symbol on the item and preventing them from using it. The game was hard because the answer could literally be anything (even with a tip in the background). If you got the right symbol, the outcome was funny and nice; but if you couldn't make it in time, your emoji just died (not quite graphic, but not child-friendly).
  • "Poison": An emoji with headphones drinks the poison and belches a green ghost, then melts while dying.
  • "Corrosive": A female emoji uses the bottle as lipgloss and is burned. Only her skull remains.
  • "Explosive": An emoji is bored and hits a spray can with a hammer. The spray can explodes and remains in the emoji's eyes.
  • "Compressed gas": An emoji plays with gas, and after an explosion, he flies into space, and then gets deformed.
  • "Flammable": An emoji is scared by some monsters in the dark. He lights a match, but the gas burner nearby burns him to ashes.
  • "Environmental hazard": An emoji is swimming in the ocean and uses a spray can. The spray can kills all the sea creatures, and the emoji is eaten by a shark (complete with blood)!
  • "Health hazard": A hairy emoji, clearly drunk, drinks from a bottle, then becomes sick and bald before he dies.
  • "Harmful": An emoji washes his hands after eating a cake with some product. He gets burns, which he rubs into his face. His face also gets boils. After that, he dies.
  • "Oxidizing": A female emoji, whose house is on fire, uses the product near her. She makes it worse by setting herself on fire.
• This British 1990 ad about carbon monoxide. We see a family playing a guessing game while the father is doing some work, accidentally knocking off the vent grade. During the game, the mom and dad ask their son some questions ("Can you see it?" "Can you smell it?" "Can you taste it?"), as the boy responds "No" every time. The happy music starts turning ominous as we see the father blocking an air vent while a jarring Scare Chord plays. A female narrator reveals that the answer was "Carbon monoxide".
  Narrator: It can kill your family. Gas and solid fuel appliances need air. Don't block up vents.
• This one from LandSAR in New Zealand shows a man lying on the ground in a mountainous area, bleeding and breathing heavily. We hear uplifting music as we see a creepy-looking Yeti walking over to the man, picking him up, and taking him to a fireplace to keep him warm. Everything seems okay until we hear the Yeti warmly tell the man that there is no such thing as Yetis. Turns out, it was all just a dream, and the man was just lying there all along, alive, yet still quite clearly injured.
• This nightmarish Canadian PSA for emergency preparedness shows a boy wandering alone through a deserted forest, with no one to hear his cries for help, accompanied by some horribly creepy music.^note Said music is actually stock music, which is also heard on the 1988 Castle Home Video Vanity Plate. An announcer then says, "It can happen here. Prepare for tomorrow today." We never find out what "it" refers to, making the whole thing all the more ghoulish.
  • Another PSA in the same series begins with the narrator assuring viewers that Canada is the most insured nation on the planet before reminding them that there's a very good reason for that given the kinds of disasters that can strike anywhere and at any time, ranging from forest fires to chemical spills and even nuclear war. All this is accompanied by some rather unsettling footage of the disasters in question, set to the same creepy music. The ad ends with a shot of a deserted city street as the narrator recites the aforementioned tagline.
  • Rowan's Law - The Risk starts out with a female soccer player training hard and playing harder. Then she starts taking hits to the head. She shakes it off, cools down, resumes training, gets back out there the next day, and gets injured again. Rinse, repeat. Her vision becomes blurry, and she gets a nosebleed. Then while training, she throws up. The player keeps pushing through the pain, keeps moving forward... only to collapse on the field while the soccer ball rolls away. The words RISK EVERYTHING appear on the screen, only for the word DON'T to appear in front of them.
  Caption: "Know the signs of a concussion."

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