In the mid 90s, a company secured the rights to release a selection of classic public information films on video, under the title Charley Says. I bought it not, as I suppose most people did, in a haze of nostalgia, but in the spirit of confronting a terrible fear, like those people who try to overcome their aerophobia by booking on to a course that involves a trip in a plane.

I can't remember the first time I saw The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, the 1973 public information film in which a Bergman-esque Death literally stalks children playing on riverbanks. That was part of the problem: the bloody thing used to come lurching out of the ad breaks during Tiswas without any warning: one minute they'd be cheerily trying to sell you Connect 4 or this week's Look In, the next you'd be confronted by a cowled child-killer with Donald Pleasance's voice, gloomily intoning about how "the show-offs are easy … but the unwary are easier still" and triumphantly warning, his voice laden with echo: "I'll be BACK-ACK-ACK-ACK!" But I can remember the effect it had on me: it remains, unequivocally, the most scared I have ever been by anything.

I was so scared that it continued to haunt me, years after they stopped showing it. Working on my university newspaper, I was granted an interview with Pulp. I wasted my allotted hour talking not about their music, but The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, which they'd recently mentioned in passing in the NME. In fairness, they seemed keen to talk about it as well. "I know it sounds like acid bollocks," their guitarist Russell Senior offered, "but me and Jarvis once went down the River Don in Sheffield, throwing money in the water to appease The Spirit."

When I got the Charley Says video home, I looked on the cover and my childhood nemesis figured heavily. I rang a friend and asked her to come over: I was too scared to watch it alone. I was, pathetically enough, 27 years old.

Last week, the Central Office of Information (COI), the government department that made public information films, was closed with the loss of 400 jobs, a victim of government cuts. Francis Maude – who last week also encouraged people to store petrol in their garages, precisely the kind of scenario that public information film-makers would have once alighted on with ghoulish delight – has talked about greater transparency and cutting bureaucracy. He thinks the job can be done more efficiently, but I struggle to see how they can do it more effectively: The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water terrified me to such a degree that I didn't just avoid riverbanks, I became virtually hydrophobic.

The COI made public information films for 66 years, but by common consent its golden age was between the late 60s and early 80s: the era not just of The Spirit, but Charley Says, Clunk-Click and Alvin Stardust waggling his gloved hand at children who didn't know the Green Cross Code ("they must be crackers – a double-decker bus could be right on top of them"). Sometimes the films were cute or funny, but mostly they dealt in fear, dishing out death and mutilation to adults and children who failed to heed their warnings. Indeed, the work of the COI often seems roughly analogous to commercial British horror films of the same era. There's a faint and disturbing sense of relish about the graphic way the directors of public information films such as Apaches or Building Sites Bite! depicted children drowning in pits of slurry or being crushed to death by falling bricks, or the sheer frequency with which people were sent flying through their windscreens by the careless driving of the Blunders family. For all the safety messages, you catch the same whiff of brutality and nihilism that Matthew Sweet's brilliant history of UK cinema, Shepperton Babylon, identified in Death Line or Killer's Moon.

The public information films aimed at children seem to speak of a different age of parenting, when you kept the kids in line by the simple expedient of terrifying them ("Get a move on or the Yorkshire Ripper'll get you!" as my mother used to say) and/or thumping them: quick and pointed and vicious, they were the cinematic equivalent of a smack on the legs. The ones aimed at adults, meanwhile, offer a weird index of largely forgotten fears. You watch them and think: whatever happened to rabies? It seemed to be an ever-present menace during my childhood. All it was going to take was one irresponsible Frenchman to smuggle his poodle through customs and we were going to be facing what one public information film called "death in a manner that is beyond description". I assumed it had been eradicated but no: rabid bats were found in Scotland in 2009. It's hard to imagine the COI in its prime would have missed the opportunity to turn that news into 60 seconds of matchless terror, perhaps involving jolly footage of people tossing the caber, massed pipe bands etc, interspersed with images of a child convulsing and foaming at the mouth and a solemn voiceover: "One wee boy won't be enjoying the Highland games this year."

Watching them now on YouTube, you boggle slightly at what some of their warnings involved. Did people really hang so much shopping on the front of prams that they overbalanced, catapulting the infant within face-first into a mass of broken glass, dented tins and Instant Whip? How much of a threat was posed to humankind by the careless placing of rugs on polished wood floors? Was it genuinely comparable to setting a spring-loaded mantrap? And did anyone actually eschew fitting a plug on electrical equipment in favour of simply jamming bare wires into a plug socket with matchsticks? Presumably, yes … well, or else someone in the COI was inventing things in order to tell people not to do them.

Maybe they were. In recent years, we've heard a lot about paternalism and the nanny state, about health and safety regulations ruining people's fun, but the public information films of the 70s seem to suggest it was ever thus. There seems to be no area of life that the government wouldn't stick its nose into, even what speed you should walk along the pavement. "Don't run!" admonishes one film, offering the fairly improbable scenario that an insufficiently measured pedestrian might be unable to avoid colliding with an enormous piece of plate glass being carried around a corner by two men.

I wasn't the only one haunted by public information films long into adulthood. In recent years, a musical sub-genre has been built around evoking their memory, centering on the label Ghostbox and artists including the Advisory Circle, author of tracks such as Mind How You Go, Everyday Hazards and Frozen Ponds. The writer Rob Young perhaps nailed the public information films' curious lasting appeal in a chapter about Ghostbox in his history of "Britain's visionary music", Electric Eden. For anyone born between 1965 and 1975, he says, they have "an effect at some primal level" because they show you "a country and an age that have now disappeared, but its aural and visual traces make us realise, too late, that we were once actively living there ourselves". You can say that again: in 1979, the COI produced a series of films starring Roy Kinnear, urging people who still had outside toilets or washed in a tin bath in front of the fire to get a council grant for indoor plumbing. Outside toilets and tin baths! In 1979! The year of Rapper's Delight and Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Are 'Friends' Electric? by Tubeway Army!

It's a time that's gone, and now too has the COI. You can only hope that, as a result of this government cutback, Britain isn't swept by a wave of fatalities involving bare wires jammed into plug sockets with matchsticks and rugs left on polished wood floors. We'll have to manage without their guidance: unlike The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, they won't be back-ack-ack-ack.