Vague Visages’ Public Information Films essay contains spoilers for The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973), Apaches (1977) and The Finishing Line (1977). Check out VV’s film essays section for more movie coverage.

The post-war period in Britain oversaw a significant shift in social consciousness. Epitomized by the 1951 Festival of Britain, the 1940s and 50s were defined by a focus on social regeneration which saw efforts to rebuild the nation through the growth of New Towns, a renewed focus on public health and a collective drive toward modernization. Cinema, too, mirrored this optimism about progress and a modern future with films like The Third Man (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951) exploring fragmented societies striving to regain moral order, with the latter offering a satirical critique on the complexities of innovation and progress. Through social commentary and visions of rebuilding, these films captured the spirit of the times, portraying a collective effort to help reshape Britain in both literal and figurative terms.

By the 1960s and 70s, Britain had undergone profound social, cultural and political change. The post-war reconstruction period gave way to the so-called “Swinging Sixties” and the more politically charged 1970s, during which issues like the environment, personal freedom and social equality became increasingly prominent, with art playing a role in these shifting dynamics. Unlike the previous decade, which often emphasized a social cohesion, the 60s and 70s saw filmmakers confronting societal issues head on. Social realist directors like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh emerged as prominent figures, with works such as Kes (1969) and Bleak Moments (1971) offering stark portrayals of the harsh and gritty realities of British life, particularly focusing on issues such as poverty, social inequality and the struggles of ordinary people.

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Beyond the traditional boundaries of mainstream cinema, however, a unique phenomenon arose that would help reflect the shift in social interest during this period: Public Information Films (PIFs). Produced by the Central Office of Information (COI) — a government body established in 1946 — PIFs were short, instructional films designed to educate, inform and advise the public on a wide range of subjects. In the 1940s and 50s, PIFs primarily focused on post-war recovery and stability with films like The Doctor’s Dilemma (1948) and Charley in New Town (1948) introducing the public to innovations like the National Health Service and key post-war housing schemes. Other films, like Pedal Cyclists (1947) and I Am A Litter Basket (1959), experimented with more adventurous and imaginative filmmaking techniques. Whether through a superimposed angel to warn against road accidents or a humorous voiceover to personify a litter bin, these early PIFs undercut the seriousness of the messaging with funny and often unique filmic devices. 

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However, it was in the 1960s and 70s where PIFs truly left a lasting impact, adopting a filmmaking style that would set the benchmark for what the PIF would come to be understood and known as. Often only one-minute long and broadcast between television schedules or film programs — they were also known as “fillers” — PIFs had to adopt more abrasive and attention-grabbing techniques and, as certification standards loosened in the 1970s, the films grew more explicit, graphic and hard-hitting. The polite remonstrations of earlier decades gave way to uncompromising safety warnings, and PIFs started to transform into a series of spine-chilling mini-horrors looking to shock increasingly jaded audiences out of a complacency. Films like Firework: Eyes (1974), part of a wider fire safety campaign, was one of those PIFs that incorporated horror tropes to deliver a chilling warning as a disembodied voiceover describes how a firework “blew up” in a child’s face. The film’s shaky camerawork, the distorted lens and the explicit nature of the subject matter succinctly create a vision of the uncanny and make for a terrifying warning that encapsulated the PIF’s style during this period. 

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By the 1970s, anxieties about the environment, spurred by growing industrialization, started to change how many viewed the British countryside, too. PIFs reflected this re-evaluation of the rural landscape by having a keener interest in certain aspects of rural life, positioning these spaces as zones of vulnerability rather than safety, adding to the changing perception of the countryside as a place of environmental degradation, and as potentially repressive, isolated and even dangerous. Films like Keep Wales Tidy (1970), set amongst the grounds of Conwy Castle, tried to combat littering and promote environmental conservation amongst green spaces and heritage sites across Wales. Meanwhile, films like the Play Safe series (1978) continued the trend of using traumatic imagery in order to intensify the urgency of its messaging. Set amongst suburban edge-lands or in idyllic rural locations, these films depicted children engaging in seemingly innocent activities — playing with frisbees, pitching tents, fishing — only to reveal the lurking dangers around them, such as overhead power lines or electrical substations. The Play Safe films, often ending in graphic and gratuitous depictions of children being electrocuted, reinforced the notion that rural spaces, once considered safe havens, were fraught with hidden, life-threatening risks. 

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This unsettling transformation of the rural landscape reached its most iconic expression in The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973), arguably the most infamous of all British PIFs and a seminal example of how horror tropes were co-opted for public service messaging. Like the Play Safe films, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water centers on children’s vulnerability in liminal spaces — particularly rural or derelict edge-land areas — but elevates its message through the use of haunting visual and aural cues. In the film, a grim reaper-like figure, shrouded in a black cloak and voiced by Donald Pleasence, who had already gained notorious fame as Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (1967), narrates the action with a cold detachment. The actor’s spectral figure lurks in the background of each scene, observing children as they play dangerously near water, whether that be a pond, a river or a large puddle in a scrapyard. His ominous presence creates a sinister manifestation of the threat: “there are traps,” he whispers, “like old cars, bedsteads, weeds, hidden depths.” Through Pleasence’s eerie voiceover and ghoulish spectre, as well as the film’s washed-out cinematography, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water conveys the idea that these seemingly benign places mask deadly realities for those who fail to remain cautious.

