Nightmare Fuel / Public Service Announcements: Transport Safety

"If you hit me at 40 miles an hour, there's around an 80% chance I'll die..."

Vehicles, be they cars, buses, or trains, are many times faster than the average human being, and several times more massive, so it stands to reason that there are a lot of ways people could get maimed, killed, or worse should they misuse these things. These ads have been made to urge people to take great care whether you're the driver, a passenger, or a pedestrian. As you'll find out, the rules of the road are in place for a good reason.

For examples of terrifying PSAs relating to other subjects, see here.

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Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives

Safety on the Move's Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives campaign has brought us several spectacularly depressing and nightmarish PIFs, which can be seen in a collection here, if you desire. Some of their scarier efforts among the series include:

• One of their more well-known ads, titled "Eyes", is horrifying, to say the least. For those who would rather not watch, the ad begins with a close-up of the face of a young woman, while paramedics attempt to revive her and the driver of the vehicle is being questioned about the accident. Notice that the woman has two different-sized pupils and is attached to a breathing device. The woman is eventually declared to be in an asystolic state (meaning that her heart has stopped), and the driver is taken away. It was considered to be too graphic to be shown before the 9:00 pm watershed. This PIF was later reused by "THINK!" 22 years later as a part of 50 years campaign against drink driving, alongside "Kathy Can't Sleep".
• "Kathy Can't Sleep" is a prime example of how even the simplest of concepts can be made into something truly harrowing. It features a little girl named Kathy crying about an incident at school and being unable to sleep due to nightmares. In the background, we hear the voice of her hysterically angry mother crying and yelling at her husband for driving drunk ("HOW CAN SHE FORGET ABOUT IT?! She can't even sleep! She heard a kid at school say you were a murderer. I don't know what to tell her!"), resulting in the violent death of a young boy from Kathy's school. As the girl breaks down further, we can hear the mother screaming "Now everything's screwed up! Isn't it?! Well, isn't it?! LOOK AT ME!", implying both that Kathy herself is very aware of the situation, as well as her father's guilt for causing the boy's death as the scene fades out.
• "In the Summertime" has the eponymous song by Mungo Jerry playing in the background as a group of friends are depicted drinking at a pub's beer garden. A car is then seen departing the garden, and one of the pub-goers react in shock; the music then slows to a crawl and fades away to dead silence as it's shown that the car had run off the road and crashed into a tree, killing the driver and his wife.
• "Christmas Pudding". A woman is eating dinner with her family on Christmas when she is interrupted by a telephone call. She is informed that her boyfriend — who was drinking at another party — has just died in a crash. The camera cuts to the burning pudding on the dinner table, which fades into the wreckage of the boyfriend's burning car.
• "One More, Dave" begins by showing a woman blending up a Christmas dinner as we hear a group of friends pressuring their friend Dave into drinking. It's then revealed that the woman was liquidating food for Dave, who has now become a quadriplegic from a drink driving accident and can't feed himself.
  C'mon Dave, just one more.
• "Mark" presents us with the absolutely bone-chilling visuals of a man's ghostly, rotoscoped face amongst a pitch-black background, who talks about his friend Mark, referring to him as "a great bloke". Then, accompanied by increasingly creepy and distressing animation, he explains how Mark caused a drunk driving accident on Christmas, which killed two parents and left their children as orphans. The ad ends with the man's face saying "Oh yeah... a great bloke", before vanishing in a cloud of vapor.
• Casualty shows a man, who was injured in a driving accident, attempting to walk again. The grunts of pain and the heavy breathing just make it all the more harrowing to see.
• This one shows a first-person view of a drink-driving victim, who was drifting in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed with his mate (the driver) pleading innocence and asking how he is whilst medics are trying to treat his injuries. The ad ends with one of the boys asking the victim if they are still mates.
• Children's Story shows a class of children in a school during register call. The camera is shown moving from row to row of children who share their thoughts about the death of a classmate who died in a drink-driving accident. The camera stopped on a close friend of the deceased and the now-empty chair next to it.
• Real Lives shows a newspaper report telling us that a 19-year-old has been killed by a drunk driver, then we see people at his funeral. We then see an old couple sorting some clothes out until they stop and stare at a 12-year-old boy looking all sad, who was the victim's brother.
• Mother's Story has a mother explaining how due to her daughter being seriously injured by a drink driver, she is likely to be institutionalized for the rest of her life. The PSA ends with the mother sitting down beside her daughter's bed.
  Mother: They say my Jenny will never come out, but I got to believe she might one day.
• This one shows a first-person perspective of a drunk driver getting taken to the police station because he killed a girl. We also get to see a closeup of someone injecting a needle into the man's arm, getting his blood sample taken, which can be unsettling to those who don't like needles.
• Fireman's Story shows a fireman sitting down while telling a story about a drunk driving accident. He mentions that a woman and baby got killed by a drunk driver. After he says that, he then begins raging as he tells us what really bothers him, which is the fact that the drunk driver kept saying it wasn't his fault.
• In "Mirror", we zoom in slowly on a young woman putting on makeup in front of a vanity mirror while she talks about an accident she and her boyfriend got into. She knew he'd been drinking when she rode with him but thought they were safe because "he'd only had a couple." She happily informs us they're still together, "though sometimes I think he's only with me because he feels guilty." As she looks towards the camera, we see she's using the makeup to cover scars from the accident, and she suggests that she only stays because she's scared she won't get anyone else.

THINK!

The UK advertising campaign 'THINK!', which deals with road safety, has always had a few Scare 'Em Straight moments:

• One of their first campaigns was a series of anti-drunk driving ads played every holiday season for around two years, featuring much-loved Christmas songs playing over live police camera footage of paramedics and firefighters at the scene of serious and fatal drunk driving accidents. The songs don't do much to ease the horror. Here are some of the ads in question. Viewer discretion is advised: "Silent Night", "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day", and "Jingle Bells".
• One horrifying PIF begins with a man's face horribly disfigured and unnaturally smashed in like the aftermath of a car itself being in a severe accident. A woman's voiceover says, in an effort to push the issue of wearing a seatbelt and slowing down, that while a car is built to sustain critical damage in an accident, the human face is not. Fortunately, as the ad goes on, the face gradually returns to a normal state, but the sound of car crashes in reverse plays in the background.
• One of their adverts released in 2009 about drug driving features a car full of youths with their eyes digitally enlarged to show that they are visibly under drug influence, causing the police to pull them over. The girl's huge, blank eyes as she stares out of the window are particularly creepy.
• Another features a man going about his daily routine whilst being followed by the lifeless body of a boy he killed when he was speeding, affectionately nicknamed "Dead Ginger". The message: "Kill your speed or live with it." Watch and be horrified.
• Camera Phone from 2006 shows teenagers filming themselves as they walk home together, until one of them tries to cross the road without looking both ways and is hit by a car.
• One of their most memorable ones, simply called "Don't drive tired", shows a man driving at night with his family, except that he's basically asleep. The narrator then mentions that he will die in his sleep tonight, with his family by his side. Following right after is a shot of the car crashing and getting completely flipped over. What makes it all extra creepy is how the car is still running with the wheels spinning at top speed despite being upside down, implying that the man's foot is still on the pedal even though he's dead.
• There is also a very creepy anti-speaking-on-the-phone-when-driving ad, in which a man is calmly talking to his wife through a mobile phone. They talk for about 30 seconds before you hear a thump, and the man jerks forward and just lays there (presumably dead) with a bleeding nose as his distraught wife repeatedly calls his name while crying. Watch it here.
• In one ad, three men in a pub ask each other if they'd like another drink. The three men sit at a table with a pint each and spot a woman standing at the bar. She winks at them, then suddenly looks shocked as a loud, screeching car is heard as the woman suddenly flies towards the table, violently crashing into it. The men then peer over the table to see the woman lying, bloody on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.
• Another ad showed a very realistic-looking slow-motion collision with a child, whilst the narrator coldly counts the distance that the speeding car travels before it stops.
• "Lucky", a terrifying anti-speeding PIF, opens with a dead girl lying by the side of the road, with her voice informing us that "If you hit me at 40 miles an hour, there's around an 80% chance I'll die." Then her injuries begin to heal, complete with a Sickening "Crunch!" as her wrists and forearms snap back into place. She slides back into the middle of the road and gasps as she wakes up, demonstrating that "If you hit me at 30, there's around an 80% chance I'll live." An equally terrifying print ad◊ was also made, it provides the page image.
• In another, a man is shown without a seatbelt and he crashes into another car. Then the camera goes X-ray and a narrator, a very monotone, creepy, middle-aged lady's voice, explains how the airbag saved him from going through the window, but then in extreme detail goes into how his ribs break, his lungs get punctured and his heart suffers physical trauma, as the organs go through this on later afternoon TV before 6.
• This anti-drink-driving ad, titled "#PubLooShocker", is essentially footage of an elaborate practical joke on pubgoers, centered around Jump Scares. The sight of a bloodied mannequin smashing through a mirror might make you want to keep away from mirrors for a while, or you might find the people's reactions to be utterly hilarious. Or both. You decide.
• An anti-speeding "online simulator" radio advert went along these lines:
  Sound of tires squealing, a crash, then silence.
  Young child: "Hit me at 40mph, and there's an 80% chance I'll die. Hit me at 30mph, and there's an 80% chance I'll live."
  Sound of tires squealing, a crash, silence... then a child begins to cry loudly.
• A cinema ad showed only in London has a motorcyclist crashing into thin air. It then shows the driver before the accident, just about to turn at an intersection, with the motorcyclist appearing out of thin air, with the horrible visual of the motorcyclist crashing with the car, his body slamming against the vehicle. Horrified people look onwards as the ad shows the motorcyclist falling to the ground. Following that, it shows the motorbiker’s face, with his lifeless eyes looking straight at the camera. The ad ends with horrified people checking up on the motorcyclist, and the driver looking on in guilt.
• This horrifying PSA has a girl going outside and then crossing the street, only to be run over a car, with her shattering like glass as a Drone of Dread plays. It then shows pictures of her shattering like glass, her belongings at school being shattered like glass, her name at a school plaque vanishing into thin air, and her sports shirt shattering like glass. It then shows Olympic footage of her just about to start a 100m dash, only to be shattered like glass. The text "Don’t die before you’ve lived" appears on the screen.
• This drunk driving PSA has a drunk driver driving very close to a girl on a bicycle. Haunting music plays as the text shows up on the screen showing a drink driver’s excuses (Only had a couple, won’t get stopped, feel fine to drive, etc.). The drunk driver passes the girl, and then the ad shows a car coming towards the driver. The screen quickly fades to black, followed by the sound of a car crash, while the tagline appears.
• The replacement for the previous and tamer Hedgehogs campaign, Tales of the Road, was infamous for following the same Scare 'Em Straight approach that the main 'THINK!' PSAs do, with an art-style that looks like an eerie mix of Tim Burton and Margret Keane to boot. It does not help that it was shown on kids channels, where it gave many children nightmares and scarred them for life.
• This one from 2004 shows a first-person view of a driver speeding, while we see people lip-syncing a song about slowing down. The driver crashes into a motorcyclist with the music coming to an abrupt stop, while we see someone identifying the body.

Transport for London (TfL)

With London being as large a city as it is, with an equally large transport system, Transport for London has made its fair share of safety campains through the years; its ads have strayed into Nightmare Fuel territory on several occasions.

• In 2009, TfL began running a successful campaign titled "Don't let your friendship die on the road", encouraging young people to look out for each other on London roads. Three rather disturbing print ads were produced, and here◊ they◊ are◊. It'll take you a moment to realize what's happening, which is what makes them disturbing. You don't immediately realize that what you're looking at is actually a dead child lying in the middle of the road. Two television ads were also produced.
  • A few years later, they made◊ three◊ more◊ with a different tagline: "Stop. Think. Live." The situation is more obvious in those ones, but they're still equally disturbing.
• Another campaign consisted of two adverts initially taking on the guise of a film trailer and an episode of MTV Cribs, respectively. Both entries featured a fictional character (including a movie star named Scott Smith and a female supermodel, Sarah Rivers) being interviewed about their success. Towards the end, they walk across the street, suddenly looking off-screen; the camera cuts to a boy or girl in school uniform getting hit by a car, rolling unconsciously to the ground. A caption appears, reading "Don't die before you've lived."
• Three print ads from 2007 urged people using the transport system to report suspicious behavior, particularly terrorism. They all featured a short first-person story set against the dark and rather unsettling pastel drawings. One ad◊ features the image of a sinister woman glowering at the audience from her seat on a near-empty bus, another◊ has a faceless man in a long coat sitting on a bench with a suspicious-looking bag underneath, and the third◊ has the unnerving stare of a man in a bowler hat. All the stories end in a Cliffhanger, leaving it to the public's imagination to guess what happened next. Creepy imagery plus creepy story equals a very creepy advert.
• TfL and the Metropolitan Police run a terrifying annual campaign called "Know What You're Getting Into", about the dangers of unlicensed minicabs. Some notable ads include one depicting a male minicab driver nonchalantly recounting his criminal record of sexual assault, before offering an unsuspecting woman a lift; another entry showing a minicab passenger on her phone realizing that the driver isn't taking her where she asked to go, ending with the driver stopping the car and getting into the backseat with her; yet another concerning a group of girls forcing their drunken friend into an unlicensed car after a night of partying; and –— perhaps the most disturbing of the bunch -–- this ad, which depicts a woman being sexually assaulted inside a minivan in first-person. There were also equally disturbing print ads such as this one◊, which faced several complaints of being triggering to people who have actually been through rape.
• This ad from 2013 features the dying victim of a motorcycle accident lying in the middle of the road, surrounded by paramedics. With an intense, unblinking stare, and in a completely unaffected voice, he describes how he caused his accident and what's happening to his body as he succumbs to his injuries. "Still, you live and learn... don't you?"
• A retelling of "The Tortoise and the Hare", in which the hare runs out into the road and is knocked down by a car.
• One of their poster campaigns from 2002 looked as though it had been taken straight from the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's currently the page image for Big Brother Is Watching.

TAC Victoria

The Transport Accident Commission Victoria tackles all sorts of driving PSA mentioned at the beginning of the section and all of them combine it with Tear Jerker, but the most notable ones are on Drunk Driving. In fact, they are the first notable ones that coined up "If you drink, then drive, you're a bloody idiot." This video shows the majority of their PSAs, and this 20th anniversary AMV set to "Everybody Hurts" serves as an effective highlight reel. All of their ads can be summarized as: "Never drive drunk (you bloody idiot), never drive under the influence of drugs (you're out of your mind), never speed (don't fool yourself, speed kills and wipe 5-10 km off), never drive tired (take a break, fatigue kills), never drive distracted (distractions leads to disaster), drive more cautiously on country roads, be mindful of motorcyclists, and always wear seat belts (belt up or suffer the pain)."

