Horror in Unlikely Places: Slow Down

(Screen cap of Slow Down shamelessly swiped from Mike Atherton, because I'm technologically challenged.)

Two generations of American students were traumatized by driving-safety films like Signal 30, Highways of Agony and Blood on the Highway. Their disinterested, monotone narration and wooden acting lulled countless drivers' education classes, only to jar them with gruesome images of real roadway carnage.

The violent shift from the mundane to the macabre was bridged by a barely discernable change in the narrator's voice, hinting at a perverse sense of satisfaction in a point being driven home.

It was education through fear, a popular teaching tool in America of the 1950s and '60s (see Boys Beware, The Terrible Truth, etc.).

(Lest you think those jittery, black-and-white movies are relics of a distant past, I'll have you know I was subjected to Blood on the Highway in the late '80s.)

In more recent years, many of the horrific elements of driving-safety films and PSAs largely have been replaced by talking crash-test dummies, and DeGrassi-style videos produced by auto insurance companies. Well, at least in the United States.

In the U.K., however, there's still an appreciation of horror as educational device, if in much more subtle tones.

Mike Atherton kindly draws my attention to a new television commercial from the U.K. Department for Transport designed to explain the reason for a 30 mph speed limit. (The cheerful poster at right is part of the same campaign.)

Titled Slow Down, the TV spot opens on a serene yet haunting image of a girl lying against a tree, her eyes closed almost as if she's sleeping. The shrubbery behind her flickers, a la Blue Velvet, as the scene rewinds at high speed.

As we hear a girl's voice in narration, the camera closes in on the child's pale face, and we see a bruise on her forehead and blood trickling from her ear.

"If you hit me at 40 miles per hour," the voice says sweetly, "there's around an 80 percent chance I'll die."

The footage continues to rewind, and we hear the cracking of her breaking bones as her wrists snap back into place. The blood draws back up into her ear, and her body is dragged, as if pulled by invisible strings, across the street.

She sits up and gasps, her life restored: "Hit me at 30, and there's around an 80 percent chance I'll live."

It's disturbing and horrific and mesmerizing -- and far more effective than any 30-second morality tale starring anthropomorphized test dummies, which permit us the luxury of detachment. A mannequin crashing through a windshield is funny. A little girl sliding across concrete is chilling.

But I'm not sure I know the word to accurately describe the sound of her breaking bones. Sickening? Ghoulish?