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A particularly disturbing scene midway through The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water perfectly encapsulates the film’s horror ethos. The camera lingers on a tranquil lake, its stillness evocative of a pastoral painting, before slowly zooming in on a fragile, overhanging branch. As a boy prepares to grab hold, the spirit whispers with delight that the branch “is weak, rotten, will never take his weight.” The serene image dissolves into a foreboding visual, as nature itself becomes complicit in the child’s demise. This subversion of rural imagery, where there is a transformation of the picturesque into the perilous, demonstrates how The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water functioned not only as a safety warning but as a cultural artifact reflecting a broader shift in attitudes toward the rural space, childhood and vulnerability. Even PIFs like Falling in the Water (1973), the first entry in the animated Charley Says series that was released the same year as The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, similarly highlights the dangers that surrounded river settings. However, where Charley  Says retains a touch of humor and color reminiscent of the whimsical PIFs from the 1940s and 50s, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water embraces a darker, more psychological mode of storytelling to make greater use of its short runtime. It is perhaps this stark contrast — its blunt use of fear and a haunting tone — that has cemented the film as one of the most memorable and terrifying entries in British television history.

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In The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, as with many of the Play Safe films, too, rural spaces are depicted as sites where childhood play comes into contact with the rising threats of a mechanical and industrial world. Whether it be a field near an electrical substation, a puddle-strewn scrapyard that doubles as a makeshift playground or, as in other PIFs such as Building Sites Bite (1978), an industrial worksite that becomes a place for thrilling quests, childlike curiosity often has to contend with dangerous modern innovations. John Mackenzie’s Apaches (1977), a bold 27-minute PIF, confronts this tension directly. Set on a working farm and told through the perspective of six children engaged in a sprawling game of cowboys, the film explores the dissonance between the rural idyll and the lethal realities of modern agriculture, whether in the form of slurry pits, tractors or pesticides. In Apaches, Mackenzie strips away any of the romanticism associated with the rural landscape and reconfigures it as a site that is unpredictable and treacherous as the focal group slowly falls victim to different hazards on the farm — plastic guns or playful camaraderie prove powerless against the very real dangers embedded amongst the children’s surroundings.

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Apaches’ use of horror, therefore, lies in its juxtaposition between the children’s imaginative play and the grim realism of their deaths. This narrative approach reinforces the idea that the imaginative innocence traditionally associated with childhood and the rural landscape is no longer viable as it is being brutally interrupted by a growing modern reality. Even moments that seem to suggest temporary triumph quickly unravel, like when the children briefly outdo a moving tractor early in the film; the vehicle suddenly jolts without warning, throwing one child to the ground and crushing them beneath its wheels, leaving a bloodied trail in the mud. In another scene, one of the children drinks from a can of pesticide to playfully mimic drinking alcohol, proving that even the imitation of adult behavior does little to shield from the perils of a working farm. Apaches, like many of the PIFs from the 1970s, punctuates its message with visceral bursts of violence in order to pack a more effective punch, a reflection perhaps of how creeping industrialization, once an admired trait in earlier PIFs from the 40s and 50s, is now something to be wary and cautious of. 

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The children’s deaths in Apaches are rendered even more chilling, however, through the film’s clinical style and almost social-realist tone — an approach no doubt shaped by Mackenzie’s role as assistant director to Ken Loach in the 1960s. In being so, Apaches rejects the use of dramatic music to cue emotion, instead utilizing the children’s cries for help to hauntingly echo across the scenes, met with eerily detached responses from the rest of the group. The absence of adult intervention is also striking, indicative of the slow desensitization to the mounting tragedies. As the film progresses, each death is marked with a quiet ritual as a primary school teacher silently removes each of the child’s names from a cloakroom peg, a gesture performed with unsettling matter-of-factness, suggesting an institutionalized acceptance of death as an inevitable outcome of rural life.

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In stripping the countryside of nostalgia and emotional warmth, Apaches transforms it into a site of concealed danger, where children’s imagination can lead to misjudgment and where innocence offers no protection. The setting may look familiar, perhaps at times even beautifully idyllic, yet it has become unknowable, uncanny and, ultimately, lethal. Danny, the group’s leader, narrates the film in hindsight, recounting the decisions and fatal errors he and his friends made during their cowboy game. Only in the closing moments is it revealed that the narrator’s voice comes from beyond the grave — a final, haunting confirmation that the group never truly understood the dangers that surrounded them on the farm. “I wish I was there,” Danny says, with solemnity at his own wake, before a scrolling list of names of real-life children who died in similar farming accidents appears on the screen. The scale of the danger, once confined to Danny’s group and a single farm, is expanded to the whole of rural Britain — a powerful reconciliation of how the rural landscape is slowly losing its idyllic resonance.