• Girlfriend was the first-ever TAC ad produced. The story is about a young drunk driver who seriously injures his girlfriend and is confronted at the hospital by her angry parents, setting the realistic, documentary style that has been the hallmark of TAC communications ever since. Nurse Karen Warnecke uttered the immortal words "If you drink, then drive, you're a bloody idiot" for the first time in a corridor at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
• Yes Mum, made for the TAC's MAFMAD (Make a Film, Make a Difference) competition, shows a young man calling his mother, intercut with footage of him driving a car while his friends are being more than a bit of a distraction. She talks about how she's having trouble hearing him and asks if he's at a party. He tells her he is. She continues talking about mundane things such as his schoolwork while he says "Yes, mum." whenever he gets a chance. This is all intersected with scenes from a party. The young man asks if his father is there, and when his mother replies that he isn't, the young man can be seen fighting back tears. He tells his mother he loves her as she begs him to tell her what's wrong and the party music fades out. The camera pulls back to reveal that the car has crashed into the water and its occupants are trapped as it fills up. The film ends with him bursting into tears while his mother begins to panic, all while his friends in the background begin to scream in terror for someone to help them.
• This one, entitled "Golf", shows a boy and his grandfather playing golf together. All is well until we see the grandfather taking some sort of drug. His grandson gets curious and asks what they are, only for the grandfather to say that they are "Putting Pills". The two begin to pack up and get ready to drive back home. The grandfather decides to plan to do golf with his grandson next Saturday. However, they definitely will not as we see him crashing into another car, killing his grandson. We then see the boy's funeral while we see his grandfather grieving for him.
• This one from 2003, entitled "Shark", shows a boy playing in the water and suddenly getting eaten alive by a shark, all while he's struggling to stay afloat and screaming for help. And if that wasn't bad enough, the water turns red at the end, with a man putting his little daughter in it.
  Narrator: Every year, hundreds of people are killed on Victoria's roads, and this is how we react. It's time we change.
• This one, entitled "The Cell", shows a prisoner going to jail and remembering why he went. We then see him in a pub, with his friends pushing him to take some drugs. We then see him driving along, looking uncomfortable, and accidentally run over a woman, with the victim's dog looking all concerned for her.
• This one from the early 1990s, entitled "Tracy", shows the aftermath of an accident while we see a driver grieving for her friend while she explains what happened and cries for her mother. The police suggest that she stays here as the driver looks at the wrecked car, hoping that her friend, Tracy, isn't going to die, and tries to apologize to her. The ad ends with the girl bursting into tears with a cop comforting her.
• This one from 2012 shows a motorcycle crash in reverse while a man explains what happened to him in the crash, such as getting a broken neck, as we see a close up of the bike rider's neck unbreaking with a sickening crunch, and other stuff. We get revealed that the accident happened because he was going over 60km. If he was riding his bike just at 60km, he would have stopped in time.
• This one from 1994 shows a group of people going for a ride. The driver decides to kiss his girlfriend, but nearly crashes into a truck and instead rolls over into a ditch. We then see an unconscious (or dead) girl while the driver asks if everyone is alright. Suddenly, the car explodes, followed by everybody screaming. We then see two country men talking about the accident, with them attributing the crash to the fact that city kids "don't know the country roads" - until the crying wife of one of the men comes to notify him that their son was one of the fatalities in the crash.
• This one from 1998 begins with policemen pulling over drivers for speeding, with the speeding drivers explaining why they did it, with even one of the drivers pointing out a green speeding car. We then see some policemen checking up on an extremely brutal accident and it happens to be the same green car that passed the police cars earlier. You are treated to people grieving while watching their loved ones die, bloody corpses, and even a dislocated limb. Don't fool yourself, indeed!
• This one from 1998 entitled "Don't Get In", shows a girl playing basketball and making their team win. We then see the girl going into a pub and having a drink with her friends, and gets picked up by drunk drivers. However, the girl refuses at first, but her friends urge her to get in, resulting in the girl having to risk it. We then see them driving and quickly losing control as the car crashes into a pole, resulting in the girl being seriously injured. We then see her life 3 months later, as we see the girl in the hospital, taking deep breaths with her family by her side. We then see her life 5 years later, showing us that the girl has become crippled as we see her eat soup and draw something, while we hear her talking to us about how bad it is to be crippled and that she lost her friends. She mentions that she wouldn't be like this if she just said no, and not get into the car.
• This one from 2010 entitled "The Ride" has a guy getting on and starting up his bike. It enters first-person view, and he drives on a road and then comes up to an intersection. A bus whizzes by, and when it passes by, it transitions to another place, this time it shows a motorbiker driving in between cars. A van starts to change lanes while a horn can be heard, and when it finishes moving to the side, it transitioned to different place. Then it keeps doing the same thing, with a motorbiker driving dangerously, and then transitioning behind vehicles, people motorbikers, etc. The last shot shows a motorbiker driving on the highway. He starts to pass another vehicle while speeding, and then he rolls his motorbike over. The camera starts to roll everywhere, and when it stabilizes, it shows the motorbiker’s body rolling right towards a pickup truck, and when the motorbiker’s body is just about to hit the truck, the screen cuts to black while a metal-sounding thump can be heard.
• This motorcycle safety ad from 1997 has a motorbiker in heavy traffic, with the narrator telling you that you should assume that the worst can happen. As the motorbiker drives through an intersection, the narrator tells you to watch out for blind spots, because only 1 in 40 people in Victoria drive a motorcycle, while 1 in 4 serious or fatal injuries to the occupants involve a motorcycle. As the narrator finishes saying that sentence, a sedan bumps into the guy’s motorbike, which causes him to lose control and tip his motorbike over. His body slides on the road, and then his rear end crashes into the wheel of a van. The screen cuts to black shortly after, and the narrator mentions that’s 10 times the risk of a serious injury, and it doesn’t matter whose fault it is because you’re disabled forever. While the narrator is saying this, it shows the now-disabled motorbiker in a wheelchair, and he goes into the bathroom, and he struggles to get out of his wheelchair and on to the toilet. His wife starts to assist him, and then it zooms onto the motorbiker’s pain-ridden face.
• This 2010 anti-drug driving ad called "Swap" has 2 men at a restaurant, with one of them smoking a cigarette. A woman comes along, telling them to get going, with another woman holding a baby alongside her. Then it shows them coming out of a house, with the woman and guy getting into a car, waving goodbye to the baby-holding mother. Then it shows them driving, with the guy under the influence of drugs. Then he pulls over and gets out of his car, and when he is out of his car, a car whizzes by very quickly and runs him over ala Final Destination style, while the woman shrieks. She quickly runs over to the guy’s body while distressingly screaming his name.
• Slab made for the TAC's MAFMAD (Make a Film, Make a Difference) competition begins with a man getting ready to cut open the heads of two dead bodies in a morgue. The two dead bodies suddenly become alive and ask each other if they are alright. A song then comes on about speeding while we see a man riding on a morgue table. We then see a first-person shot of a driver crashing into a pole, followed by split-second screenshots of X-rays. While the song continues, we see three women running with a dead body in a blue bag while dancing around and singing, and eventually begin to dance on the floor. The dead body then comes to life and gets out of the blue bag and sings about how your friends' lives are in your hands and that you need to do the best you can to survive. He then adds "I hope you heard what they said, but it's too late, 'cause we're all dead...". The bodies then return to their previous state as the man begins to cut open the head of one of the bodies. And just as the blade touches the body's head, the clip ultimately cuts to split second screenshots of X-rays.
• This one from 1995 begins with a group of friends driving, talking back and forth. The driver accidentally crashes into a driving car without giving way, accidentally killing the mother of a baby, and you are treated to seeing the damaged car, the sound of a crying baby, the mother's dead body, and the friends breathing heavily and looking in shock.
• This one from 1999 entitled "Pinball" has a guy getting into a car with a woman, and then they drive off, with the guy forgetting to buckle up. Then they crash with another car, and then it fades to black. Doesn’t sound too harsh, right? Well, not. It fades back to a physician, who starts to explain what happens to you in a crash without a seatbelt. While it shows the car crashing in super slo-mo, the physician explains that in a 50 km/h crash, as the car decelerates, you start to leave your seat and you smash into the windscreen (while the ad shows the guy smashing his head into the windscreen), and then shockwaves ripples through the brain, which instantly damages cells. He explains that your body is like a pinball, which you body can bounce off many surfaces of the car (which the ad shows the guy exactly going through that). It goes back to the physician, who explains that the forces can fracture limbs & puncture lungs. It goes back to the crash, which the physician explains that you can collide with belted occupants, which severely injures them (the ad shows the guy colliding into the woman, who is buckled up). The physician explains that the result can be brain & spinal injuries in which you’ll be unlikely to recover from. Behind him is a guy on a walker, and a guy struggling to eat. The physician remarks, "Why would you ever get into a car, without putting on a seatbelt?"
• Another ad similar to the above one, called "10 KPH Less", has a guy walking on a sidewalk, holding a pizza box. He starts to cross the street... only to be run over by a speeding car. A Sickening "Crunch!" can be heard as the man’s legs hit the windscreen. It cuts to a trauma surgeon, who is going to reconstruct what happens to the the human body is less than two-tenths of a second, when hit by a car going at 70 km/h from a 50m braking distance. He explains that even with ABS, the impact happens at around 46 km/h. As the guy gets hit by the car in super slo-no the surgeon explains in excruciating what happens, and the horrific things happening to the pedestrian (flesh & ligaments being torn away, the neck braking, the skull shattering, the brain turning into pulp, etc.). The surgeon explains that a little more than a second later, the pedestrian hits the road with a 70% chance of death. He then explains that if the driver was braking at 60 km/h, they might have been able to stop in time, with the pedestrian suffering minor injuries (the ad shows the driver stopping just in time for the pedestrian). The surgeon then tells the viewers to "think about it."
• This one entitled "Bush Telegraph", shows a group of friends having a drink, followed by one of the friends leaving to go back home after a drink, taking his son and his dog. They talk back and forth, and all of a sudden a truck brutally smashes into their car, with the son screaming for his dad before the truck plows into them. We then see the same group of friends as before. One of the mates picks up the phone to get a call to tell them the news, as his other friends start to feel worried.
• This one from 2005 shows a man in a different place, with a little boy following him everywhere he goes, while an ominous tune plays. We see the man getting dressed for his daughter's wedding while he sees the same little boy in the reflection of his mirror, causing him to hang his head down. We then see him standing near a fence while he has a flashback to the accident, and we get revealed that he killed the little boy for speeding, causing the boy to turn into a ghost, all while we see his dead body on the ground. The man suddenly bursts into tears as he realized what he's done.
• This TAC PSA from 2000 called "Never" starts off innocent enough, with a couple driving a car with lively music playing, but the music abruptly stops as the car crashes into the back of a flat-bed semi-truck. The guy who was driving repeatedly calls out "Julie," as Julie’s lifeless face is shown. This is juxtaposed with scenes of a birthday party, with its occupants drinking. Paramedics then surround the vehicle, asking questions & putting a sheet over Julie, with the driver crying and asking what's happened to his girlfriend. It then cuts to the driver being with Julie, with her father, with heartbreaking music beginning as the father, in a depressed tone, talking about how he’ll never see her nor hear her voice ever again. It then shows the driver and Julie getting ready to drive & the scene of the accident, with the father continuing that he’ll never hear Julie laugh, nor see her getting married, nor cuddle her children ever, or hear her calling him dad as an unsettling shot of Julie's hand with 2 big flesh holes is shown. It goes back to the father, stating that he’ll never forget the day that he had to choose Julie's coffin, and then he cries out hysterically, "My beautiful baby..." as he breaks down further. It is very heartbreaking and scary to watch.
  • The sequel, which takes place after the PSA showed above, isn’t much better, with the elderly man clutching a photo of (presumably) Julie, with the driver stating that she was a beautiful girl and that he wonders if their lives will ever be the same again. The driver is then revealed to be disabled and he says that he’s dealing with a lot of cops and that the whole case is coming out. It cuts back to the man wondering if he’ll ever stop thinking about it, as it drives him insane. He starts to break down as the same heartbreaking music starts playing. It then goes back to the driver, as he states that everyone treats him like a criminal, then it shows the elderly man crying. The driver says "He’s saying I killed her." He is shown in a wheelchair, who lost a leg. It cuts back to the elderly man crying, then the tagline is shown. Both ads had the song "Adagio For Strings" playing in the background.
• This one from 1991 entitled "Darren" shows a group of friends going for a ride. A girl then asks the driver if he can slow down, but the driver refuses and assumes that they are safe. The boys in the back start to fight, distracting the driver and amusing the girl at first until she becomes annoyed and slaps them, causing the two to stop fighting. Darren, the driver, is seen to not be concentrating and crashes into a red Chrysler Valiant, and we then get to see Darren's body lying near the burning wreckage. We then see a wide shot of a hospital room which shows Darren's parents going to visit their son, with Darren's sister and another girl staying in the waiting room. All of a sudden, we hear the mother letting out a blood-curdling "NOOOOOOOOOO!" offscreen, implying that Darren didn't survive. Said scream could also give some people a Jump Scare for those not expecting it. After the two girls hear the scream, they realize what has happened, and both hug each other while crying.
  • Another version shows the same thing as before, but after the crash, we see an ambulance picking up Darren and putting him into the ambulance van, and cutting off his shirt, all while we see a boy (presumably one of his mates) talking about the group of friends, while we also see Darren's sister shouting at the police to let her go and tells them that she is his brother.
• This one from 1994 entitled "Night Shift" shows a man picking up his girlfriend and taking her for a ride in his van. She falls asleep, and her boyfriend wakes her up by turning on the radio, much to her annoyance. She suggests that he pull over if he's tired, which he ignores. We then see that the sun has risen up, and the driver has gotten really tired and tries to concentrate on the road, but suddenly loses control as he brutally crashes into a truck, while the truck driver quickly gets out and looks at the carnage.
• This one from the 1990s shows a family getting ready to go back home. The mother offers to drive for him, which he declines. The next scene shows him getting more tired, with the rest of the family sleeping. Eventually, he is so tired he crashes into a river, waking up everybody as the car sinks down. The man quickly gets out of the car and floats in the water while screaming for help. What's worse is that we never find out whether they survived or not.
• This one from 2000 entitled "The Pub" begins with a group of mates drinking at a pub, with two of the mates leaving to go for a drive. We also see some clips of an old couple walking their dog. All is calm until the drunk driver brutally kills them both, with the dog whimpering while looking at their dead bodies. We then see the same drunk driver in prison getting sentenced to 5 years.
• This one from 1997 entitled "Prison" begins with a prisoner visiting his wife and kids and discussing the accident, all while we see shots of him in a pub, the aftermath of the accident, and him in prison. The prisoner's wife says that he will miss both of the kids' birthdays and reminds him of him being pleaded guilty. She then comforts him and tells him that it will be over before he even knows it and that they will both have a whole new life, all while the man cries loudly. The baby then touches the prisoner's hand and the prisoner and his wife hug each other. As they leave, the woman and the baby both start crying.
• This one from the early 1990s entitled "Beach Road" simply shows some paramedics trying to revive a young boy, only to fail as we hear a flatline, followed by the victim's family grieving, the paramedics taking the victim off life support and a man talking about the impacts of a crash and the results of your loved ones.
• This PSA about looking out for bikers at intersections starts off with a first-person view of a biker driving down a suburban street. It then cuts to a group of people making a turn at an intersection. It cuts back to the biker briefly, and then it shows the driver looking around for vehicles, and then they go into the intersection. They freak out as the biker crashes into their car, along with the scary visual of the biker rolling on the hood and then onto the concrete. It then shows the aftermath of the accident, with the driver being questioned and paramedics treating the bloodied biker. It then shows the biker on the route to recovery, as somebody else tries to put on an artificial hand on his now-amputated stump.
• This PSA from 2021, named Lucky, has a family driving down a road, with a mother and a girl talking back and forth, while the father is shown to be milking up speed. They are then show passing a semi truck, which then reveals that a police car is on the side of the road. It then shows more shots of them driving on the highway, and they pass by a police officer giving a ticket to somebody else. Then a police car drives by them in the opposite lane. Then their car slightly goes into the ditch, then they lose control, and rolls into the ditch. It then shows the father’s bloodied face, with the girl crying hysterically, with the mother and one of the child’s fates unknown. It ends with the tagline "The lucky ones get caught."
  • There is also a rare extended version of the PSA that is even scarier. The things that were extended are the beginning driving scene, which shows more of the mother and driver, and the crash scene, in which it shows an extended overhead shot of the upside-down car in the grass. The child suddenly starts screaming, and it shows the mother, who is clearly dead, before cutting back to the injured driver. For some reason, this extended version can only be found on the page of the person who directed this film (before being uploaded to YouTube) and probably not on TV, presumably for being too long and/or showing a dead body.
• This one from 2010, named "What Hurts Most", is about a man who is technically blind. He tells his story about his accident which he would never forget as when it happened the last thing he saw while his vision was whole was his hands covered with blood and glass shards. That happened because he took off his seatbelt for a few seconds and that is what hurts most to him.
• TAC, in order to prove how we are all fragile in car crashes, made Graham, the only human designed to survive a car crash.

Queensland Transport

Queensland Transport has made many horrifying commercials, including Pram, Negatives, Catherine, and more. They tackle speeding, drink driving, and seatbelts, and miscellaneous topics (looking out for children), mostly speeding. Most of their ads can be found here.

