A few years ago I wrote about a disturbing farm safety film I’d watched when I was at school.
At the time my memory was little hazy, but I remembered it being a really sinister and gruesome story of a group of children who visit a farm, and one by one, they all die.
Well, I finally tracked down the film in question. It’s called “Apaches” and Wikipedia describes it as “one of the most notorious public information films of all time.”
It’s a British film and dates from 1977 and appears to have been shown extensively in British schools throughout the ’70s and ’80s, leading to a whole generation of grown-ups who were traumatised by it.
It’s available in its entirety on YouTube, but I feel like I should advise viewer discretion: children get killed, and horribly. When the little girl wakes up in the night after having swallowed poison earlier in the day, man, I don’t ever want to hear that scream again.
I still can’t believe that a) this was shown to me when I was about six years old, and b) they thought it would be relevant to New Zealand children living in what was essentially a rural suburb of Hamilton.
So, as a pre-Halloween treat, here is Apaches on YouTube.
Update: There’s a hilarious fake trailer for “Apaches Redux” and a music video that sets more joyful clips from “Apaches” to Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” but ends with The Scream That Should Never Be Heard.
Part of me wants to watch.
But the mother part of me knows I get all upset when children get hurt so I won’t.
Also – after reading your older post – my mother had a cat who drowned in a big pond of poo.
I watched the first episode – not sure I am up to watching the rest. Waiting for them to get picked off one by one is horrible. How could they show it to children! Bloody hell.
Ah, YouTube has it! I downloaded a good-quality version from a site that has since been closed, and I swear, safety films in the US were NEVER like this. If they were, I’d probably be in therapy right now. (I was searching for it for the express purpose of horrifying some friends.)
Melanie, Mrs. Smith–if you haven’t yet seen the “poisoning” event, just…don’t. It’s not even graphic; just screams heard coming from inside a house in the middle of the night. But I guarantee you’ll never forget those screams and wish you could.
And then there’s the iron gate bit. That’s jump-out-of-your-seat graphic. You don’t want to see that. Not if you have kids.
Oh my god, this film gave me nightmares for years, literally. The bit where the kid falls through the crust on the slurry pit and drowns made me so terrified that I couldn’t bring myself to walk on grass for months afterwards. I was utterly, utterly terrified – I got so upset that a teacher had to take me from the room and calm me down. And I was only 5 or 6 when they showed me this. I just can’t even begin to want to watch this again, even as an adult. Horrifying. What were they thinking?
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