Fire Kills launched in 2001, and have produced some of the most memorable and frightening campaigns to grace our screens, as well as indirectly saving thousands of lives. As good an organisation as they so obviously are however, they still thought this would be a good idea.
WARNING: I'm just gonna tell you now, because I hate them: the following video is a "screamer". A video designed to make you jump right out of your skin by flashing a loud face and a VERY loud scream unexpectedly. So if your gonna put yourself through that, volume controls at the ready. If your too much of a pussy, then you can read the spoiler riffic description below.
Its actually quite hard what to make of the first few seconds. A man, asleep or dead, its never made quite clear, is lying in an extremely dark, depressing living room with a cigarette in his hand. Ominous, whispering voices mumble something about cigarettes. I still can;t work out who these voices belong to. Fireman? Smoky Mcdeads friends? Its shot almost like a home video, quite jittery and shaky. Is it firemen surveying after the terrible fact? Has the house already burned down? The rooms so bloody dark you can't tell! I lived in a house like this once. There were no ominous voices, but plenty of scorpions. More scorpions then one would ever require actually. Unusual for a house in the North of England that there would be a rather large scorpion population. Them buggers don't have give you a rash!
So we linger on this cigarette, as you can see in the thumbnail, for an uncomfortable amount of time. Your already tensing yourself for...something. An awakening from Sleepy Mccoma? ("He's not quite dead"). A caption? A scorpion attack? I used to think you could make out a skull in the ash of the cigarette. But watching it back now, I'm not so sure. Although that could be to do with the resolution of the clip, I don't know. Shame, because if there isn't a skull, that would have been a neat idea. While we're thinking about subliminal skulls (good name for a band), the ash falls off the fag which the-
ARRRRRRRRRGHHHHH!!!!
A fiery skull leaps out of nowhere and SCREECHS at you! As your changing your trousers, a caption reminds us that fires started by cigarettes kill someone every four days. What they don't tell you is that demon fire skulls kill someone every four seconds. And this PIF kills someone every time they watch it. Luckily, the amount of scorpion venom in my body prevents me from dying from fright, as I have virtually no heart beat to speak of. A doctor told me that. A good one.
So yeah...what is there to say really? Its another empty attempt to "scare", like the drug faces one from last time, with both using very cheap techniques indeed. Whereas the drug PIF assumed that showing some scary faces would be enough to stop you doing acid (hell, if your on Acid, your seeing way worse then that every day anyway), this one uses possibly the laziest technique of getting a reaction ever.
Jump scares have become more prevalent lately. Every single horror film released recently seems to rely on nothing but jump scares [1], modern video games that utilise horror and fear seemed to have picked up on this trope too. It's nothing but a cheap trick, the equivalent of going up behind someone and grabbing there shoulders shouting "BOO!"
And in terms of this PIF, what's the point? Sticking a flaming skull and screaming right in our faces doesn't really teach us about being careful with cigarettes, it just makes us jump and probably change the channel out of fear. Why would you actively try and drive your audience away from reading the message your trying to teach us? And besides, if the average viewer comes across the ad a second time, there probably going to just change channel immediately anyway. Its a self defeating prophecy. (Not that many people probably had a chance to do all that. I don't remember seeing this ad on television at all. Maybe it was relegated to post 9PM watershed, or maybe Fire Kills realised there mistake, and quietly withdrew it).
There are so much more effective ways you can scare someone, and still make a valid point. Here's Fire Kill's first PIF as a comparison of what there capable of.
It manages to be utterly depressing and visceral without relying on throwing skulls at us. Why is so much scarier then the jumpy cigarette one? Because it feels REAL. The events your seeing look like they could feasibly happen. That's the secret to scaring them straight, putting the audience in a world almost exactly like our own, and then breaking it down and destroying it ruthlessly. Every parent will be terrified by the sounds of those kids crying for there dad. Everyone will feel sick at the sound of that poor woman banging at the door. You know how powerful this ad was? It was banished to 9PM watershed land, and then quietly withdrawn after a staggering amount of complaints. Surely proof that this PIF REALLY shook people.
Because it could happen next week. Or tomorrow. Or tonight. To your children. Or your parents, or neighbours.
Or you.
No one however is ever going to be sitting there with a fag, and have a demon scream in there face. (unless your on Acid, probably bought off Scary Face man).
So, is that the key to a successful scary PIF then? Realism? I'd make a case for that, yes. Not all the time of course, but if PIF's are designed as a warning, then they should feel cold, and harsh. They should feel like there happening on your street, in your garden, in YOUR house even. To quote one Youtube user:
" PIFs are not adverts, they are not selling things, they are commanding people to do - or not do - certain activities. They're not meant to be stylish, they're meant to be blunt instruments"
- Applemask. Go view his channel right now, Huge collection of PIF's/adverts and unlike me, actual funny and insightful descriptions to go with it.
One Final note, if your saw the aforementioned video we've been discussing and your still shaken, this should sort you out.
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