• "Pram" is one of their worst ads. A father and son drive down a road. A mother is shown pushing her baby in a stroller. The father is then shown speeding. He then clips another car and heads right towards the woman with the stroller, with the woman turning around to protect her infant. The screen cuts to black with a thump. When it cuts back on, it shows a crying baby covered in blood, the father running towards the infant, then panning towards the dead woman, the traumatized child screaming "Daaaddyyy!", and the father having the bloodied crying infant in his hands. This is one of the most scariest ads ever and it’s also a Tear Jerker.
  • A variant of this commercial takes things even further: it starts right off at the father clipping the car, and it also reads out on what happened to them. The traumatized child can also be heard screaming at the tagline.
  Amy Louise Oliver. Killed instantly.
  Hayley Jane Oliver. Will spend her life without her mother.
  Jack Michael Atwood. Undergoing trauma counseling.
  Michael John Atwood. Charged with dangerous operation of a vehicle causing death. Facing up to 7 years of imprisonment.
• "Negatives" is shot in a creepy photo-negative style and uses a creepy and serious-sounding narrator, which pretty bad in itself, but the content of the ad is even worse. It starts of with the message "The negatives of speeding." It shows a couple walking on a crowded sidewalk. They kiss, and the woman crosses the street. "You kill." The woman gets run over by a speeding car. She rolls to the concrete as a eagle-like sound plays, and it shows a horrified man running towards the woman. "You maim." A motorcyclist collides with a car. He rolls all over the windshield and onto the pavement. It shows him in a wheelchair, with another person hugging him. "You injure." Women freak out as they lose control and crash into a tree. One of the women’s heads smash into a window and then rocks forward. It shows a woman struggling to eat. "You disfigure." A man putting on an artificial leg is shown, and then a whimpering man with a halo cast is shown. "No positives." Paramedics put a sheet over a dead biker. "Just nightmares." Paramedics pull out an injured person out of a wreck, as a crying woman and a siren is heard. A man screams to another man "Hey! I just killed a bloke!", and he slaps him. "Forever." A man cries to himself "He’s dead... He’s dead!!!" A woman is grieving to her dead husband. "Exceed the limit by any amount," A speed limit sign and a speedometer going over the limit is shown. "Expect the worst." The ad ends with a paramedic feeling sorry to himself, and a woman crying to her dead husband.
• The Slow Down Stupid campaign, in similar vein to the above ad, and using the same scary narrator (replaced with a not-as-creepy female narrator in one of the ads) had at least six ads, and they all showed black and white clips, and it frequently cuts to black screen with text, with immensely creepy music playing in the background. Then, the music stopped and replaced with a slight wind noise, and it usually showed a graphic clip, and then the tagline, "Slow down stupid". The tagline itself is pretty harsh.
  • "Faces": "Mothers die." Faces of different women, all with eyes closed and expressionless emotions. "Fathers die." Faces of different men, again with the same closed eyes and expressions. "Sons and daughters." More faces of different people, same emotions. "Friends and lovers die." Even more faces, same emotions. "All gone too fast." More faces are shown, this time it is zoomed back a bit, which reveals them to be shirtless and a sheet over them. Wavy scenes of accidents are also shown. The music stops on the third person. "Senseless." A crashes car is shown, and it shows coloured blood draining down the door.
  • "It Hurts": "It hurts." A man is on the phone outside of his crashed car, reporting that he just had a crash. A woman is in the car. "You lose points." The man reports that the woman is fine. "You lose money." The man reports that the car is in a pretty bad way. A man is in the front of the car as well. "You lose your freedom." The man questions about his license, and it’s revealed that he crashed into another car. "You lose your job." The man says that he has to go. A coloured police car is coming down the street as well. "Is it worth it?" The music stops, as the man says that he’ll call back.
  • "3 Little Words": This ad uses a female narrator. "Three little words..." A couple is embracing a rose plant. The woman eventually pulls up a coloured rose. "...that say, 'I don’t want you to die, from something stupid as speeding.'" The music stops as it shows the scene of an accident.
  • "Nightmare": A happy couple is shown posing on a beach with a car behind them. "You speed." It shows them hugging. "You crash." The woman pushes the man away. "You kill your girlfriend." The woman has her hair in her hand, with the man beside her. "You live." The man is shown flexing. "But it’s not living." The woman is on the man’s back, then cuts to her being alone. "It’s a living nightmare." The man is standing up, having his arm around the kneeling woman. "Forever." The music stops, and it shows a dead and bloodied woman (the blood is colored) on the streets, with a lifeless face, with lights flashing.
  • "In A Flash": "Funny." It shows a family sitting down at a stairway, playing with each other. The screen flashes and a shuttering sound is heard, implying that a picture was taken. "He loves them." It shows them playing with each other again, and another picture is taken. The sound of children laughing can be faintly heard. "He lives for them." Another pose, with the kids playing ball, and another picture is taken. "But he forgets in a flash." The woman is shown taking a picture of the family. "He’ll be gone in a flash." It shows the family looking at the photo they took, with the father vanishing like a ghost, with a creepy sound effect. "Not funny." It shows the woman sitting down at a stairway in her home, crying. The music stops, and it shows the scene of a car crash, and it focuses on the car door, with colored blood raining down the door, with the camera zooming in on the blood.
  • "Life": A car is shown driving down a hill. "Life goes fast." A car drives down a highway. "Don’t speed it up." More shots of the car driving, with the voiceover "For your own sake." It then shows a group of people on the highway, interspersed with a man looking in a rear-view mirror, with the voiceover "For the ones you love, care for, and protect." It shows a car driving down the highway, and the voiceover "Don’t leave them.", with the camera showing a colored speeding sign, and a speedometer going over the limit. "Not like this." It shows the car driving down a road, and the music stops as it shows said car in a scene of an accident.
• Also from the Queensland Transport were a series of PIFs dubbed "Fatal 4" that were shot POV-style, through the eyes of victims just after a car wreck. The noises the victims make while in a state of pure agony are just flat-out horrific. The chilling ending tagline in each one certainly doesn't help things either ("Driving [title of the subject of the ad], kills everyday people, everyday.")
  • "Speeding" shows a biker who seems to be the victim of a hit and run accident all alone, lying on the ground, desperately pleading for help as his legs are broken.
  • "Tired" depicts someone waking up inside the crashed wreck of their car as they attempt to move.
  • "Unbuckled" shows a father outside the wreckage of his car, being able to only crawl through the grass to reach his crying infant.
  • The last one, "Drink Driving", is by far the most horrifying, depicting a young woman practically convulsing in pain as people around her desperately try to get her to stay still.
• "Catherine" starts off innocent enough, which it goes through the perspectives of two people, a mother and her son coming from the grocery store, going to pick up her older son from baseball practice, and two teenage girls (one of their names is Catherine) who came from a music store. Catherine starts to part ways with the other teenage girl. The mother is shown going over the speed limit, and the son wants his mother to look at his drawing. She starts to say that it’s nothing, but she frantically brakes, and she runs over Catherine. The other one lets out a blood-curdling scream, as she runs to Catherine in horror. The mother and the teenage girl is crying on what they saw, as paramedics wrap up Catherine. One of the policemen escorts the boy away as it goes to the tagline, which has an American soft rock ballad with a man singing "Because enough, is enough!" The accident scene of this ad is also a Tear Jerker.
• This speeding PSA has a person driving down a road, who is speeding. Also shown are the excuses that the driver has. It then shows a boy running after his dog, with his gardening mother in the background. He runs out onto the street, only to get run over by the car. The mother screams horrifically and runs over to her dead son, who has a heavily bloodied face and a gore-like neck, with the dog next to the dead boy. The narrator says "This woman’s son was killed by a car who was doing 72Ks in a 60 zone. She doesn’t want your excuses. Please, slow down!" It then fades to the tagline, with the same ballad as before.
• This seatbelt PSA starts off with a man being showered by somebody else, with the voiceover "It happens. You lost it. You lose control." It then shows the person wiping up the man, and it is revealed that he urinates in a bag, with the voiceover "No bladder, or bowel control." It then shows him struggling to pull down his shirt, with the voiceover "No feeling below your chest." Then it shows a woman reading a book in front of an empty bed, with the man in a wheelchair behind her, while she sheds a tear. The voiceover says "No sexual function." It then shows two people trying to get a paraplegic man out of a chair into another, with the voiceover "You’re a T5 paraplegic. It’s not good." Then it shows the man crying in front of the woman. It goes to the tagline "Wear it, or wear the cost."
• A duo of ads tells you to look out for children on the street, with the tagline "Look out! There are children about!" said by children.
  • The first ad has a kid playing his Game Boy on a crowded school bus full of laughing and talking children. Eventually, the sound of the children fades out, leaving the only sound to be heard is the Game Boy. As the child gets up, the narrator says "The last thing on your mind is you." It then shows a first person perspective of a person driving their car. The child gets into their way, and the screen cuts to black with the sound of a person getting run over by a car. It then shows the tagline.
  • The second ad has a girl walking on a crowded sidewalk, while she says and calculates equations in her mind. The ambience fades out, leaving the only sound to be heard it the girl talking in her mind. As the girl goes out onto the street, the voiceover says "The last thing on your mind is you." What follows is a first person perspective of a person driving a car, again, and the girl gets in the car’s way, and it cuts to black with the sound of the girl getting run over by the car. Again, it shows the tagline.
• This new speed limit PSA starts off innocent enough, with a boy playing with his hand-held toy plane on a sunny day, while happy piano music plays in the background. He throws the plane, and then it lands on the street, and the boy goes to the plane to retrieve it, while the music stops. He shrieks, and a car frantically brakes. Fortunately, the car stops just before it is about to hit the boy. Then a voiceover states that a car travelling at 50km/h would have stopped 12-16 meters when before when travelling at 60km/h, which could make a difference. All the while creepy music is playing and a ghost car passes through the boy. As the mother escorts the boy away and the driver exiting his car and walking off, the voiceover tells us that starting March 1st, you cannot go over 50km/h on local streets, unless otherwise posted. Then the voiceover tells us that now the law says: Slow down to 50km/h. Then the tagline says "50km/h (colored in red) on local streets will save lives."
• Another speeding commercial starts off with a family at a park, having fun, with the mother taking pictures of the father spinning around the baby, and a speeding driver, with the voiceover "It doesn’t seem like very much. But it was more than enough. Why did you hurry? Why did you speed?" Then the mother walks out to the street, the baby looks on, and the speeding driver brakes and runs the woman over, with the screen flashing white when she’s hit. It then shows her body on the road while people check up on her, with the voiceover "At 2-15 Ks over the limit, you have less time to react, and little time to stop, so if you hit somebody, you’ll probably kill them. That’s all it takes. It doesn’t seem like very much..." It cuts to the tagline, saying "Speed. Don’t be in a hurry to kill someone."
• This commercial which uses scenes from Negatives (although the scenes aren’t in a photo-negative style) and Catherine has sorrowful choir-like singing over slow-motion clips of above films. The singing and the visuals of people suffering is pretty scary.
  Singers: When are you ever gonna stop, all this hurt?
  When are you ever gonna stop, all this pain?
  When are you ever gonna, ease on back?
  Stop leaving all this destruction in your trail,
  When are you ever gonna, be aware of your self,
  Till your senses come round?
  When are you ever gonna, slow down?
  Narrator: Exceed the limit, by any amount, expect the worst.
  Singers: When are you ever gonna, slow down?
  Narrator: Slow down, drive safe, every K over, is a killer.
  Singers: Slooooow doooowwwn.

Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec

What THINK! is to the British and the TAC is to Australians, the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec^note Quebec Automobile Insurance Corporation, or SAAQ, is to Canadians.

• "Eyes" starts off with a watch, and then a dead man in a car, staring at the camera with lifeless eyes. Then it shows said man driving down the road, over the speed limit. He then goes into the other lane and crashes into another car, with one car flying up into the air. It then shows the dead man in the car, and then the scene of the crash with the text "Take a few more minutes... to live." However, the crash scene is poorly made in CGI, so it could be Nightmare Retardant for some.
• "Speed Kills" shows a young man grieving for his deceased girlfriend as a coroner reads from her autopsy report. A series of flashbacks then reveal she was killed in an accident caused by the boyfriend's excessive speeding.
• "90 Zone" starts off with two people getting into a car, and then a man speeding on a highway, all while heartwrenching music plays. The narrator says that a 90 zone isn’t a racetrack for professional drivers. It then shows the man speeding, and then he comes across a truck, then swerves frantically around it, and then collides with the other people, while the truck driver covers himself up, with the narrator saying that the driver is going so fast that he couldn’t stop behind the truck. The ad ends with the horrifically crashed cars. This ad could only be shown after a certain time due to its content.
• "Never Forget" has a man speeding down a road, with the voiceover "You’re in a hurry, and you’re head is full. Make sure to make room for something." The man then hits a pedestrian on the road, and his head hits the windshield, and then rolls all over the car and onto the pavement. Shocked, the man gets out of his car and looks at the pedestrian, who has a blood-covered face. The voiceover says "Anything can happen in a 50 kph zone. Never forget this. Slow down."
• "Speedometer" starts off with a speedometer. The speedometer increases, and then goes over the limit. In the background, you can hear what appears to be people having fun, and the car passing by objects at speed. This continues for around 30 seconds, until you can hear people screaming, and the car braking. The car crashes, and the camera shows the speedometer tumbling around as the car rolls over. The ad ends with the cracked upside down speedometer.
• This one from 1994 shows the grisly aftermath of a car accident, with a little girl crying for her mother while the drunk driver gets arrested and the injured (or presumably dead) parents get taken away. The PSA ends with a tagline that says "Drunk driving... it destroys lives.".
• These two ads feature a camera panning ominously through a field of either crashed automobiles (in the first one) or medical equipment (in the second one) as a narrator recites statistics and questions in a very threatening tone why things have to be that way.
• "Wheelchair" features a man speeding in his car and moving the gearshift back and forth with rock music playing in the background. When he crashes, the music stops as we cut to him again, only to find out that he is now crippled and in an electric wheelchair, as we see him slowly moving away.
  • "Wheels" is just as unsettling. We start off with a young couple going for a ride with the girl looking out the window as happy music plays in the background. The girl's boyfriend, however, ramps up the speed and gets him and his partner involved in a crash. Then, we cut to the girl, only to find out that she is now dead as we see her covered in a sheet on a morgue trolley as we hear some whistling in the background.
• "Hero to Zero" is a particularly disturbing PSA from SAAQ. We're treated to footage of an actual car crash while an upbeat sounding pop song plays in the background (Said song was actually made just for this PSA). What really pushes it to horrifying levels is the ending where we're told that the driver, named Matthew, was killed after driving over 120 hms/hr. Making it worse is the audio of the friends telling him to wake up, clearly scared beyond belief. Easily SAAQ's most harrowing ad.
  Tagline: Choose Life, not Speed.

DOE (Department of the Environment)

The DOE has made a variety of different campaigns and adverts, with a majority of them being horrific in their own rights. Many of these aren't afraid to show gore and tend towards Mood Whiplash and Soundtrack Dissonance.

• "Thoughts" has a young couple on a drive while a different music track ("I Can See Clearly Now", "Don't Stop Me Now", "Call Him Mr. Vain", "Highway to Hell" and "It Must Have Been Love") plays as the driver begins to increase in speed, and his girlfriend begins to get increasingly more nervous, even appearing to be shouting at him to slow down, followed by her boyfriend shouting at cars to get out of the way. They crash into the back of a car where a little girl is watching the line of traffic, throwing her out of the car, and killing her instantly. We also get to see unnerving shots of the little girl's corpse, her parent's bleeding faces, and two men moving a stretcher with the girl covered in a sheet. The ad ends with the voice-over of a courtroom while the driver's girlfriend looks at him with disgust, huddled in a blanket with a police officer beside her, all while the driver looks around in shame. The dark atmosphere and the aftermath are both equally terrifying.
• "Flowers" has a couple hanging out with each other, before getting married, moving into a new home, and then starting a family. It shows the father having an alcoholic drink and then driving. He approaches an intersection with an oncoming car and then brakes frantically. His car shoots up into the air and then crashes to the ground, along with the flowers he bought for his wife. It then shows the mother and child at a cemetery, with the mother holding flowers in her hand. "You Don’t Bring Me Flowers" plays in the background of this ad.
• This one shows a bunch of people going into a giant crusher while a narrator talks about ignoring all the traffic rules such as forgetting to pay attention, forgetting to wear your seatbelt, etc. The narrator then mentions forgetting that nothing on the road is more crushable than you. While he says that, we see the people all getting crushed to death. The eerie synth music doesn't help.
• "Shame" involves a toddler playing soccer with his teddy bear and bonding with his father in the backyard as we cut to scenes of another man also playing soccer, winning a game and getting a drink to celebrate before getting into his car. Everything is nice and peaceful until he suddenly loses control and crashes through the fence, crushing the child to death. The bloodied driver exits his wrecked car to view the man clutching his son's dead body and silently wailing as he looks on in guilt while the narrator asks the rhetorical question "Could you live with the shame?". A remake of "Man of the World" by Fleetwood Mac plays throughout the ad.
• A similar advert in 2014 was produced, in which the driver loses control of his speeding car, the car crashes through a hedgerow... and then crushes an entire class of young schoolchildren on a field trip to a nearby park ^note as all their teachers and aides stand and idly watch. A mournful, lullaby-version of Guns N' Roses hard rock classic "Sweet Child of Mine" plays in the background, and the scene is underscored by a shy young boy paying attention to his matchbox-sized car, which is a scale version of the car being driven by the responsible driver, and he is shown losing his grasp after being killed. The over-the-top Bloodless Carnage means it could be seen as Narm, but some people have lauded its sobering message that speeding in Ireland has killed enough children since 2000 to fill a primary school classroom.

  Narrator: "Since 2000, speeding has killed a classroom of our children. Shame on you. You can never control the consequences if you speed."

• "Mess", which is against speeding, starts off with a young couple hugging and looking each other in the eyes. A small grey hatchback clips a red car and rolls over towards the couple. The red car crashes into a blue car, and then the hatchback smashes into the boy, making him puke, with the girl's legs trapped between him and the stone wall as she screams in terror. Many people stop and stare in shock (including a mother and her daughter) as paramedics, police, and firefighters rush into the scene as the driver in the blue car is revealed to be dead. The scene then cuts to the girlfriend having an operation on her leg, and the boyfriend's parents crying over the sight of his dead body on a stretcher. The driver who was speeding appears in court and has a flashback of him avoiding running over a dog, causing the horrific carnage, as the girl watches, with the scene fading to her at her boyfriend's funeral, revealed to be in a wheelchair as a result of the crash. The creepy version of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" contributes to a lot of the horror.
• This one began as the "Light and Cheerful" kind, with a man sitting down at a bar next to a beautiful woman, picking up a beer, and setting down his keys. The woman frowns and a voiceover says "Before you decide to drink and drive, take a look at the decisions you could be forcing into others." It then showed clips of blood-soaked people in wrecked cars, a woman trying to walk and screaming in agony, a man in a semi-vegetative state, two police officers delivering the bad news to an elderly woman, a disabled girl trying to paint with her mouth, an attractive-looking woman turning around to reveal a horribly disfigured face, and paramedics attempting to revive an unconscious woman, all while everyone stoically considers the choices forced upon them. The scene then cuts back to the happy bar as the man sets down his beer, and the woman smiles, with the voiceover saying "Just one drink impairs driving. Never ever drink & drive. Could you live with the shame?"
• This one from 2002 starts with a loving couple cuddling on a bench, with the words "Today Michael will hit his girlfriend so hard, she'll end up with permanent brain damage." They get in a car with two other people, and everyone wears a seatbelt except the boyfriend. They get in an accident, and the camera graphically shows him bouncing around the cab, striking other people with his head, before cutting to a paramedic reporting on the scene and the other three passengers in the ambulance in body bags.
• "Excuses" shows the daily lives of victims in road accidents caused by speeding drivers, such as a crippled man getting into a pool, a paralyzed woman being lifted onto her hospital bed, a man looking at a photo of his dead wife, and a woman taking off her prosthetic leg. We hear voiceovers of the victims talking about the excuses the drivers that seriously hurt them gave ("I was in a hurry", "I thought the text was important", "The sun was in my eyes" etc). The ad ends with a girl and her father driving while the girl says it was just an accident, and a lorry smashes into their car landing on top of theirs, presumably killing them.
• One from 2009 has a beer glass on the left side of the screen, with different people (and text in different fonts on the right side of the screen) saying "Every drink increases the risk of crashing", with the beer glass continually draining. After the 4th time they say it, the glass suddenly explodes, with the sound of a horrific car crash. It fades to black and fades back again with another full beer glass, this time, it's in the shape of a coffin, with a voiceover saying "Hit home yet? Never ever drink & drive."
• There was a campaign in 2002 called "Pay Attention or Pay the Price" in 2002, with both of them having the song "I Want to Walk You Home" by Fats Domino in the background.
  • The first ad has a boy and a girl texting messages to each other. They eventually meet each other, much to their enjoyment. The boy starts to text something while walking on the street, but he gets run over by a van, hitting the windshield as the girl lets out a blood-curdling scream. His shattered phone drops onto the ground and he falls to the ground, with blood coming out of his mouth. It then shows the boy’s funeral with his coffin being carried and people grieving over his death, including the girl.
  • The second ad has a boy coming back from school, and hugging his mother. They’re just about to cross the street, and it cuts to a driver in traffic. He makes a turn, and spots an attractive woman on the sidewalk, not paying attention to the road, running both of them over in the process. It cuts to the mother’s unsettling bloodied face, and it’s revealed that she’s watching the paramedics trying to revive the unconscious boy, but to no avail, as the EKG flatlines. The tagline is shown as the driver is locked up in jail.
• "Just Because" starts off with various pedestrians and drivers avoiding accidents, with voiceovers of each pedestrian or driver ("Just because I'm a pedestrian, doesn't mean I'm nobody", "Just because you're surrounded by metal, doesn't mean I'm not flesh and blood", etc). The final one, an elderly pedestrian happily walking from the grocery store with eggs, says "Just because you're nearly home, doesn't mean you are", then a car suddenly runs him over, sending him flying with blood coming out of his head after he lands on the side of the road, as the driver looks on in shock. The policeman rushes over to him and we get an uncomfortable close-up shot of the old man's eyes dilating, staring right at the viewer. The PIF ends with the cop pronouncing him dead and one final shot of the eye.
  Narrator: One in every five road deaths is a pedestrian. Just because you use the road, doesn't mean you own it. Respect everyone's journey.

