Let’s Talk About PIFs #1: Apaches
I’d like to start this piece by saying that I’m that weird kind of human being who enjoys torturing themselves by watching things they know will end up making them sleep with their lights on for months. I’ve been like that since I was a child, and now that I’m an adult woman with a thing for weird shit and a wifi connection, my condition worsened.
It all started with a countdown. A countdown of creepy commercials. I wanted to scare the crap out of myself, so I decided to check out this list that back in 2015 had me staring at the window, eerily looking for that weird ice cream being from the Little Baby’s Ice Cream ads. That’s how I dared myself to watch one of the commercials on the list, which as I would find out later wasn’t really a commercial but a public information film. What’s a public information film, you may wonder? It is the UK’s equivalent of a PSA: a short or long film, television ad or short story with a clear purpose: to scare people away and make them lock inside their rooms forever to stay alive, well and away from all kinds of dangers. I’m actually kidding, though. (sort of)
PIFs were created to warn people about several kinds of dangers and wrongdoings, from drunk driving to animal cruelty. The one that sent me right into that creepy universe of public information nightmare fuel was Lonely Water, a 1972 film in which actor Donald Pleasance voices Death and claims the lives of careless children playing in the water, all while reciting a creepy monologue that ends with an unintentionally hilarious sendoff (I’ll be back…back…back…). And while several of these short films are scary as fuck and have made me sleep with the lights on for weeks now (giving me an excuse to rinse off the fear with long marathons of Law and Order: SVU and the chance to see Raúl Esparza’s face on a regular basis), today I will be talking about an old and quite infamous PIF: Apaches. First released in 1977, this 26-minute film has a reputation. And what a reputation.
I gotta be honest. Naturally, the pass of time made these films somewhat of an outdated source of nightmare fuel and if you showed them to children today, most of them would laugh their butts off and go back to their Fortnite sessions. But this one in particular was controversial at the time it aired because it literally involves children dying in crude, graphic manners. As with The Finishing Line, a similar film I’ll discuss in another post, Apaches represents traumatic experiences that whole generations of British schoolchildren still remember very well, at least according to YouTube’s comment section.
Let’s start talking about Apaches, also known as Final Destination Kids. The action transpires in a farm near their homes, where six children pretend to be Apache warriors as part of a game that has them running, screaming, laughing, jumping and shooting at each other. These innocent games soon grow more and more macabre as five of them die in gruesome, horrifying ways. There’s Kim, the blonde cowgirl who falls under a tractor and gets crushed; Tom, the boy who gets swallowed by a slurry pit; Sharon, the girl who forgets to mime-drink the weedkiller they’re using to celebrate their dominance over the whites and ends up dying a slow and painful death. There’s also Robert, who gets crushed by an iron gate, and (plot twist!) Danny, the leader of the group, who accidentally starts a tractor and crashes into a ditch. The last kid standing is Michael, the dullest one of the bunch, the one who had narrowly escaped death before, and the one Danny called “daft” for wearing a red bandana. I guess we can either laugh at Danny for dying before the daft one or get mad because we trusted Danny’s leadership so much more than that.
I forgot to add there’s a secondary plot in this PIF: a tea party our narrator Danny describes in great detail as the film progresses. He seems to believe grown-up parties are boring, but later he wishes he was at the party. And he is, only not in the way he wants to: the tea party is actually his wake, attended by several relatives and friends, including his cousin (!) Michael. I guess we can add a third option to our list of possible feelings: little Danny was mean to his cousin and ended up dead while Michael saw all his friends die in front of him. The film ends with a rolling list of actual kids who died in farm-related accidents. Apparently, the list of crushed kids is surprisingly long.
On my first watch I gotta admit this film gave me chills. The grainy camera, the gruesome deaths of children (which are surprisingly terrifying despite being an elementary school play next to The Human Centipede), the voiceover, the surreal vibe (these children saw some shit and somehow they’re still playing like nothing happened a few days later. Okay, I guess?) It isn’t scary at all on a second viewing, but it just gets sadder and sadder.
Ironically, the least graphic death is the most horrifying. Even with six or seven viewings of the film I still skip the scene where Sharon wakes up in the middle of the night and calls her mother, burning inside and most definitely dying in a very painful manner. The screaming is just… something else. It is the most shocking part of the film, and has the highest amount of nightmare fuel. Goddamn it, Sharon! Mime, you said!
Well, that’s all for now. I’ll continue reviewing some of the PIFs I’ve been watching, just to share my feelings on the subject. In case you feel like watching Apaches, PIF enthusiast Hello I’m A Pizza (they also have a great blog, BTW) has the full version on YouTube for your viewing nightmares. And remember, kiddos, playing on a farm is dangerous. Or going out, for that matter.
