A new BFI collection shows how the government used to terrify us into doing the right thing, but those days of trust are gone

Volcanic explosions send rocks flying into the air. “There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all,” intones John Hurt’s voiceover. Black rocks tumble down a cliff. “It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.” This is the beginning of Monolith, the infamous public information film made to highlight the Aids epidemic in 1986. The doom-filled climax is a bouquet of white lilies tossed on to a fallen tombstone. The government spent £20m on the campaign, including £5m on its TV adverts.

Those were the days: authoritative, unambiguous, utterly terrifying information films, distributed nationally to mitigate impending catastrophe. They haven’t made them like that since 2012, when the coalition government closed down the Central Office of Information (COI). Given the current government’s threadbare, often muddled messaging on what to do about Covid-19, you wonder how different things might have been.

Public service film-making began earlier but it was the COI, established in 1946, that produced the most memorable films. Some are wry comedies (Richard Massingham’s Coughs and Sneezes deserves a rerelease); others are bizarrely obscure. “Have you ever fallen out of an aeroplane? Consider how awkward this could be,” begins 1965’s Dressed for Drowning. And many are stark mini-horror classics, designed to induce fear and paranoia. As the BFI’s new Blu-ray compilation of COI films shows, danger was everywhere in the 60s and 70s: roads, parks, building sites, railway lines, homes. Sometimes it was symbolically implied with dropped foodstuffs. Often it was depicted more graphically: as in 1977 shocker Apaches, where some youngsters meet gruesome farmyard accidents; or 1973’s Lonely Water, with Donald Pleasence’s Grim Reaper luring kids to watery deaths like a junior Don’t Look Now.

As well as scaring the populace, the COI also provided opportunities for up-and-coming film-makers. Apaches was directed by John “The Long Good Friday” Mackenzie, for example. Other COI veterans include Peter Greenaway, animators Halas & Batchelor, Lindsay Anderson. The Aids tombstone ad was directed by Nicolas Roeg.

Given the industry’s current paralysis, perhaps today’s film-makers could be put to use? Surely they could do better than the government’s blandly informative online clips, which feature no children falling into ponds to speak of. Then again, if there were a well-organised government information campaign, would we trust it? It would doubtless be dismissed by some as “fake news”. Perhaps with good reason. Effective as it was, the Monolith ad associated Aids with sexual activity, saying nothing about contaminated blood. Perhaps what really killed the public information film was not the funding but the trust in government it depended on.