Luchemos por la Vida

Luchemos por la Vida ("Let's Fight For Life") from Argentina have also treated us with some nightmarish commercials:

• This one from 1992 has eggs getting into a simulated car accident. The worst part is you see them lying in a pool of their own yolks, while we hear an unsettling ambulance noise. The ad ends with a man reminding you to buckle up, as we see him do so.
• Another one from 1992 shows a group of kids playing hide and seek in the dark, while we get to see a first-person view of him with his flashlight, searching for the kids. We then see two toy cars as an announcer says that darkness is a game, but on the road, it isn't. We then see a road, which replaces the lines on the road with Christian crosses while a scary Drone of Dread is playing, all while the announcer tells us that night triples the risk of dying in a traffic accident.
• Another one from 1992 shows a glass of wine while the camera zooms in on the glass, all while we hear a car driving. Suddenly, the tires start screeching and the car crashes, which would give people a jump scare for those not expecting it. We then hear EKG beeps while the camera zooms out to reveal a blood bag while we hear a dead-serious announcer warning you not to let alcohol make you drown in a sea of blood. We also see someone unplugging the patient's life support while we hear an unsettling flatline. The ad ends with a tagline reminding you not to drink and drive, followed by the logo.
• This one from 1993 shows a family going for a drive while happy synthesizer music plays. However, we can see that the kids are not wearing their seatbelts, as we hear a male announcer tell them that you might love your kids, but you could take better care of them. The music abruptly turns scary as we see unsettling shots of a car ramming into another car, while the test dummies inside the car crash into the windows. The music then turns happy again as a person buckles a child's seatbelt, while the male announcer says that buckling your children's seatbelt is love.
• Another one from 1993 starts off with a first-person shot of a car crashing into another car, while we also see test dummies flailing around. We then see another first-person shot of a car crashing into a wall, while we see a test dummy in the front jumping out of his seat. The creepy music just makes things worse. We then hear a male announcer remind you that you are not a dummy and that you always have to wear your seatbelt, all while we see close-ups of people doing just that.
• This one from 1995 begins with a man going for a drive while an announcer reminds you that your life and the lives of those you love ar in your hands. We then see the man milking up speed and eventually crashing into another car, which is shown in different angles, all while the music suddenly turns into a very scary synth drone with a heartbeat in the background. And if that wasn't bad enough, the video has a creepy red filter and is slightly distorted. It then turns out that the man didn't actually crash and was just imagining it and begins to slow down, all while an announcer says that slowing down at night or when driving in the rain or snow can be the difference between life and death. While he says this, we see a road sign with the number of kilometers going down from 90km to 50km. The ad ends with a long shot of the car driving as normal, followed by a cheesy animated logo at the end.
• This one from 1996 begins with some text that says "No voice. No light. No life.". All of a sudden we hear some people crying while we see some text that says that thousands of loved ones are now cried for due to a traffic accident that might have been avoided, and asks the viewer if they will want to prevent being the next one. We then see the same crash scene from the PSA mentioned above, which almost comes out of nowhere. We then see test dummies flailing around in a car and people buckling their seatbelts while an announcer reminds you to buckle up and live.
• There was also a series of PSA's from said company entitled "Album". The first one in 1997 shows photos over the years of a boy named Nacho, while happy music is playing in the background. We then hear a crashing sound, followed by the music turning into an unnerving Drone Of Dread, as some text says that Nacho never wore a helmet when he rode his moped and that the remains of his brain were scattered on the asphalt.
  • Another one from 1998 shows photos of a boy named Jose while his father talks about how the boy has been dead for 2 years, his wife wants to commit suicide, and his daughter left school in crisis. The piano music turns into a scary Drone of Dread as we see a horrifying crash showing the grisly aftermath with a boy's bloody corpse on the car ^note The footage was actually taken from a series of PSAs from Spain entitled "Pictures" in 1995. while a dead-serious announcer mentions that when Jose decided not to wear his seatbelt, he did not imagine how much pain he would cause. The ad ends with a tagline reminding you that wearing a seatbelt saves other lives, not only yours, followed by the cheesy animated logo at the end.
  • Another one from 1999 shows photos of a girl, while we hear her husband grieving about her and mentioning that he is in a wheelchair. The music once again turns into the same scary Drone of Dread as before as we see footage of a car brutally crashing into a rock while the man explains that he never knew that going at 75km would cause him to kill his wife. The ad ends with a tagline reminding you that lowering your speed saves other lives, not only yours, followed by the cheesy animated logo at the end.
  • The last one of the bunch in 2001 shows photos of a little girl while her mother mentions that losing her daughter was the worst thing that has happened to her. She then mentions that she got divorced and has never been able to forgive her husband. We hear her start sobbing as she says that she is also the one to blame as well because she let him drive after drinking two glasses and couldn't hit the brakes on time, all while we see a horrifying shot of a car rolling over and another shot of a little kid's corpse on the road ^note The footage was also taken from the "Pictures" campaign in Spain.. The ad ends with a tagline to remind you that not driving drunk saves other lives, not only yours, followed by the cheesy animated logo at the end.
• This one from 1998 features a young girl and her baby sister telling their dad his errors while driving, while the dad ignores them. After telling him that they passed a red light, the older girl screams and the baby cries after we have a shot of the father, who turns out to be a terrifying monster, complete with growling noises. The No Budget feel and Special Effects Failure of the thing do not help at all.
• Another one from 1998 shows clips of people in a rave and a bartender pouring drinks while we also see horrifying clips of car accidents such as a car rolling over, a man hitting his head on the steering wheel while the remains of his brain leak out, someone brutally running over a child, a truck crushing a car and someone pulling a man's dead body out of a car. The scary synth music doesn't help wonders. The ad ends with a dead-serious sounding announcer warning you not to go with a driver if he is drunk.
• This one from 1999 starts off with a close up of a seatbelt while we see some text asking you why you don't wear your seatbelt. We then see many people giving excuses to why they don't, such as forgetting, nothing happening to them, their destination only being a few blocks, etc. We then hear a Drone of Dread and see horrifying clips of car accidents as an announcer says that seat belts can avoid you hitting something or someone in the interior of the vehicle, or being thrown out and dead. We also see a tagline that says that last year in Argentina, 1,100 people died for not wearing their seatbelt. The ad ends with footage of test dummies and close-ups of people buckling up.
• This one from 2000 shows people telling the viewers how much they speed, with most of them saying that they go over 100km. We then hear some scary music as we see horrifying car accidents while an announcer asks if you had thought that at 100 kilometers per hour, you need at least 80 meters to break. We also see a tagline that says that last year, more than 3,000 people died due to speeding. We then see a car driving in the daylight while we see a sign showing the kilometers going down from 110 to 90 as the announcer reminds you to slow down, with the Drone of Dread still playing.
• Another series existed in 2000 which was entitled "Pedestrians" and they were all definitely scary. They usually start off with pedestrians answering where they cross the street, such as wherever they can, being in a hurry, etc. Then, they show a horrific car accident with a Drone of Dread, combined with beeps in the background while a person shares a story about a car accident when crossing the road.
  • One of them features a woman holding her unconscious son's hand in the hospital. She tells us that the boy ran across the street without waiting for the light, missed the first car, and didn't see the other car coming. The woman reveals that the boy has been unconscious for 20 days.
  • Another one featured a male victim attempting to take steps which we hear him explain how he'd crossed in the middle of the street, thousands of times, and one day did not see an oncoming car, with the driver also not seeing him. He then mentions that he is worried that he will lose his ability to walk again.
  • Another one featured an old man telling a story about going back home with his son, walking on the side of the road as they always do, and all of a sudden a truck was right behind his son and tossed him up into the air. We then see a close up of the old man's face as he mentions that his son left four of his children.
  • The final one in the series featured a woman telling a story about her kids playing on the street because it was quiet. She mentions that one of her kids ran after a ball by some parked cars and got hit by a car. We then see the woman laying her head on her hand as she says that the driver said he didn't see her son.
• This one from 2008 begins with a tagline asking the viewer why they don't wear their helmet. We then see multiple people giving excuses as to why they don't, such as driving carefully, not going far, not being able to breathe, etc. We then hear some scary music as we see a boy crashing his motorcycle into a car and smashing his head onto the footpath in the rain, while we see an unsettling shot of his mangled corpse, all while an announcer says that head injuries are the main cause of death and permanent disability in motorcycles and mopeds. The ad ends with a man putting on his helmet with an announcer reminding you to use your brain.

Miscellaneous

• This 2006 Finnish PSA by Alko shows a man with a shovel digging a hole. We assume that he is just working on the side of a road. However, the camera zooms out... and the man is surrounded by graves. The message is that drinking and driving is like digging your own grave. The eerie sunset, shadowy figures, and somber music taken from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest really set the mood.
• A TV ad against texting while driving. It showed a first-person view of someone reading messages on an iPhone, the messages saying stuff like, "If you have to pick up Chris at 11, and the party ends at 3, and you have 50 miles of gas worth in your tank..." and then it ends with the final text message being "What are your chances of surviving this crash?". You can feel the guy's Oh, Crap! reaction as he jerks his head up and sees a car roaring towards him... then the screen goes black. Congratulations. You just died in a car accident. In first person.
• A◊ disturbing◊ collection◊ of◊ print ads◊ from South Africa's Arrive Alive campaign show the creepy flashlight faces of drivers staring right at you, along with Paranoia Fuel-inducing texts like "I'll wait for you on the top of ur road". The message was to convey that you become "a killer" when you text and drive. The first one is especially creepy, given the male driver's Axe-Crazy expression.
• And then there's this infamous horror from Poland, which warns the viewer about insufficient buses carrying children. It follows a beat-up red bus as it is constantly abused. Nobody wants to ride on it, and it doesn't even have a nice place to sleep. Finally, the bus drives off to a junkyard to end it all, placing itself onto a crusher's conveyor belt ala The Brave Little Toaster. Right before it can do the deed, a butterfly shows up, turns the machine off, and cheers up the bus immensely. Happy ending, right? After this brief heartwarming moment, a previously unseen woman turns the machine back on, and the frightened bus is sent to its doom. We actually get to see it get crushed. "Have no mercy," indeed.
  • The same campaign as above also made this ad, simply named KOSMOS. And it manages to be even worse.
• This 2001 one, from Portugal's Prevenção Rodoviária Portuguesa^note  Portuguese Road Safety keeps the Nightmare Fuel tame, but the message delivery pulls no punches all the same. The video shows a simple premise: a man, named Hélder, buttons his shirt. Sounds fairly harmless, right? Well, the video literally starts with white text explaining that he had a car accident caused by speeding in 1989... and then the video cuts to him taking literally nearly 2 minutes to button his shirt, as his physical capacity and mobility had been damaged by the crash, all to the sound of Aimee Mann's "Wise Up", the haunting ballad that's best remembered from Magnolia. When he finally buttons it, the line "quanto mais depressa, mais devagar" — which is the Portuguese translation of the saying "more haste, less speed" - appears, followed by a fade to black to the PRP and Direção-Geral de Viação^note  Directorate-General for Traffic logos appear, and a voice-over that tells it straight: "Next time you drive fast... remember Hélder." A shorter version of the ad was made, in English.
  A less popular variant was also created. It features a man, named Henrique, who had a motorbike accident in 1988, caused by a failed attempt at a dangerous manoeuvre, that seems to have paralyzed him from the waist downwards. After the white text that explains that, the video fades in and it's him, sat down in his bed, trying to unlace his shoes, also to the sound of "Wise Up" by Aimee Mann and ending with the Wham Line of "more haste, less speed". This version, while not as iconic as the Hélder one, is perhaps even more terrifying, as the fact that it took this poor man two minutes to unlace his damn shoes while sat in his bed... goes without saying, it will indeed make you think twice before you try to rush past the legal limits even for a split second.
• This scary 1997 PIF from the National Safety Council in Ireland shows a plastic bag in an eerily lit room. As we zoom out from the bag, we hear a judge in the background talking about how a boy got ran over and died. The announcer then says in a dark tone that it is always too late to say sorry. The synth drone doesn't help at all. At the end of it, the light suddenly turns off and the synth drone comes to an abrupt stop, which is genuinely creepy.
• From Ireland's Road Safety Authority comes "Don't Look Back", which starts with an elderly lady haunted by regret, shown by the scene repeatedly going into her past with the same mournful expression. The last few cuts reveal her at a funeral, tearfully visiting a child at the hospital, and getting distracted by her kids behind the wheel, not noticing the car right in front of her...
  Don't lose a lifetime looking back. Never let a child take your focus off the road. Pull over if you have to.
  • A full version exists, which was made in 1996. It shows someone putting the boy's toys and hat and his game boy and many other things into a plastic bag while we also see some people in a bar drinking. However, we hear a car crash with a woman screaming over the footage of the camera zooming out from the bag. All this is set to Lou Reed's haunting song "Perfect Day".
• This creepy 2004 Belgian ad from the Belgian Road Safety Institute seriously knows how to get its point across. We see a birthday cake in an eerily lit room while we also hear some little kids singing. The camera slowly zooms in on the cake, and we hear a car crash, causing all of the candles to blow out. We're treated with a caption that says that a boy named Thomas is 6 years old forever, implying that he died on his birthday.
• This disturbing ad from India has a person browsing through a cellphone in complete silence. They go to the "Ringing tones" page and there are 3 types. The first type is a woman crying hysterically. The second one is a man crying hysterically. The 3rd (and the worst) one has a baby screaming horrifically, then fading to black with the message "Don’t use your cellphone while driving.", with the baby still screaming.
• This one from Belgium in 2002 begins with a shot of a tree, while we hear a loud crash offscreen while the camera starts shaking. We then see their bodies inside the car with their souls floating out of their bodies. Eventually, one of the ghosts goes back to their normal form and brings one of the men back to life. The one alive is breathing heavily, wondering what just happened.
• A print ad in early 2000s from Indonesia reminded you why you should wear a seatbelt while driving by showing a traffic accident victim lying lifeless on a stretcher buckled up! The message is something along the line of "Why you buckle up when you're already dead?". It was chilling.
• This one from Brazil in 1999 shows some people in a pub pouring a glass of beer and drinking. We then see someone holding a bottle of beer, which morphs into a rotten corpse in a morgue.
  Narrator: Do not drink and drive. That is the code.
• Another Brazilian PSA from 2002 simply features a first-person top-view shot of a moving car on the road, accompanied by a beeping monitor for each white line passed. It quickly becomes more unsettling as the car moves faster, the monitor itself beeps faster and faster... until we reach a long infinite white line, as the monitor flatlines, suggesting that the victim died from speeding too much. Simple, yet unnerving.
• Drive Alive's 2005 PSA from South Africa, though tame, is rather unsettling. It plays out as an advertisement for a hotel with relaxing beach music... just swap "hotel" with hospital, "staff" with doctors, "guests" with hospitalized, unhappy drivers and "relaxing music" with Soundtrack Dissonance; in short, it's actually a hospital with drivers who are either on life support or trying to walk again, with the wrong music playing. The dead silence at the end doesn't help.
• This Puerto Rican commercial called "Lucky" starts off with a man leaning against a counter in a bar. He gets up, tipping his drink. He leaves the bar, and starts walking down a dark alley. He nearly gets run over by a passing car, then suddenly, a Drone of Dread starts playing as the guy starts to cross a street. He gets to his car, while a suspicious piano note starts to play. While he is unlocking his car with a key, another guy grabs him, with the music turning sinister. The guy who grabbed him points a gun next to the guy who was trying to get in, then he knocks him down, and then he steals the guy’s car. It then shows the guy on the ground while the car stealer drives off. It then fades to black with text saying "next time, you might not be so lucky". It fades back on, with the guy walking away while the car stealer drives off in the distance with the tagline "if you drink, don’t drive".
• This eerie PSA from Argentina has a Corvette driving down a dark road with its pop-up headlights up, with the only sound in the PSA being the engine drone. Throughout the PSA, the headlights start to sink down slowly, and then a slight buzzy horn sound can be heard as the headlights pop back up. They again close gradually, then the same horn sound can be heard as the headlight pop back up slightly, only this time they're half-opened. And then, the headlights gradually close, and then they fully close. After this, it cuts to black with the message "99,9% of people who fall asleep driving never wake up" in a slightly unnerving font. Simple, yet unnerving.
• This Dutch car distance PSA from 2000 has clips of two people walking very closely to each other, while relatively upbeat and dramatic music plays. After the 5th pair, a text says "Ridiculous?" Then it shows two men walking very closely to each other, with one of them having a stuffed shopping cart. The text says "So why do the same when driving your car?" It then shows a couple running in a park while the music gets more dramatic. Suddenly, the screen cuts to black, with the music being replaced with the sound of a car frantically braking and then crashing. The message "Keep your distance" (with big space gaps in between) displays over complete silence.
• This one from Romania, started out as a car salon presentation: expensive cars with hot girls sprawled over them, and then the camera zooms in on the girls: some are missing limbs, others have half their face burnt off, and such.
• In 2010 there was a radio ad in Norway that was like this (paraphrased), with all narrator lines being given in the same creepy monotone:
  Narrator: "here are three lessons in what to tell a loved one who drinks and drives. Repeat after me"
  Narrator: "you're drunk. You can't drive like this"
  Young Woman: "you're drunk. You can't drive like this"
  Narrator: "come on, give me those keys"
  Young Woman: "come on, give me those keys"
  Narrator: "I still love you"
  Young Woman: (rasping breath, beeping life support in the background): "I still love you"
• This 2000 Singaporean PSA has a man performing Five-Finger Fillet in black and white, with the only sound in the PSA is the knife stabbing. He then gradually increases the stabbing speed, before he quickly yanks up his hand while letting out a painful gasp, with the PSA showing the knife stuck into the table. The words "Don’t speed" appears in a slightly unsettling font.
• This Thai speeding PSA has a man sitting in a public place, with the man being completely silent, save for an occasional sigh. It eventually says "This man had sex without a condom." You might think this is an AIDS PSA, but it's not. It then shows him walking towards his car, crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it away. He gets into his car and drives away with the text "Today, he's lucky. AIDS didn't get him." He then milks up speed, and then a car comes towards him, but just when there about to collide, the screen cuts to black... with the sound of a car braking & crashing, with the text "Unfortunately, speed did." It fades back, with a flaming car in the distance. It fades to black with the text "Why aren't you scared of SPEED (larger than the rest of the text) like you're scared of AIDS (the same size as the word SPEED)." It then shows a mini speedometer going up, and then a no symbol appearing on it, with the text "STOP SPEEDING!" under it.
• This horrifying Thai PSA has a woman talking to her grandmother, reminding her that school is starting tomorrow, and she’ll get some school stuff. Then she says goodbye to her grandmother and tells her to be careful. The grandmother starts to walk on the sidewalk with a group of people... only to get run over by a reckless driver. People start to panic, with a guy screaming "Someone got hit!!", and the screen fades to black with a caption saying "It can even happen to you." It fades back again on the woman’s shocked face, with her yelling "Grandma!", with her running off. It fades to the voiceover and tagline "Watch out for reckless drivers."
• A Greek PSA about railroad crossings has a family driving on the highway. As they are approaching a railroad crossing, the barriers go down and the bells start to ding. They drive away from the barrier and make it on the track. A train approaches and plows into the vehicle, with the vehicle exploding. The train starts to brake and the car shoves to the side, and a hawk flies away. The ad ends with a family driving away from the crossing, and it shows a wrecked in the ditch.
• This German PSA has a young man playing OutRun in a video arcade taking corners too fast and losing the game while his friends mock him. He walks away and towards his car, and starts it up, muttering "No idea, those idiots." He pops a cassette in, and "Born To Be Wild" starts to play. He starts to drive fast, nearly running over an elderly man in a wheelchair, and he goes on the highway. He has some near-misses with people and cars, and stats appear on the top screen, like in a video game. The friend’s taunts are also heard occasionally. He then passes a truck and sees a bus in the oncoming direction. He brakes hard and crashes and an animated explosion takes up the screen, and the music stops. It then shows the hallway of a hospital with a person running down the hallway while an EKG can be heard. It then shows the interface of an EKG. The EKG then flatlines while the words "GAME OVER" appear on the screen and the line that measures heartbeats goes straight.
• This scary Swedish PSA shows a bald man lying in a hospital bed (who appears to have a scarred head). Images with creepy ambient music quickly flash by, with the first flashback having pictures of kids, the second one showing pictures of a man and a woman, the third one showing a video of a man getting into a car, the fourth one showing a video of said man and woman buckling up and a speedometer, the fifth one showing a video of a car rolling over, and showing a dead person in a car (who looks zombie-like), and the final flashback showing an image of a bloodied and unconscious (possibly dead) woman. The tagline says "The wrong speed destroys your life and the life of others.", with an unsettling ambient noise and heart beating. The face of the man in hospital and the fact that he seems to be hyperventilating does not help at all.
• This eerie PSA from Singapore shows a first-person view of a car driving down a busy road in a city. An empty glass of beer appears in front of the first-person perspective, causing it to become more blurry. And then another. And then another. A fourth one is place, and the car suddenly skids to the right and collides with the front of a bus, getting cut off by a red screen before the crash actually happens, but making it blatantly clear what the aftermath was.
  "Each drink you have before driving impairs your judgement."
• This horrifying Israeli PSA starts off scary, with a shot of a wrecked car while we hear the disembodied voice of a young child ("I don't want to wear a seatbelt in the back! It's only a five-minute drive!"). We are then treated to a child being rolled on a stretcher out of an ambulance, a visible gash appearing on his leg, as we yet again hear the disembodied voice of a young child ("Dad, the seatbelt in the back is too tight! I'm not putting it on!"), followed by a group of surgeons performing uncensored surgery on another child while a monitor can be slowly heard flatlining ("But mommy, we're almost there. Why should I put on a seatbelt in the back?"). An announcer talks about why we should stop making excuses for not wearing seatbelts, and to not start a car up until every person in the vehicle is buckled in, while we are treated to someone putting their seatbelt on in the car.
• Toyota sponsored this ad in Singapore in which a child plays around in the backseat of car... which slowly recedes into the black background, appearing in the elastic of a giant slingshot.
• "Shoes" by Tokai TV Broadcasting is short and to-the-point; we see several pairs of shoes on the asphalt, along with their owners' names in reverse order of age, concluding with this gut-wrenching message:
  Each of the owners of these shoes, will never get any older. Don't die in a traffic accident.