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The imaginative play that underpins Apaches finds a darker, more surreal counterpart in another PIF released the same year: The Finishing Line (1977). Directed by John Krish, the film imagines a school sports day taking place on an active railway line, where children participate in a series of violent and life-threatening games, such as throwing stones at passing trains, running across the tracks and navigating a long, pitch-black railway tunnel. Like Apaches, The Finishing Line explores the disjunction between children’s imaginative play and the fatal consequences of misreading the actual dangers that lie in these rural surroundings. However, where Apaches borders on a realism when depicting the jeopardy inherent on a farm, Krish’s film adopts a more fantastical tone with elements of satire. Its confluence of school games and tournament geniality with the normalization of violence presents a bleak and dystopian vision of childhood, where risk is overlooked in favor of applause and where institutional care is conspicuously absent.

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The Finishing Line opens with a boy sitting on a railway bridge, imagining the events to come after his teacher warns that “the railway line is not the game field.” The blurred boundary between the rural landscape as a playground and a zone of hidden dangers is again the key point of interest. The Finishing Line then follows a terrifying fantasy as the boy imagines children in colored sashes being organized into teams and cheered on by teachers and classmates, while a brass band is ever-present as they compete throughout the games. There is a jarring juxtaposition between the upbeat pageantry of a traditional sports day and the horrifying spectacle of the children’s mutilation. As they trip up on the tracks, are crushed by trains or maimed from rocks hurled at carriages, applause rings out from the sidelines. The Finishing Line‘s use of diegetic music — particularly from the brass band — adds a sense of grotesque irony, imbuing these acts of violence with a disturbing aura of celebration and official sanction. 

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Crucially, there is something distinctly Orwellian in how The Finishing Line’s events unfold with chilling bureaucratic precision as each game is announced with military-like formality from a teacher with a megaphone. The colored sashes that the children wear also evoke a form of war-like regimentation, an homage to a genre that is compounded through the narrator’s use of diagrams and charts to explain the rules and maneuvers of each game. Whereas the cowboy-like narrative in Apaches retains a sense of childlike imagination, infused with the innocent language of play, The Finishing Line replaces spontaneity with tactics and calculation. Overall, there is a cold detachment with which the games are officiated that mirrors a totalitarian indifference to human life, an emotional void that feels all the more disturbing for being staged within the quiet isolation of a rural railway setting.

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Despite the co-opting of horror tropes so familiar with 70s PIFs, The Finishing Line was not technically a COI production, as it was commissioned, instead, by British Transport Films (BTF), an organization better known for its genteel travelogues or documentaries on rural life and the national rail network. Earlier films from the BTF, like The Heart of England (1954), Between the Tides (1958) and A Letter for Wales (1960), were similar to early PIFs in their idealized and fanciful depictions of rural life. A Letter for Wales, for example, frames the journey from Paddington to rural Wales as a voyage from monochrome urbanity to vibrant natural beauty. Paddington is initially pictured in black and white before dissolving into color as the rolling Welsh hills come into view. At the film’s conclusion, as a lifeboat is deployed from the coast at the picturesque town of Tenby, the sea’s spray dissolves back into the black and white train station, suggesting a retreat from nature back into mechanical modernity. Told through a Welshman’s memories, the countryside is framed as a site of sanctuary and something that is wholly a lost quality of a paradisal past.

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By the time BTF had made The Finishing Line, the idea of rural landscapes as places of refuge had almost been lost altogether, at least amongst PIFs. The film’s graphic scope, its depiction of the railway as inherently dangerous and its cinematic audacity is precisely what secures The Finishing Line in the canon of PIFs that helped redefine rural landscapes as sites of danger. That Krish’s film was so disturbing that it prompted BTF to commission Robbie (1979), a more conventionally structured and less graphic remake, points at its narrative power and, as with The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water and Apaches, reflects how these films mirrored a Britain in the grip of changing values and shifting social consciousness. 

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There is at least a small glimmer of hope at the end of The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water as a child is saved from drowning by the intervention of a group of more “sensible children.” Despite Pleasence’s reaper character eerily vowing to return — “I’ll be back, back, back,” he says — the film retains the possibility that vigilance, staying safe and being careful as a group can preserve rural spaces as sites of exploration and joy. But by the end of the 1970s, and moving into the 80s, as Britain’s political and cultural landscape grew increasingly disillusioned, even that cautious optimism began to recede. Public Information Films, once tools for instruction, became haunted reflections of a nation’s growing uncertainty and discontent, where the fields, rivers and tracks of childhood imagination no longer led to freedom, but instead down a dark alley towards tragedy and potential death.

Edwin Miles (@eaj_miles) is a filmmaker, screenwriter and documentarian from the West Midlands, United Kingdom. Now based in London, Edwin’s experimental work reflects on ideas of family and memory, home and displacement. His favourite filmmakers include Derek Jarman, David Lynch and Kazuhiro Sôda. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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