Miscellaneous — Canada

• This harrowing Canadian advertisement for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD Canada) depicts a black-and-white scene of a baby named Emily lying in a crib crying with nobody coming to take care of her. After slowly zooming out, the picture finally goes to black, with the sound of the baby crying still audible, and the ad explains that drunk driving kills 4 Canadians every day, including the baby's mother. It had to be pulled off the air, either for being too depressing or because it scared children.
• A Canadian anti-drunk driving PSA shows a group of teens being pulled over by a police officer. You think the teens are going to be arrested for underage drinking and driving under the influence but instead, as the police officer waits for the teens to roll down their window, he's struck from behind by another car. The ad ends with a horrible thump as he's hit and then silence as the camera focuses on the two cars and an empty road with one of the officer's shoes. Worst part of the ad, it's based on a true story.
• The Government of Ontario released a PSA titled #PutDownThePhone, showing a man driving along when his phone goes off. He picks it up, and CRASH. Smash Cut to the man at the hospital in a neck brace and wheelchair, to assure the audience that yes, it happens that quickly. There's also a 60 second version, which confirms that the man is left almost entirely vegetative by the crash. While not necessarily creepy, it gets a lot of shock factor from how quickly it unfolds.
• This Canadian PSA from 1985 features a man with his group of friends having glasses of alcohol. Most of his friends leave after a while, leaving the two together. The man's friend asks him if he's okay to drive, which the man says that he is. We cut to the next scene as we see the man, who's dead in his car with blood on his face, eyes wide open, accompanied by a creepy high-pitch descending synth chord while a police officer asks if he is okay. Cut to the next scene as we see a woman, presumably his wife, looking at her husband's gravestone as a man checks up on her to see if she is okay.
  Narrator: "This holiday season, Stay OK! Don't drink and drive!"
• This Canadian PSA from 1998 starts off with a man getting dressed in a suit while ominous music plays, as we get shots of other people getting dressed for some kind of ceremony. We then get a shot of someone shouting and a truck plowing into a car, and then see that the people are at a funeral mourning a boy's death. You are also treated to a close-up of a woman's bruised face. As we cut to one of the boy's friends, we see flashbacks of him and his friends getting ready to go for a ride while drunk. Finally, we pan down to the coffin as a tagline in grungy text appears on the screen.
  Tagline: No one walks away from drinking and driving.
• This Canadian PSA from 1987 shows many pictures of family members in a dark room shattering with the sound of a car crash superimposing them to imply that they died in a car accident, while a cover of "You Are So Beautiful To Me" plays in the background. Simple, but brutally effective.
  Tagline: Only you can stop drinking and driving.
• The Winnipeg Police Service is committed to safer streets. You don't want to hit an unsuspecting little girl with a car, do you?

Miscellaneous — United States

• 1977 saw the release of The Day I Died, a short film about the dangers of drunk driving. It starts with a teenage boy narrating as he drives his new car to the beach, hangs out with some friends, and gets drunk. Then he tries to drive away, and he gets into a fatal accident. Things get disturbing as the narration continues, with the dead boy watching his parents identify his corpse, and watches his own funeral play out. The film is brought to a chilling end as the boy starts begging God for one more chance at life as the casket his body is in is lowered into the ground. Even worse, this is where the film ends. After seeing this, you may never want to get drunk behind the wheel again.
• There was a short film often shown in driving/health classes titled Jacqui's Story, starring Jacqueline Saburido. It's a brutal case, not the least because the girl was quite beautiful before, and had aspirations of being a singer. What puts it into overdrive are some of the details: she was trapped in a car hit by a drunk driver, and was heard screaming (i.e., she was conscious), for 45 seconds while it burned. Just watch a second hand go round a clock sometime and see how long that really is. The Snopes page describes her injuries and links to several pages with images of her. She not only had virtually no face after the accident, but she got gangrene and lost all her fingers, meaning she couldn't even feed herself, or do anything else for herself in a personal capacity. The saddest part is knowing that Jacqui eventually died from her injuries in April 2019 at only forty years old. Even the fate of the drunk driver in the other car — an 18 year old kid — is Nightmare Fuel in a way: one night he's at his first big-kid party and the next morning he's in prison for negligent murder (other passengers in the Jacqui's car didn't make it) with no bail money and only a public defender to represent him.
  
  Jacqueline had extensive surgery to reconstruct her body following her accident and was the topic of several surgery-themed documentaries. She forgave the young driver in the other car, and went on to campaign against drink-driving, becoming famous for the "Not everyone who gets hit by a drunk driver dies" ad campaign, which included a poster◊ showing pre- and post-crash photographs her. There was also a TV commercial in which she held up a "before" picture of herself and introduced herself before lowering the picture and revealing what she looked like then. Even though she is no longer with us, her progress and determination is nothing short of inspirational.
• Wisconsin has these DOT radio PSAs that are just a mother and son talking after they've been in a horrible car accident, slowly coming to grips with their situation and ending with them realizing that nobody is coming to help them.
• A US PSA against texting and driving from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows an inside-the-car view of a teenage girl and her friends driving along. The girl gets a text and runs a stop sign while checking it. What follows is a slow-motion view of a semi truck hitting the car and the teenagers being whipped around in slow motion like crash test dummies. The scene then cuts to a view of the crash site with a police officer picking up the shattered phone and saying "If I had pulled her over for texting and driving and given her a ticket, it might have saved her life."
• A series of bus ads on the DC Metrobus system make mention of crossing the street only during the "Walk" portion of the pedestrian signals. Some are relatively low-key, but there's one in particular where a car barrels straight into a woman. Said woman flies like a rag doll through the air, scattering brown paper bag with groceries, purse, and shoes. To make it all the more nightmarish, a baby in a stroller is sitting in front of the woman.
• This seatbelt PSA from the late 1960s voiced by Jack Webb. While the line "they wrinkle my dress" might sound a little narm-y, the tympani combined with the imagery delivers quite an eerie effect. There's also something truly terrifying about how that drum roll is just cut off.
  • There were also sliders produced, such as this one that features Mrs. Gordon, a woman wrapped in bandages, and a narrator as he describes how she was on her way to a beauty parlor but forgot to buckle up...and never made it to the parlor at all.
• The above line was re-used in an 80's-era PSA: First a shot of the lady driver complaining about how seatbelts wrinkle her dress, then a cut to show her paralyzed and strapped in a wheelchair, with her caretaker observing "Oh, your dress is getting wrinkled; let me tighten your belt..."
• The line appeared again in the Crash Test Dummies campaign that began in the mid-'80s and ran through most of the '90s — both in commercial and poster◊ form.
• This 1983 ad from the Ad Council has a group of excited teenagers leaving a bar and getting into a car, while the tune of Michael Jackson's Beat It plays. Their designated driver hops into the driver's seat with two bottles of beer, which he then hands to his friend in the passenger's seat. As the driver's friend questions him on if he is in a state to drive, the driver then reassures him with "What's a few beers?" As the driver proceeds to start the car, an ominous-sounding announcer then warns, "If you don't stop your friend from drinking and driving... you're as good as dead!" The driver gets the ignition started... only for the PSA to emit a bright flash and jarringly cut to the teenagers as skeletons, accompanied by the music abruptly stopping in favor of a Scare Chord. The PSA then ends with the words (which the announcer reads) "DRINKING AND DRIVING CAN KILL A FRIENDSHIP" fading in on a black background, with a human hand giving a firm handshake to a skeleton hand underneath the text.
  
  A similar PSA, also using "Beat It" as the music score, was created for radio, with the passengers begging their driver — who is clearly intoxicated — to pull over and let someone else drive. The driver, who barely avoids one collision with an oncoming car (cue the horn honk) insists that he's fine and, wanting to go to another party when the others want to go home, proclaims that he is invincible. "Invincible" is the last word he ever says... as the car crashes immediately afterward and everyone is (presumably) killed. The voice-over announcer finishes with the "drinking and driving can kill a friendship" line.
• This PSA from the early 1980s shows clips of two glasses of alcoholic drinks crashing into each other in slow motion dubbed with car crash sound effects while an announcer speaks in a dead-serious tone about how friends die from drinking and driving. In the last clip, a hand grabs one of the glasses and stops it from crashing into the other glass, while the announcer says that drinking and driving can kill a friendship.
• This PSA from the city of Santa Clarita on texting and driving. The acting is a little cheesy, but the ending is beyond the usual level of dark for a modern-day PSA. A little girl getting hit by a car? Dark, yes, but if it's simply implied nothing new. Try blood splattering on the windshield as the driver moans "Oh my god..." realizing what she just caused. This aired on Cartoon Network, by the way.
• There was one billboard (located somewhere in Wisconsin on the highway) that simply had the image of a shattered dashboard, with the accompanying text reading something along the lines of "The last thing Emily saw." That's it.
• A 2014 spot for the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission intertwines footage of a pickup truck rolling over a field and crashing with audio of a wedding oath. Emphasis is put on "Till death us do part". The effect is nothing short on chilling.
• This train crossing safety PSA from the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York.
• One haunting PSA from the early 1980s begins inside of a junkyard full of wrecked cars and a male announcer reading off the names of various people and where they're from. He then says that "though they're not victims yet, one out of every two Westchester County residents will be involved in an alcohol-related crash in his or her lifetime" and before going back to reading off the names, asks "Will today be the day?" as the commercial ends from the inside of a crashed car with a smashed-in windshield. Adding onto the nature of the ad is its ominous soundtrack.
• This horrifying 1960s print ad◊ by Mobil, starring Dancer Killer Joe Piro, was produced to advocate against driving with tension. Talk about Nightmare Face. Don't click the link unless you're not planning on sleeping tonight.
• In 2012, popular make-up blogger NikkieTutorials made a video called "A crash course to shine". Viewers didn't notice that this was a Volkswagen anti-makeup while driving PSA until it was too late. Watch it here.
• Since the late 1980s, South Carolina has been promoting driver's safety with a series of PSAs called "Highways or Dieways: The Choice Is Yours." They're all filmed in intentionally grainy, jerky, cheap-documentary style, showing how in just sixty seconds of bad driving your life can change forever, and again in the sixty minutes after that. One of the most effective subsets features parents grieving over their dead children in the back of an ambulance.
• This one from 1987 shows a car driving badly in a dark space while a narrator talks about how in the last 10 years, a drunk driver has killed over 250,000 people, which is more than the population of Salt Lake City. The narrator then says that tougher laws are being passed, but nothing can protect you from him like your seatbelt and that the drunk driver doubles your chances of surviving, while we see the car getting closer to the camera, complete with unsettling screeching noises.
• One advert from the US Department Of Transportation in 1999 began with a woman waking up her husband at night, asking him to get some ice cream, which the man accepts, only to find out there's none in the fridge, so he puts his coat on and goes to buy some. He gets in the car, drives in reverse, and another car plows into him, sending him backward as he collides with another car, with the cheerful music coming to a stop. The ad ends with a message reminding viewers to buckle up.
  Text: Didn't see that coming? No one ever does.
• This one from the National Safety Council shows a man dressed in biker gear with a honeydew in his hands, representing someone's head. He then puts the melon into a helmet and throws it up in the air as the sound of a motorcycle goes off. The melon successfully lands on the ground safely. However, he throws another melon without a helmet, and it splatters onto the ground. The eerie music and the darkness of this PSA don't help.
• Death Zones, Gene Starbecker's graphic bus safety film from 1975 about kids getting run over by buses for not paying attention to what they're doing. The way they show it is pretty graphic and gave kids nightmares. One kid loses her card for her mother and goes back to get it, but gets hit by a bus. Another kid drops his books and goes under the bus to get them, but his head gets runs over instead. But the ending really takes the cake. One girl tries to get her book back from the boys who are teasing her. She manages to get it back, but then she slips under the bus and the bus runs over her stomach, while we see a close up of her face moaning in pain. Later on, she is taken to the hospital, but she's going to die before the day is out.
• There was an anti-drunk-driving campaign in the 90's and early 2000's called "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk", which showed home movies of adults and children in happy moments and then the writing on the screen would have the names of the people in the video, their date of death, and the fact that they were killed by a drunk driver. Those were done by Wells Rich Greene BDDP for the Ad Council.
  • One entry showed a home video of an adorable 1-year-old, repeating his mother's words for numbers in Spanish. Then writing appears on the screen, telling the viewer the baby died in an actual crash, which was the result of the mother trusting a friend to pick the baby up. The friend had been drunk. It was even shown on kids' stations.
  • This entry shows the names and photos of three smiling siblings — followed by a horrific shot of the car they were riding in when they died.
  • One chilling entry (which was also broadcast in Spanish) showed a slideshow of various people of many different ages with their dates of death at the bottom.
  • This entry, easily the worst of the bunch shows an ultrasound with a heartbeat in the background, then writing appears on screen telling the viewer that the baby was on her way to being born when she was killed by a drunk driver, as the heartbeat flatlines.
    • It's made worse by the fact that in this entry, unlike most of the other entries in the campaign, there is a total lack of an announcer.
• A PSA by the Federal Railroad Administration about the danger of railroad crossings started with a railroad crossing crossbuck sign on a black background as creepy music plays in the background. An off-screen voice says, "A lot of drivers ignore this warning." Then the crossbuck sign fades into a skull and crossbones as the voice continues, "Almost every 90 minutes, one of them is hit by a train." After that, the skull and crossbones fades back into the railroad crossing sign as "ALWAYS EXPECT A TRAIN" appears on the bottom and the music fades with scary synthesized sounds.
• The FRA made another ad titled "Stop. Trains Can't." It shows a train coming up to a level crossing as the traffic gates come down. Inside the train, the engineer suddenly pulls a lever to apply the brakes, and sparks spray from the wheels. A narrator says, "If you think trains will stop if they see a car on the tracks, you're right. They will. About a mile after they hit you." The video then shows a car being pushed across the tracks and crushed by the front of the train.
• The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration put out this ad in 2018 about what happens when you don't wear your seatbelt, with chilling background music and victims of car accidents presumed to be unconscious (or dead) becoming conscious to tell you why they weren't wearing their seat belts. The end of the PSA has a man who receives a ticket from an officer for not wearing his seatbelt, citing that sometimes he "just forgets" while buckling himself in. If you watch this late at night, kiss your sleep goodbye.
• "Don't Text and Drive" features a teenage boy, on voice-over, talking about the day his sister didn't come home, the little sister out playing, and another teenage boy driving a car. The story is told out of chronological order: starting right after the collision, flashing back to the girl playing with her friends, cutting to the paramedics working on her, then cutting back to the driver texting, forward to paramedics again, then showing the driver inside the car and the sickening thud of the car hitting the girl. Even worse? This was shown on cable channels with a preschool/parent audience. However, the cheap effects and cheap camerawork could definitely come off at Nightmare Retardant.
• The "Kids and Cars" commercials are just bone chilling. They show a mother trying to wake her apparently dead son up, shoving a baby into a oven, and a mother telling about how she accidentally ran over her own son while backing up her car. The worst thing is that they showed them on Boomerang and Discovery Kids before it was defunct.
• This PSA from the Brain Injury Association of America has a child on a bike going up to another kid on a bike and insulting him because he has a helmet. In the middle of bullying him, the kid runs into a board of wood, and it's implied that he now has a head injury.
• This example is unique, as it is a PSA disguised as a Game that plays in theaters during the pre-movie advertisements. The premise is that it follows a man on his last day of school and viewers are invited to vote with their cellphones on decisions he has to make throughout the day using the TimePlay app (which include picking what socks he should wear, what prank he should pull at school, what music he should listen to on the way to class, etc.). The final decision he makes is whether he should spend the day with his regular friends or his girlfriend. Whichever you choose, he pulls out his phone while driving in his car to make a text, and while he's texting, the sound of tires screeching is heard while another car is coming out of the intersection in front of him in the background, and the screen cuts to black as he crashes into the other car, presumably to his death, because he wasn't paying attention to the road. The ad then asks you to press "I Pledge" on your phone and promise to never text and drive and shows a list of people in the room who pledged. The fact that the PSA starts so lighthearted only to take a turn for the worst in the end only makes it more jarring.
• One 2006 PSA from MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) features a man on crutches walking out of a store, making various sounds of effort as he struggles to get to his car. The ad makes it seem a little innocuous at first, but it's only when he gets to his car, puts his bag into the backseat, and drives off that we learn the real reason he is disabled — he has been in a car accident involving a drunk driver, as the handicap parking spot explains that "nearly every 17 minutes, a drunk driver makes another person eligible to park here."
• This PSA from 1990 is very simplistic but hard-hitting. It opens on a hospital room floor, and the camera slowly pans up towards a hospital table while we hear audio of someone going to a party (presumably getting drunk as well) and crashing their car. We then hear an ambulance siren, then a nurse paging for a couple doctors as another doctor's hand pulls away the bottom of the sheet to reveal the feet of a cadaver that sits on the table. The doctor then places a toe tag on the dead body before a voiceover explains that there's more than one ticket that a person can get when they drink and drive. Directly after that, a Scare Chord plays as the words "DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE" suddenly appear on the screen. The Maine Association of Broadcasters definitely did not mess around with this one.
• A 2015 anti-drunk driving commercial by our old friends at the U.S. Department of Transportation shows a man in a club going to the bathroom, drunk, and putting his keys on the sink. Cue his reflection in the bathroom mirror starting to speak to him, trying to get him to pick his keys up and drive home because he's fine, he can handle it. The guy is sensibly smart enough to say no, and the reflection eventually snaps and screams "JUST GET IN THE CAR!" The fact that your own "I can handle a few drinks" mentality could be taken as your head deliberately trying to kill you is a rather chilling prospect to think about.
• A PSA from the late 90s by Operation Lifesaver features a man with a group of friends driving at night when all of a sudden, he comes across some train tracks and the train itself can be heard in the distance. The man is reluctant to cross while the train is coming, yet his friends egg him on even as we can hear it approaching. Giving into peer pressure (his friends calling him a chicken), he crosses it, and the next thing we see is a bright light and silence. The man's eyes appear in the rearview mirror looking at the audience, saying, "I should have waited", and we see that the train has smashed the car into an accordion.

Miscellaneous — Chile

• This Chilean PSA has a close-up on a teddy bear, while tinkly music plays. Then the music fades out and is replaced by the sounds of sirens and people crying, with lights flashing on the teddy bear. The camera pulls up to reveal that the teddy bear is on a sidewalk and a car that completely flipped over. Paramedics and firefighters do their work, while dramatic music that sounds like it’s from an action movie plays. The ad ends with somebody picking up the teddy bear.
• Another Chilean PSA has paramedics attending the scene of a horrific accident, all while sinister music plays. The camera then focuses on a body with a sheet over it, and then suddenly, the body jolts. Paramedics go over to the body and then take off the sheet to reveal an unconscious man. Then they attempt to revive him. They give up and put the sheet back on him as a flatline can be faintly heard in the background. The ad ends on the body.
• This 1997 ad from Chile is quite unsettling. We start off with a father and family going for a ride. However, the father's kids distract him, causing him to crash into another car. We then get an unsettling pan of someone zipping up his body in a bag.
  Narrator: Don't become as a bag. Drive with responsibility. Your life and other lives are in your hands.
• This Chilean PSA is one of the most horrifying examples of Hell Is That Noise. It starts off with a couple having a drink at a bar, and then they get into their car. They drive down a road, and then they crash into the back of a flatbed truck. The horn goes off immediately after, and then it shows the bloodied couple in the wreck, and then the man in the hospital with a halo cast, and then him being slowly fed soup, then being showered by somebody else, then it shows him at the graveyard in a wheelchair, and finally, he looks out of a window in a wheelchair, with the text "THE SHOCK LASTS FOREVER", with the only sound is the horn going off the whole time.
• In this Chilean PSA from 1981, a girl waits for her friend, Panchito, on a teeter-totter. The camera zooms out of the playground, and then we hear audio of screeching tires and a thud. As it pans across the road, the viewers learn that he was killed crossing the street. It suddenly pans to the curb, which displays his animita (a roadside memorial that resembles a small white chapel) as an ominous orchestral chord and a gong play.
  Narrator: "Panchito won't come today, either. Perhaps his parents never properly explained him the meaning of the yellow lines. Perhaps the car's driver was approaching too fast. Determining who's guilty doesn't really matter now. PANCHITO... WON'T COME."
• Chilean TV channel Television Nacional (or just TVN) decided to give us two messed up PSAs in the mid-2000's that follow the same formula: someone is relaxing with others (A man with with a group of friends in the first one and a girl having dinner with her family in the second one), until a presumed drunk driver crashes it and sends them all into a wreckage in slow motion. The fact we only get to see the victims die but not the driver, plus the lack of music and dark atmosphere really takes the cake for emotional damage.

Miscellaneous — United Kingdom

• Anything from the British road safety education charity Safe Drive Stay Alive is eligible for being nightmare fuel. There are so many examples that the charity's numerous 30-minute long films deserve a page all to themselves.
• This highly unsettling 1984 PIF about pedestrian crossing features unsettling rotoscoped animation.
• An unaired and quite disturbing 1997 drink driving PIF depicts a couple sitting down at an outdoor restaurant. All seems fine at first as they talk to each other whilst enjoying their drinks, but upon the man finishing his cup of alcohol, the music abruptly takes on a seriously demonic quality as the man grabs the cup and shatters it right across the woman's face. This is juxtaposed with the imagery of a car crash, in which the same woman is sent crashing through a windshield while screaming in terror. The ad then states, "It only takes one glass to ruin a life", before cutting back to the man, having survived the crash, looking in horror at the woman's lifeless body as the demonic-sounding music continues to play. The reason behind this PIF being refused airtime was because broadcasters felt that viewers would be so shocked and horrified by its content — especially the cup to the face, which could be misconstrued as referring to domestic abuse rather than traffic safety — that they would completely forget about the message it was trying to send.
• This 1993 PIF from the Scottish Office depicts a boy walking on a road, too busy on his portable game to look both ways before crossing. Cue a transparent CGI car rising from the road, with incredibly horrific and loud music, and proceeding to pummel the boy over. The CGI holds up quite well despite its age, which does not help, and neither does the fact that this was played before The Lion King (1994) in cinemas. Imagine seeing — and hearing — this in a theater. To quote easportsbig899, "between the Carlton Screen Advertising ident, this PIF and seeing Mufasa plummet to his death, children must have been suffering nightmares for months afterwards."
• A PIF for car safety shown in movie theaters in England involved showing actual footage of children being hit by cars as they played in the street. There's another one with just a toy and a splash of blood lying in the street.
• There was an old British anti-speed PIF in the nineties from the very to-the-point campaign "Kill your speed" with narration by a young girl informing the audience that she will be killed because of a speeding driver, while looking straight at the camera every time she changes location. There is no gore but it is still disturbing. The scariest part was probably the soundtrack: "Mysteries of Love" performed by Julee Cruise. Almost certainly chosen for her immensely creepy vocals rather than the relevance of the song.
• This British drink-driving public information film from the 1970's. The woman's screams before she dies are absolutely bone-chilling. Even worse, it was given a U rating, meaning that kids definitely saw it (and were probably terrified).
• A truncated version of the 30-minute British public service film Only Stwpd Cowz Txt N Drive shows the car accident scene and the moments before and after. Specifically, it shows three teenage girls in a car — with the driver, named Cassie, texting a friend and later trying to get his number — getting involved with a head-on collision (complete with showing them graphically experiencing whiplash, accompanied by the sounds of snapping necks and body parts being thrown around). After both of the cars come to a stop on the side of the road, Cassie is then shown painfully looking over at her friend in the passenger seat, and two look out to window upon noticing another car barreling straight towards them. Another horrific crash later, Cassie regains consciousness and begins screaming and crying hysterically upon realizing both of her friends are dead. She is then rescued from her car by paramedics as it is revealed that a mother and father involved in the crash were either incapacitated or killed (with their young daughter desperately trying to get them to "wake up"), and a baby is also shown motionless. Cassie is then placed on a stretcher and taken away in an air ambulance helicopter, and the PSA ends with a harrowing, final shot on her bloodied face as she shuts her eyes tight. It definitely doesn't pull any punches whatsoever with delivering its intended message on the dangers of texting and driving. Some viewers, though, may find that the relentless piling of tragic incident on tragic incident tips the advert over into unwitting Narm.
• There was a UK PIF similar to "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk", featuring home video of variously-aged, similarly-deceased children who had been killed by drivers exceeding the speed limit. One of the films ran to the narration of a man reading out the police protocol for officers delivering the news of a road death; others featured readings of poems about death and sorrow, including "Funeral Blues" by WH Auden (famous for its appearance in Four Weddings and a Funeral).
• There was a British radio PIF in the mid-1990s with a cheerful, motherly-sounding woman (if not Judi Dench, then a remarkable simulation) relating the tale of little Alice and Bob, whose favorite Fairy Tale was Peter Pan. They wanted to be like him, and they got their wish — when the car crashed on their way to school. They weren't wearing seat-belts, so Bob got to fly (through the windscreen, blinding him in at least one eye during the process) and Alice never grew up (because she hit her father's head, causing both of their skulls to crack and sending brain matter everywhere), just like Peter Pan. Made all the more horrific by the way the narrator lovingly describes the children's injuries in intensely graphic detail.
  • The above PIF ran at the same time as a companion piece aimed at teenagers, where a doctor describes in excruciating detail the reconstructive surgery that a young person may have to go through if they sustain facial injuries from smashing into a windscreen.
• This PIF from the Safer Scotland campaign. Ads featuring first person car accidents are all well and good, but what about a first person car accident... at night?
• "Drive Like an Idiot, Die Like an Idiot". This ad features bloody (fake) dead bodies, a crashed car and Christopher Eccleston making tasteless jokes.
• One PIF encouraging the use of seatbelts featured the sound of a car crash being run through a vectorscope (with Sickening Crunches galore), as Ewan McGregor explains what you're hearing. You don't see the accident, you just hear it, and all you see are the ghostly waves of the vectorscope.
• From the same campaign as the above example, the infamous UK PIF "Julie Knew Her Killer", which warned viewers about the importance of wearing a safety belt in the back seat, features a woman getting her skull crushed when she has to stop suddenly and her teenage son, who isn't wearing a seatbelt, collides with the back of her head. It's not as gory as some PIFs, but the dispassionate narration ("Like most victims, Julie knew her killer. [Beat] It was her son.") and the daughter's screams at the end make it extremely unsettling, as does the way the narrator nonchalantly continues ("After crushing her to death, he sat back down.") as the son falls back over in a bloodied heap himself after accidentally killing her. The ad was later used by the THINK! campaign, whose Scare 'Em Straight antics are detailed in the folder above; this PIF also essentially replacing "Backwards" because it seems more meaningful.
• The UK's Network Rail are known for making some particularly disturbing PIFs:
  • "See Track, Think Train" shows a family biking in the country, when a boy starts an innocent-sounding game of "I spy", challenging the others to guess the word he's thinking of that starts with the letter "T". Tractor, tree, train, tire, and teddy are incorrectly guessed, and then a Mood Whiplash comes as a girl guesses "Wait, is it... track?" as she walks with her bike onto a train track, and then a Smash to Black as a train is heard whooshing by.
  • Another corporate campaign, reflecting on why using a mobile phone at work can be a very bad idea (specifically, while working near the rails). This one's called Hit or Miss.
  • Network rail have also done adverts urging people to use level crossings properly, with the tagline, "Don't run the risk." The print ads◊ show accident sites with smashed cars and labels showing where the passengers were found. It's not clear whether the labels refer to the dismembered bits of the passengers or the individual passengers themselves...
  • There were also "Don’t Run the Risk" radio adverts:
    • One of them has the narrator telling you that you know this road, which takes you to work everyday. He then says that you know that today the boss is going to give you hell, and that the lights on the crossing will turn red, and that you know that you will have to wait for what it seems to be ages. He tells you that you know you shouldn’t put your foot on the pedal but you will, with the sound of the railroad crossing beeping and a car accelerating, and you know that the train goes at 100mph. After this, the beeping sound turning into the sound of a EKG flatlining, with the narrator saying that you know that your family will never see you again. The sound of a train whooshing by is heard, while the tagline is heard.
    • The other one has a narrator saying that you just gone through the red lights at a railroad crossing, and that you ducked under the first barrier okay, and then the exit is blocked by the car in front, and now you’re stuck under the track. He tells you that you either: A: Pretend that it never happened. B: Quickly get the kids out of the car and run. C: The sound of a train plowing into a car. He then apologizes for being too late. He then says the tagline. The images used for the ads don’t help much, with the first having a picture of a derailed train, with the second having a picture of a train that ploughed into a car.
• The British Transport Police put out a short video featuring real CCTV footage of people doing stupid things on railway lines, including a few near-misses as a train comes by. The final clip shows a person actually getting knocked down by the oncoming train, and in full view of the camera too. Though it isn't stated in the video, he ended up paralyzed.
• This horrifying public information film shows the dangers of drink driving involving children and in the tune of "The 12 Days of Christmas" sung by children. For each different number, the child featured has suffered a horrible medical fate, but perhaps the most harrowing fates go to the "Five golden rings" part, which has been replaced by a haunting echo of "Fooood through a tuuuube" and "And a Partridge in a pear tree" which has been replaced with the somber "And a lifetime in a wheelchaaairrr..."
• This British PSA shows what could happen if you text and drive. Not only do you see a graphic depiction of a car wreck and the horrifically mutilated faces of the teenagers, but it's also shown that the person who texted caused the death of both of her friends, two parents, and (possibly) a baby, and is presumably forced to live with the emotional pain and guilt for the rest of her life.
• These two 1988 ads from the Scottish Office both show first-person views of a child running on the road and getting hit by a car, ending with the tagline "Stop at the kerb. Don't run into danger". The first child, named Andy, gets hit by a car and ends with his coffin getting lowered into a grave. The second child, named Johnny, ends up seriously injured with his badly bruised face and parts of his body bandaged up as the narrator says that "he won't run again".
• This brutal 1993 ad from the United Kingdom which reminds us to wear a seatbelt. We see a group of friends going for a ride, which is filmed in black and white. We get told that in a crash at 30 miles an hour, an adult backseat passenger without a seatbelt is thrown forward with a force of 3 and a half tons, which is the weight of an elephant. We then see the backseat passenger morph into an elephant, which rams into the driver, causing the driver to slam his head onto the steering wheel. The backseat passenger then crashes straight through the window as we also see his bloodied hand. We then get a shot of the devastated front seat passenger, while looking at the dead driver. This was the last ad in the Clunk Clink campaign.
• This ad from Britain, which is actually one of the first ads about not driving while on your mobile phone. We see a slideshow of a wrecked car while we hear a policeman talking to someone on a walkie-talkie about how a pedestrian got hit and how the driver was on his/her mobile phone and that the pedestrian is fatal. The juxtaposition is quite unsettling, and the audio quality of the walkie talkie is a bit unsettling as well.
  Text at end: Stay switched on. Switch it off.
• This 1986 ad from the United Kingdom has a perspective of a driving simulator Video Game. The driver has a few close calls, such as nearly running over a child and colliding with another car, but then he ends up crashing into a pram, sending it flying up into the air, a truck after trying to avoid hitting the child again, and a motorcyclist who plows straight into the camera. The PIF ends with the driver nearly running over a dog, then turning around while an unsettling screeching noise plays as he runs over multiple people on the footpath.
  Narrator: How long before you realize, it's not a game.
• This 1990 ad from the Scottish Office begins with closeups of a man getting dressed in a suit. We then see someone put a flower on his chest as the camera zooms out to reveal that he is in a coffin in a dark room, implying that he died from speeding.
  Narrator: When you go out tonight, you'll want to look your best. You may even want to show off a bit — put your foot down. But if you drive too fast, you could end up out for good, and even worse, you could take someone with you.
• "Worn Tyres Kill" was the last film from the Joe And Petunia campaign in 1973, meant to shoot down the Misaimed Fandom that related to the couple without realizing the cautionary aspects. On a mountain drive in their Mini, Petunia sees a notice board advising that "Worn Tyres Kill", and repeatedly asks Joe whether he has checked their tires. He tries to change the subject, then says they're not worn, they're "a bit smooth". Petunia is relieved, only for her facial expression to suddenly turn into horror as the car skids and crashes into a tree. Joe and Petunia slump down in the car and disappear from view; the cartoon image then changes to a shot of a real car accident as the camera zooms into the tire. A caption states "WORN TYRES KILL" as we hear Joe's and Petunia's haunting echoing voices repeating the words from the start of the film: "Nice view up here, Petunia." "Yes, very nice, Joe.", implying that Joe and Petunia were killed in the accident.
• This harrowing PSA aired a month after the death of Princess Diana (who was killed in a tragic car accident). All this PSA features are (presumably) actual memorial photos of Princess Diana, and a little girl singing a song set to "God Save The Queen" (which is the national anthem of the UK). This ad was so sensitive that it was banned in the UK. However, it did well in Germany.
• One chilling 1999 anti-drink-driving campaign from the British DETR (Department of the Environment, Transport, and the Regions) asks, "What's it like to kill/lose someone?" It includes four different entries featuring real-life interviews from both drink drivers and family members of drink-driving victims, intercut with dark arthouse-style shots of foggy roads and an interpretative dancer, amongst other nightmarish imagery. All four ads were directed by Mehdi Norowzian, who ended up winning a Bronze British Arrows award for his work on the "Terry" ad described below.
  Tagline: Please don't drink and drive.
  • Mike & Joy: a middle-aged couple talk about how their daughter Michelle died of head injuries due to her car being hit by a drink driver and how much they miss her every day. Unlike the other three entries, this one focuses on someone that had been a victim of a drink driving accident rather than a perpetrator, and it's certainly more of a Tear Jerker due to its somber atmosphere, the chilling ambience still makes it unsettling. It also ends with a different tagline: "This millennium, take a moment to think about the rest of your life."
    Joy: Even if I could just hold her hand for five minutes, or tell her again how much I loved her, or just touch her hair, I'd... I would give the world for that.
  • David: a middle-aged man remembers when he accidentally crashed into an old woman while he was drunk. As a result, he now suffers from feelings of loneliness and emptiness, and for him, it doesn't seem like there's any way out of his pain. He also says that his two younger children don't understand why he's been imprisoned, and the guilt of killing the old lady still haunts him.
    David: I sort of wish I could have said something in the hospital... but there's just nothing I could have said, not to make it any better. Because nothing would have made it better.
  • Terry: a man chillingly admits that he killed a woman while driving under the influence the morning after he had been out drinking. He left a husband without his wife and his children without their mother, and he says that he suffers very vivid nightmares about the incident. This one is arguably the most disturbing ad in the campaign due to how calm Terry appears.
    Terry: I'm just very sorry for my victims, for the... the husband, and the children, and her family.
  • John: an older man discusses how he ran over a pedestrian in a drink-driving accident just after he was out for a few beers with his friends. Like David and Terry, he is also haunted by his mistakes, and he sadly states that he has now become a killer due to his reckless mistakes.
    John: And the fact that I am the cause of it, I can't take that back. But it doesn't change the fact, uh, I've become a killer.
• One notable 1998 campaign from the UK's DETR, Don't Drink and Die, showcases footage from actual police accident files for real-life car accidents, all of which were fatal and involved alcohol use. While there is no exceptionally graphic imagery shown, the shots of the heavily damaged cars/motorcycles combined with the staticky police voiceovers are still very chilling. What's even worse is that all of these accidents took place in December of that year, and according to the uploader, the last ad features a drink-driving crash that apparently occurred on Christmas Day.
  Tagline: Tonight, someone will die as a result of drink driving. We'll show details of another accident tomorrow. Make sure it's not you.
• This one from 1994 shows a girl crossing the road, only for an oncoming car to run her over, with her body plummeting to the ground with a sickening CRUNCH, complete with blood splattering against the ground. We then see that she is now a ghost as a policeman walks through her. She then berates the man who has killed her for speeding.
  • There is another version with a male, this time the victim is inside the vehicle, with his father crashing into another vehicle, causing his truck to flip upside down, with the teenage boy lying dead on the concrete. We then see the ghost trying to confront his father for speeding. We then see his father in an ambulance, which is getting ready to drive away, all while the boy begs his father not to go away.

Miscellaneous — France

• A French Public Information Film has a man talking to a friend of his, who was in a drunk driving accident and now lies in a coma with severe injuries, including lacerations to his face, one leg that has been amputated, and the other that is badly injured and in danger of amputation. As he is talking to him and telling him not to drive drunk, the man's injuries slowly heal and then it is revealed that the injured man is now unharmed and sitting in the friend's home, having been convinced to sleep off his drunken state, saving him from any potential danger.
• This five-minute French public information film features three seemingly unconnected people: a woman having the police come to her door in the middle of the night, two teenagers waiting up for their friends, and the scene of a horrific car crash. It turns out, the woman is the mother of the victim in the crash and the two friends were just at a house party where the victim drank liberally before he and his other friends drove home. From the mother's reaction to the very graphic end result of the crash where the man and his friend both died (he was ejected from the car and his buddy painfully convulsed before succumbing to his injuries), no amount of horror is spared. Even the backseat passengers clearly did not walk away unscathed, as the one girl understandably freaks out over a tooth projecting from her skin and both of them had to watch their friend die before their eyes.
• This one from France named "Double Accident" has a car that completely flipped over on a highway. You can hear the people inside confirming if everyone is okay, with a man climbing out of the wreck with the caption "On that day, he was driving much too fast." Then another car comes and plows into the crashed vehicle, on the side that the man is crawling out, with the caption "And he was going just a little bit too fast."
• This French PSA sets the mood in black-and-white with creepy ambience. A man has a drink and begins a round of Russian Roulette. Lucky for him, the chamber's empty. Next up is another man smoking a joint. He presses the revolver against his chin, pulls the trigger, and lucks out. It then shows a woman having a phone against her ear, which she puts it down for her turn with the revolver, put against her chest. Again, nothing happens when she pulls the trigger. Next up is an elderly woman, but rather than gamble herself, she takes aim at a little girl. She gets the loaded chamber, and when it fires, it cut to everyone in a car accident in color, the girl laying montionless on the street.
• This shocking French PSA starts off innocent enough, with a group of people driving down a road. However, one of the rear passengers is not wearing their seatbelt. The narrator and text then says "Something is missing in this car." The ad pauses with the text and voiceover "Any clue?" Then the ad resumes. They then suddenly brake and crash. The person who is not wearing their seatbelt is thrown forward and his head hits the windshield. A text appears on the screen saying "THE REAR PASSENGER’S SEAT BELT". The woman in the front then screams. The voiceover then says "Always belt up in the back."
• This 2002 ad from the same people who brought to you "Double Accident" has a family going about their normal day, culminating in the father, his young daughter and his teenage son sitting on the roof... and then an invisible force knocks them off the building (several feet up high, no less) to the ground, where you are treated to an unsettling shot of their dead bodies. Its execution is pretty jarring.

Miscellaneous — Spain

• One Spanish PSA against driving under the influence of drugs, inspired by the 1972 film La Cabina, features a man driving his car after using cocaine, until a sun glare suddenly transports him to an empty street, where he can't start nor exit the car. Eventually a tow truck picks him up and carries him across town, until he finally arrives at a junkyard, where he sees various other people trapped in their cars. He notices his right shoe is missing right before a jumpcut to the shoe laying on the road after an accident. The narrator tells the audience that 1 in 10 drivers drive under the influence of drugs as we cut back to the junkyard, where it's revealed that the man's car is actually wrecked alongside other wrecked cars.
• There was a series of PSAs that ran in Spain in the mid nineties called “Pictures”, showing pictures of different people, with a voiceover saying that the person shown had just lost their father/husband/wife/son/etc. in a traffic accident. The pictures would then fade to black with text stating that the person shown has been affected with terrible things as a result. (One version of the ad states that a boy had to go through an entire year of trauma counseling, another has a man getting prescribed tranquilizers to help cope, another had a woman attempt suicide a month after the accident.) After the 4th picture/person, it would show a horrifying crash involving the 4th person in black and white. One of them involves a man crashing into another car, being thrown through the windshield and then landing onto the car roof, with blood running through his arm and showing his bloodied face, another showing a man who fell asleep behind the wheel flipping over his car, rolling over many times, and then a semi truck crashing into his car, another depicting a woman crashing into a huge rock, with her car being completely engulfed in flame, and another shows a boy being hit by a truck, being replayed a few times, then the wheels of the truck crushing the little boy. After these horrific scenes, it shows the picture of the 4th person, revealed to be part of a photograph containing all the people shown. It ended with the text “Think about it. You're not the only one who pays for foolishness." A fan-made mashup of the whole campaign can be seen here.
• A trio of ads by the same people who brought you the horrific "Pictures" campaign above has a premise: The narrator advertises a certain product that looks like any old product, but in fact is the world’s most expensive product. And then if the driver uses it, they will cause an accident, which will cost many people & events. All of these ads have scenes of accidents, with people screaming in distress and/or pain and scenes of injured people. Here is a list of them:
  • The first ad showcases some sunglasses. The driver, Rafa, decides to pick it up, and he loses control, which causes a crash that will involve him, a couple, and a child. The sunglasses will also cost his family, his son Juan, and a potential grandson. It will also cost the firefighters (but they always pay the price), the people who work on the power lines, the traffic police, two ambulances, and doctors and friends, and it’s all because of the pair of sunglasses.
  • The second ad showcases a song on a phone. The driver, Lucia, decides to change it. She won’t notice that she has her foot on the accelerator, and she will have an accident on the next bend. The accident will cripple the movement of her left leg permanently. Two drivers will also pay the price because they didn’t see Lucia because she was going too fast. Lucia’s recklessness will also cost her job and years of rehabilitation. The accident will cost several lives and countless explanations, and it’s all because of the song.
  • The third ad showcases a joint. The driver, Oscar, decides to smoke it, and that will affect his reflexes and his ability to drive home, thus costing him an accident. It will cost Oscar and the three friends that are in the car. It will also cost cutting off traffic and calling the emergency services. It will also put off a trip and cancel a wedding. It will also cost Oscar a sense of guilt and a call to his family, and you know what the call will cost. All of this is caused by the joint.
• On 2023, Spain's DGT (Directorate-General for Traffic) ran a series of ads with the cheery title "When you kill someone on the road, you kill them every day of your life", a series of supposed interviews with people who killed someone while driving... and their victim, suggesting they're being haunted by their spirit. An already terrifying concept is made even worse by the fact that the victims are graphically bloodied and wounded. Each one is worse than the last:
  • "Martin y Carlos" has a man talking about how his young son asked him if it was true that he had killed another boy's father, and the man admits that he was driving drunk and caused an accident that caused another man to get thrown out of his car, killing him, and now he's scared of losing his son.His victim, a man with a face full of lacerations, just reacts with a soft "good".
  • "David y Juan" ups the creepy factor by having the victim being a teenager boy with blood on his nose and neck, a huge hole on his shirt, and a completely bloodied and mangled arm.The man laments the fact that "it was him and not me", and that he misses the boy, suggesting that they were related (probably even his son). The ad then turns somehow sweet, as when the man laments that no one calls him anymore and he can't relate to people due to having been in jail the teenagers tries to cheer him up, reminding him of a lady that keeps calling him and a job interview he did... but when the man mentions that his interviewer asked him why he hadn't finished his college studies, the boy quips "Well, I didn't finish mine either".
  • "Cristina y Lolo" is probably the worst of the bunch, starting with the fact that the victim is a very young boy with the left side of his face completely covered in blood. While the boy keeps interrupting her, the woman tries to explain that she was drunk driving, crushing the young boy and his bicycle under her car, and now she can barely sleep ("well, with those pills you do") and when she does she keeps getting nightmares ("am I on them?"). The ad ends with the woman lamenting that her dream was to have children someday but she couldn't now, while the kid looks at her.
• The 2003 "Abróchate a la vida" ("Buckle up for life") campaign from DGT shows horrific crashes followed by equally horrific metaphors to their destructive force in the form of the victims of the crashes getting forcefully injured in a blank room. Such injuries include a woman experiencing a disturbingly clean fall from a massive height, a man getting hit with a sledgehammer as his pillow (representing an airbag) fails to protect him, an elderly couple getting hit by a wrecking ball, a young boy tied up to the front of some sort of oil drum-like cart getting driven through a wall of glass face-first, and a man getting catapulted into a solid wall.
• This drinking and driving PSA has scenes of absolutely horrific crashes, with the narrator stating the amount of many alcoholic drinks. In the end, he says " And another... And another..." A health symbol with the text "CREU ROJA" appears on a white screen, with the narrator saying "The dangers of drinking & driving campaign." It is a bit of Nightmare Retardant when you realize that these crashes were taken from action films.
• In this 1995 PSA by the Government of Catalonia, the camera pans across what seems to be a luxury car. But an instrumental of the "Lacrimosa" from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem plays over the ad. Aptly, the voiceover solemnly describes it as the perfect vehicle for speeders and street racers. The "car," in fact, turns out to be a hearse.

Miscellaneous — Czech Republic

• This PSA from the Czech Republic's Ministry of Transport is called "Grotesque", though it may initially seem an unfitting title. It shows a group of people after a day of fun at the lake getting ready to go home after it rains. At least five people try to cram themselves and a comical amount of inflatable toys into a fairly small car while whimsical piano music plays, reminiscent of a silent comedy from the early days of film. Then, the driver starts the car. Suddenly, the last three notes of the background music play on loop, becoming more and more distorted, with the rear passengers dead and covered in blood. A voiceover informs the audience that one of the most common causes of road accidents in the ad's country of origin is having too many passengers to a vehicle, obscuring the view of the driver. This results in two to three deaths and hundreds of injuries every day. And in a country the size of the Czech Republic (population about 10 million according to The Other Wiki), that's no laughing matter.
  • Another PSA from the Czech Ministry of Transport shows a young couple in their car being run off the side of an overpass as a result of driving recklessly and onto the road below, with the car subsequently catching fire and the two being graphically burned to death on-screen. While some may find the overly melodramatic nature of the ad and the use of Stock Screams to be Narm, it's hard to deny that someone being consumed by flames while screaming in complete agony is not a pleasant image at any rate.
• This creepy Czech PSA is creepy from the start, with an embryo animated in creepy CGI. You can hear a couple talking as they unlock and start their vehicle. Then they floor the vehicle, which causes the embryo to jolt backwards. Then the car makes several sharp turns, causing the embryo to weave back and forth. You can hear cars honking and a woman screaming as the car brakes and the embryo moves forward slightly, ending with the car horrifically crashing as the embryo tumbles quickly everywhere. Then it shows the lifeless embryo as blood surrounds it, with the voiceover and the tagline saying "Don’t decide on the lives of others with your aggressive driving."
• This haunting child car seat PSA from the Czech Republic starts off with a man looking out of a window while it’s raining outside, while gloomy and haunting music plays. Two children start to enter the room. The girl starts to run towards the man and hug him, and when he’s hugging her, she vanishes into thin air. The boy walks up to the man and places a toy car into his hand, and just when the car is placed into his hands, he too vanishes into thin air. The camera then zooms into the man’s eye, and it shows them driving down a highway on a sunny day. The children are not buckled up at all, playing freely in the back seat. Then a car pulls up into the middle of the highway, and then the crash. The children scream as they are thrown out of the vehicle, and it shows their bloody corpses as well. Then it cuts back to the room, as it shows a woman sitting in a chair, and then it shows all four of them in a family photo. The woman joins the man as they both look out of the rainy window, with the voiceover and tagline saying "Your children could be here with you... Use child car seats."
• This Czech PSA has a man unlocking and getting into his car and then starting it up, with the camera aimed at the rear-view mirror. He forgets to buckle up, and the seat-belt reminder starts to flash & beep. He starts to buckle up... only to crash, and his head hits the rearview mirror, and the seat-belt reminder stops flashing & beeping. The tagline says "In accidents in towns, those who do not buckle up, are dying 8 times more often. Let it go through your head", with the seat-belt reminder beeping again, this time it’s beeping at a slower rate.
• This texting and driving commercial has a surgeon wheeling an empty portable hospital bed into a room. He opens a cabinet door, adjusts the bed, wheels a tray holding a dead person onto the bed, and the surgeon clips a number tag onto the dead person’s toe. The text "Your new PIN" is shown, while two beeps are heard, and the dead person’s pale feet are shown.

Miscellaneous — Denmark

• A similar ad to "Mistakes" exists in Denmark, except it doesn't actually show the person crashing, there's just a middle-aged man telling you in detail exactly what happens if you drive a little too fast and lose control over your car. He ends the whole thing with, "Have fun."
• The Danish Road Safety Council put out a pair of ads showing the gruesome impacts of car crashes... in reverse. All the while, we hear the drivers' regrets that they failed to pay attention and wish they could turn back the clock to before their collisions. The fact that both spots use Alison Krauss & Union Station's "The Lucky One" does not help at all.

Miscellaneous — Hong Kong

• This disturbing 2004 ad has three seemingly unrelated people: a young woman named Miss Chan who's helping her father, a boy named Billy who's playing soccer by himself, and a man named Mr. Lee watching a recording of his wife. Said people are actually victims (or, in Chan and Lee's case, instigators) of car accidents and are suffering flashbacks... which manifest in brutal Jump Scares of photos of graphic car accidents with a voiceover explaining what happened to each individual. It also crosses with TearJerker since you can feel the guilt in Miss. Chan's (who killed someone's father while recklessly driving) and Mr. Lee's (who put his wife in a coma) faces for their actions.
  Miss Chan: If only everyone's dad could live this happily.
• This shocking PSA from the Road Safety Council in Hong Kong in 1983 shows a motorcyclist speeding through cars as a dead-serious narrator informs that not only the man is dangerous, but so is the woman that is about the cross the road. She does so without hesitating, except that she wasn't looking where she was going, resulting in her getting plowed by a van, followed by it crashing into a gate. The motorcyclist then slips off his bike, and finally, a car turns away from the bodies on the ground and ends up running over a man, with a close-up of his unconscious body. The PSA ends with a shot of a man getting on his motorcycle, with the camera zooming out to reveal a man with a crutch in his hand and one of his legs bandaged, implying that he was a road accident victim.
  Narrator: Road accidents wreck lives. Both the guilty and the innocent alike.
• This PSA from Hong Kong shows a man walking through train tracks with his bag of groceries with catchy music playing in the background. However, things take a turn for the worst as a train is then seen. The man walks on its tracks, the music stops, and the train comes closer and closer until the loud noise of the train abruptly cuts. We then get a shot of broken eggs, the man's pair of shoes, and the grocery bag all lying on the tracks, implying that he got killed by the oncoming train. Simple, but effective.
  Narrator: For your own safety, please... please keep off the tracks at all times.

Miscellaneous — Australia

• This PIF from the Pedestrian Council of Australia called Scarhead shows a man with a scar on his head that is slowly growing until it's completely across his head (the message being "speed kills, slow down"). It is absolutely nauseating.
• The Pedestrian Council of Australia also produced these two anti-drink-driving ads starring Mark "Chopper" Read. He calmly sits in front of the camera, discussing either the terrible things that happened to him in prison or how people hate him for being a murderer. He then tells the audience that if they drink, drive, and are unfortunate enough to kill somebody, then they are a killer just the same as he is. Simple, yes, but brutally effective.
  Tagline: A killer is a killer.
• Some Australian drinking and driving ads are horrifying. Here's one. When you compare TAC ads to other countries, they get the point across in the most horrifying ways. No wonder there are some which can't be played until 9:00 on prime time TV.
• There is one Australian road safety ad from New South Wales state by RTA (Roads and Traffic Authority, now known as Roads and Maritime Services). It aired in the early 2000s and started out with a shot of a teenage boy, handheld camera style. He says, "This is my summer holiday." Next, we see a shot from inside a driving car. Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday" begins playing as the car continues travelling. Suddenly, the music stops as the car collides with something, sending the camera flying all over the place. It eventually falls just inches from the boy's bloodied-but-alive face, blood trickling from his nose.
• Western Australia released several radio ads advocating against fatigued driving by having a narrator tell the audience a whimsical bedtime story involving people getting killed or seriously injured because they were driving tired. The worst of which was the story of "Sleepy Simon", who didn't get enough sleep because of his crying baby. So he and his family got into a car accident when he was driving them tired and fell asleep on the wheel. The narrator then happily tells you that now, since his baby died in the accident, the only thing that keeps Sleepy Simon up at night nowadays is his own nightmares.
• This one from 2000 in Australia shows a child reciting "Now We Are Six" by A. A. Milne while we see the child sitting in a car. When he gets to the line "Now I am six. I'm as clever as clever." We then see a window shattering, implying that the boy has died, and the boy then says "So I think I'll be six, forever and ever.". We then see the aftermath of the accident while we hear the driver asking if he will be okay and tries to mention that he wasn't drunk. The music box tune doesn't help, and neither does the slogan.
  Slogan: Drink drive. You'll be sorry.
• This one from Australia shows a freeze-frame of a car crash. We see the car disappear while a narrator talks about the damage done to the driver, such as bruises, a big wound in his ankle, internal bleeding, etc. We get told that after his car stopped, his brain kept moving, slamming into his skull with enough force to burst blood vessels, which will leave him in a coma. We then see him falling down to the ground, while the narrator says that he will have to learn to walk and talk.
• This Australian PSA starts off as a car commercial, with the narrator pitching the car’s safety features, such as dual airbags, four-wheel disc brakes, and reinforced side panels. Suddenly, the car runs over somebody, and the music stops. The pedestrian rolls over the car and onto the road, as the car braking echoes and creepy ambient music starts to play. The ad ends with the driver running over to the pedestrian and examining him with the narrator saying "...which means absolutely nothing to him if you’re driving a little too fast." all over again.
• This one from Australia in 1998 shows victims giving excuses as to why they were speeding, such as getting in trouble with their boss, not wanting to keep their loved ones waiting, and many more excuses, as we see unsettling aftermaths of their accident, all while somber music plays in the background.
• This one entitled "Dirt Racer" features a bunch of kids riding on the titular big-wheel while happy music plays in the background. One of the kids then decides to ride on the road and a speeding oncoming car runs him over. The music then turns into a Drone of Dread as we see the broken Dirt Racer, which pans up to the driver. Mood Whiplash at its finest.
  • There is also a "making of" to this PSA for those who are curious.

Miscellaneous — New Zealand

• This 1997 anti-speeding PSA, titled "Stop", from the Land Transport Safety Authority of New Zealand is horrifying. A family of four is traveling along a narrow, unshouldered rural highway, the driver going at well above the 100-km/h speed limit when - while going around a sharp curve, he comes upon a disabled vehicle on the side of the road... and there's an oncoming car in the other lane. The action freezes on the panicked looks on everyone's faces as the male voice-over explains in graphic detail that if the driver had gone the speed limit, he would have been able to stop his car... and the fatal and critical injuries the driver and passengers suffered would not have happened. The action resumes and the car skids and crashes into a light pole, the mother and one of the daughters being killed instantly and the father and the younger daughter surviving suffering major injuries. We're then treated to a gruesome shot of the mother's bloody corpse inside the car, with the surviving daughter bawling.
• The Nightmare Fuel for this LTSA ad is more subtle than most. It has three different people celebrating Christmas, only to receive a phone call that their loved ones have been killed in car accidents and their horrified reactions to the news. Perhaps the worst reaction is that of the old man, whose response is to grab his chest and collapse. This is all heartbreakingly set to "I'll Be Home For Christmas".
• In New Zealand, there's an ad where a strange old man sits by a Wheel of Misfortune and he watches the road, accompanied by haunting music and freaky noises. As a car enters the intersection, he spins the wheel. Where the wheel stops on decides the car's (and their occupant's) fate. There are three versions of this ad.
  • In one ad, the wheel stops on "Miracle". The car in question almost comes into contact with two cars. They all spin and, after all that, they remain unharmed.
  • In the much more frequent ad,^note The second half the wheel stops on "Death". The car in question is hit by a speeding car. Everything stops in slow motion as the horrific scene is showered upon by a rain of broken glass.
  • Both ads were also shown in a longer version, where the wheel initially lands on "Near Miss". The car in question almost hits another car. After the miss, a police car is in pursuit.
  • In a follow-up advert, a driver is careful at every intersection, so the man doesn't spin the wheel (this version is arguably the scariest, because it shows the man and his wheel at every street corner, intersection and road bridge). When the driver is tempted to rush the intersection after abuse from another road user, the man goes to spin the wheel; but stops when the driver resists and does it properly. However, in an extended version, the next car behind him drives out without looking, and gets a spin of the wheel. We never see what it lands on.
    
    They actually had the man go to intersections all over New Zealand and had him sitting and spinning the wheel. Now that's Paranoia Fuel.
• Another ad from New Zealand called "Mistakes" showed a driver speeding towards another driver at a turning. Just as the speeding driver applies the brakes, time freezes. The driver at the turning and the speeding driver get out and have a conversation. The driver at the turning apologizes and says he thought he had time, and the speeding driver accuses the driver at the turning of just pulling out, giving him no time to react. The driver at the turning says, "Come on mate, it was a simple mistake." The driver at the turning begs the speeding driver to slow down because his boy is in the back of the car. The speeding driver apologizes, saying there's nothing he can do now. Time unfreezes and the driver at the turning is shown looking back at his boy, and then his car is destroyed.
  
  The French Government remade this PSA from the perspective of the speeding driver, who is in the car with his wife and young daughter. As the child sobs in terror, the mother tries to reassure her: "Daddy's going to brake very, very hard and it will be okay", but it's evident from the parents' expressions that they know this isn't true. Then time unfreezes and they smash into the side of the other car, presumably killing all three of them and the other driver.
  
  There's also a Thai version in which a couple on a motorcycle try to speed past a slow-moving truck on a two-lane road, only to find themselves right in the path of a much bigger truck. They argue about their options when time freezes, but then it unfreezes again and they get pulverized. The tone is a little more comic than the original version and the French remake, but the last shot is pretty brutal.
• There's a billboard◊ in New Zealand that reminds motorists to drive according to weather conditions. It features the image of a young boy that actually "bleeds" whenever it rains outside.
• "Tama" begins with a family leaving the beach and packing up to go home, with the dad as the driver. We see the family laughing and having fun until the dad finds out that he is in the wrong lane and drives off the road, before showing a scene of their funeral, with a shot of a child holding a pinwheel.
• "Same Cop" involves a family on a road trip to a soccer game, with the dad getting a ticket for speeding. As the family drives back, they come across the unpleasant aftermath of an accident, with shots of damaged cars, injured victims, and a grieving woman. We then get revealed that the cop that was letting them through was the same cop that gave them the ticket.
• "High Rise" shows a car floating in mid-air while a narrator tells us that if you are driving at a certain kilometer and you crash, the speed your body impacts is the same as falling from a certain floor of the building that the car is beside. After the narrator mentions that a 125km crash is the same impact as falling from the ninth floor, the car suddenly loses gravity and falls to the ground.
• "Mate" has a montage of a group of friends calling each other "Mate" while drinking at a pub. The group of friends go for a ride, and one of them screams out "MATE!" as the driver crashes into a pole, sending them upside down. The advert concludes with the man who drove the car walking into a pub to see his friends again, saying "Hello, mate!". However, instead of his friends calling him "mate", they call him by his real name, "Dave".
• "Same Day" begins with a family's road trip which goes wrong as a speeding car crashes into them, showing us the brutal aftermath, with sounds of the children crying in the background. We then see David, the one who drove into the family, in the hospital receiving a speed camera fine given to him by his wife. Her voice breaks down as she reminds him that it happened on the same day as the crash. When he tries to apologize, she snaps back "Don't say sorry to me, say sorry to his kids!" before walking off, leaving him to burst into tears of realization.
• Another one from 1995 in New Zealand shows a group of girls driving while putting lipstick on. We then see them driving past the aftermath of an accident, and you are treated to unsettling shots of damaged cars and a woman's blood-curdling screams.
• This one from New Zealand shows two friends driving at night and having a conversation. Suddenly, the driver crashes into a ditch, killing his friend. He then mistakes his dead friend for staring at him weirdly and begs him to stop staring at him. Then, the body of his friend falls on him, with the driver pleading with his friend to get off him. However, you may think it's either scary or funny.
• Another one from New Zealand begins with a group of guys having a party, with them dressed up in costumes, playing hard rock music, and having fun. Then eventually, they get into a car. Then they’re driving down a road, with hard rock music, and talking back and forth. Then they milk up speed, and then they lose control and crash into a wall. The horn goes off immediately after, with the driver, with blood coming down his nose, trying to get attention from the dead passenger to no avail, and then he starts to freak out, screaming "GET IT OFF!!!" while the horn continues to go off.
• This one from New Zealand has a drunk guy driving down a dark road while he grabs a cigarette. As he’s lighting it, he suddenly loses control, and then he goes into the ditch and rolls his car over. It happens so suddenly that it’s a bit of a Jump Scare. He tries to get out of the car, but he can’t because he is too injured. And then, it starts to rain. Hard. The vehicle starts to fill up with water, and the guy tries to get out to no avail. His head then starts to get fully submerged in water, and then he starts drowning. It fades to black, and when it fades back again, it is early in the morning, with the car still filled up with water, while the guy has drowned quite a while ago.
• This one from 1982 in New Zealand shows a man doing a Russian Roulette and surviving once, all while an announcer says "Drinking and driving is like Russian roulette. Sooner or later you're going to lose." The music begins to get tenser as the man takes a few deep breaths, and finally shoots himself in the head, which then cuts to an explosion, implying that the man presumably got killed.
• This one from 1995 in New Zealand shows a drunk couple getting ready to go for a ride. However, the boyfriend is so drunk that he can't even walk, so his girlfriend drives instead. Her boyfriend, however, wants to get a taxi, but the girlfriend really wants to risk it. However, the driver didn't look where she was going and crashes into a truck, all while we get to see unsettling shots of the damaged car. We hear someone scream "Call an ambulance!" while we also see the brutal aftermath, showing his girlfriend's bloody corpse, all while other people react in shock.
  Tagline: If you drink and drive, one way or another, you will be stopped.
• This one from 2003 in New Zealand shows the grisly aftermath of a car accident, followed by a panicking girl getting into an ambulance. The whole thing is reversed with a twist, featuring a scene with a couple driving peacefully.
• This one from the 1990s in New Zealand shows a group of friends getting ready to have a drink. All is good until a woman enters the room, calling the boys murderers, implying the fact that they accidentally killed someone due to drinking and driving. The boys just look at her in regret while the woman leaves the pub, and is Suddenly Shouting at them and calling them "MURDERING BASTARDS!".
• This one from New Zealand shows a group of friends in the car talking back and forth. Suddenly, the driver loses control and crashes into a ditch. We see the driver getting out of the car with the passengers still inside. All of a sudden the car blows up in flames while one of the passengers scream "MARK! THE CAR'S ON FIRE!", all while the driver panics, not knowing what to do, with the passengers still screaming.
• Another one from New Zealand shows a group of friends driving, talking as usual. The driver begins to milk up speed and drifts along. Suddenly, he loses control and crashes into a pole. We get revealed that the front passenger has died (and possibly the one behind him), all while we see the driver trying to wake him up. The driver's face after the crash is also quite unsettling too. You can see parts of his skin peeled off. We then see the driver inside a room with a neck brace on, ashamed of what he did.
• This New Zealand advert called "Gents" starts off innocent, with a guy having great fun in a crowded bar, meeting up with a woman, and having some alcohol. He walks to a bathroom, where he spots 2 guys going to the urinal. He grasps their butts, and then they get his attention. They start to joke and enthusiastically talk to each-other. Then they pressure him to drive, even though he’s drunk. The 2 guys grab him and head towards the door, and right when they start to open the door, it transitions to a hospital, while a horrific crash can be heard. Doctors wheel an unconscious guy into the ER, with that guy having a bloodied face and a horrible black eye, while they wheel another guy in. Doctors do their work, and yell out instructions, while it goes to this guy, who has a bloodied face & body, while yelling out for one of his mates. It shows a close-up of his unsettling face while the tagline is shown.
• This one from 1996 in New Zealand shows two girls going for a ride, talking back and forth. We then see a group of boys going on a road trip, also talking. Suddenly, the boy crashes into the girl's car, causing the passenger to fly out of the window and fall onto the boy's car windscreen because she didn't wear a seatbelt, followed by a gruesome shot of her bloodied face. The boy looks in shock as the girl's friend looks and cries out her name and screams. We then see some people covering the victim's presumably dead body in a blanket while the boys sit on the footpath staring at the aftermath. The ad ends with a shot of a seatbelt with a tagline reminding you to always wear your seatbelt.
• This one from New Zealand entitled "Spot The Difference", shows a split-screen of two girls going for a jog. In one of the split screens, a girl runs onto the road and nearly gets run over by a car, but stops in the nick of time. The other one, shows the girl getting brutally getting run over by a car, with her friend running over to her. It is then revealed that the one that stopped was driving at 50 kilometers an hour, while the other one was driving at 67 kilometers an hour.
• This one from New Zealand shows a mother and son getting ready to see his father. After she gets in the car, a car suddenly crashes into the back of the vehicle, and runs out of their car to check on them. We see one of the drivers telling the little boy that the mother is okay. We then see a flashback of her drinking at her friend's place and find out that the mother has hit her head. The kicker is the ending, as we then find out that the mother is pregnant. She cries for the drunk driver to help her.
  Tagline: Women are drink drivers too.
• This one from 1997 in New Zealand shows three viewpoints of different people. The first viewpoint shows a group of friends leaving a party, with one of the men driving. We then see them in the car talking back and forth. All is good until the driver accidentally runs over a motorcyclist. We then see the injured drunk driver in a waiting room in a hospital, with the victim's parents giving him a Death Glare. We then hear the victim's parents crying, revealing that the victim has died. Then, we see him in court with the judge saying that he is guilty of driving while drunk. The ad ends with the man getting ready to go to prison.
  • The 2nd viewpoint shows the wife looking after her child, and suddenly getting a phone call from the hospital. We then see her running to her husband, asking if he is alright. We then see a nurse breaking the news to both of them, telling them that the victim has died while we see the victim's parents walking away. We then see the driver's wife speaking to a man about how he thinks he is going to lose his license, which means he will lose his job. We then see the driver in court with the judge saying the same thing as before, and the ad ends with the wife looking at her husband going to prison, while we hear a loud slamming of a door.
  • The 3rd and final one shows the victim's mother getting a phone call from the hospital. The victim's parents then enter the hospital to hear the news that their son has died in a horrible accident. We then see the mother looking at a photo of her and her son while crying and holding a blanket. We then see the drunk driver in court, with the judge saying the same thing once again, while we see the grieving family, followed by a loud slamming of the door at the end.
• This one from the early 2000s in New Zealand entitled "Consequences" shows a man on a bus having a flashback to a car accident, as we see clips of his boss shaming him, with another clip showing him speeding with his girlfriend in the car. While he is on the bus having his flashback, a little boy peeks out of his seat looking at him. We then see him crashing into a red car, and the man runs to the red car talking about the damage done to his car. He then runs over to the front and finds out that he bumped into the red car, making the red car run over a boy's mother, as we get to see unsettling shots of her bloody corpse, followed by her son quietly calling out for his mummy.
• This one from 1999 in New Zealand called "Farm Gate" shows a man dropping off his kids and getting ready to leave with his mate. We then see a driver milking up speed. He and his friend are talking back and forth, and the driver nearly runs over a bird and suddenly loses control and runs over two children. The driver quickly gets out of the car and screams for the kids, and just as he sees the kids dead bodies, he screams.
• This one from 1996 in New Zealand begins with a man milking up speed and listening to music on the radio and all of sudden he runs over a little girl, while we also get to see god-awful shots of her bloody mutilated corpse, with her mother grieving, and the driver crying and panicking while we also see clips of him running her over. We then see him in a dark room as he bursts into tears while explaining about not being able to get the situation out of his head and that the little girl that he killed was only 4-years-old.
• This short New Zealand PSA shows a photo of children and a man in a back seat. The children are buckled up, but the man isn’t. The sound of children laughing can be heard. Suddenly, the sound of a car braking can be heard, as the photo turns into a video of said people getting into a crash, and the man getting shot forward and hitting the frame glass, which causes it to crack. The tagline says "Safety belts help keep families together", and the sound of a woman crying can be heard.
• A 2022 PSA titled "Road To Zero" from Waka Kohati NZ Transport Agency, who in its many previous forms made many of the PSAs above. A dad drives through the countryside and often stops to play with his two kids, an older son and younger daughter. The tone should be happy and wholesome, but the PSA already has the suspenseful tone of a horror movie, particularly when the son tells a rather ominous riddle ("What's always in front of you but can't be seen? The future."). The dad drives the children up to a toll booth, where he asks a very untrustworthy seeming toll lady with a Slasher Smile what the toll is. She sternly responds "Just the little one today" while staring at the girl. Cue a distorted version of the soundtrack over footage of the girl playing from before and shots of her distraught father, while the boy cries for his dad. Prior to the Advertising Standards Authority taking action and condemning the ad to a later timeslot, this formerly aired during G-rated family films. The long version is even worse, due to containing ominous shots of the toll lady during the son's riddle. A very abstract and surreal, yet chilling way to point out the fact that we are all so used to car accidents by now that instead of trying to stop them, we treat them as an inevitability, like a toll to pay.
  "It's time we stopped paying the road toll."

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