Post by hyperthermal on Aug 18, 2016 13:46:13 GMT -6
Notice: This was originally posted on TooSpooky, and may or may not be a work in progress. I would like to improve this story as much as I can.
We all know about the universally loved Public Service Announcements. Educational entertainment is nothing new, with the invention of counting likely being born of bored cavemen trying to pass the time between hunting gathering expeditions, all the way to relatively recent television shows such as Sesame Street. But while the antics of a felt vampire compulsively shouting out numbers can be a strangely helpful way for children to remember sequential pattering, the “scare ‘em straight” methodology of PSAs leaves emotional impacts rather than factual ones. Many people remember the infuriation they’ve felt from being told lies about house hippos; the awkward comedy of PeeWee Herman explaining, both in character and within the confines of the most sinister looking set, the dangers of cocaine; or the simple confusion of the human brain to egg analogy. But over all of these memories, the ones that stick out the most to people are the ones that go for an all-out horrifying feeling, giving the impression that a good majority of PSAs made are barely television safe excuses for horror, regardless of actual statistics.
The most recent PSA I’ve seen certainly did go for a horror feeling, but the subject matter (the importance of keeping food allergies in check) was portrayed realistically and tamely. But a lot of the other television spots that wind up on top ten lists are outright malicious and confusing. Nothing was off limits, from those warnings about workplace accidents that show graphic death and mutilation (either pre or posthumously), body horror of drug users melting, entire picnics of children being killed in an auto accident, and so on. At best, the underlying message of these are completely lost under the shocking imagery, as if made by an inhuman being trying to understand and protect human reality. At worst, the message is completely warped, seeming more like a threat than an attempt to keep people safe. The prime example of this being that infamous “No pressure” environmentalism campaign, where people are graphically and sadistically ruptured into blood and viscera, including children. When pressed, the group that made this PSA said that they thought the idea would be funny. Funny.
If there is one thing my mind is thankful for, the HAVOC PSAs fall under the category of being misguided and confusing, rather than being directly born from a place of malice. Not many people I’ve spoken to seem to really remember these commercials, but there are a few friends and peers who remembered pieces of their decade long campaign. These announcements must have also been entirely focused in the local area in which I lived, because no footage of these have made their way onto sites like YouTube or DailyMotion, at least not yet. If they do manage to be uploaded, I would like to believe that you would be able to tell that these are the real deal: as muddled as the underlying messages may be, there was a strange finesse and craft towards the cinematography, with nearly all shots being perfectly composed and engaging. The acting and gory special effects, to be polite at the expense of being truly descriptive, left a lot to be desired. This combination of excellence and rookie mistakes, the contrast of the real, the unreal, and the bizarre, gives all of these commercials a timeless, dreamlike quality, yet thinking about them after having seen them recalls them perfectly, shot for shot, in your mind’s eye.
The earliest commercial I know about aired from the early to mid-nineties, and you can tell from the first shot alone. The scene was inside of a school bus, with the expected ambience mixed in with a goofy attempt at a hip hop instrumental. The focus of this shot was a particularly “nerdy” looking kid, with thick glasses, freckles, and a smile that accentuated buck teeth. The film itself has a minor golden tint that makes it look particularly ancient. This first shot lasts for just under a second, using a dolly set up to zoom in on this nerdy kid’s face as he says “I got beef.” While this means that someone is holding onto a deep seated bitterness and hatred in the parlance of our times, the context of this commercial made it seem that the writers and director were under the impression that it was the hip new nineties way to claim dibs. The next shot was behind the kid’s shoulder, showing the front seats of the bus, indicating that he wanted to claim a seat closer to the front once his stop comes up. There was a nineties style “zany” zoom in, taking a noticeable Dutch angle toward the end. There were two other kids in the other seats toward the front, neither of which seemed to be particularly noteworthy, and the bus’s driver.
Child focused media in the nineties tended to portray figures of authority as bumbling, incompetent villains, and this bus driver was no exception. His lanky body was twisted and bunched up over the wheel, his face was narrow, and he had on his best defeated, pouty look. I tend to think that there is “beef” between this driver and the nerdy kid whenever I think back on this commercial, a beef big enough for it to be a syndicated child’s television show. The next shot was from in front of the driver’s left shoulder, but the focus was on the bus’s sliding doorway, and the other school bus that was driving alongside it. A crooked and sour glee overtook the driver’s face, the hip hop music stops abruptly, and he declared to himself and the audience, “I’ll show those little brats. Besides, it’s always funny when somebody dies!” With a failed attempt at comedic timing, the driver sharply twisted the steering wheel clockwise, in an attempt to use the forces of sudden speed and inertia to hurl the kids out of the doors and windows.
The buses collided, indicated by a quick shot of the bus’s interior with the frame quaking about, an admittedly subtle and effective attempt to hide the fact that no buses actually made contact. A split second of stock children screaming played right before a quick cut to an obvious manikin. It was meant to be one of the kids at the front, despite the thick winter clothing not resembling anything the three wore, or even suitable for the time of year the outdoors looked from the final few shots of the commercial. The first of the three children shown was one of the two who sat at the front, a boy who had bright ginger hair. The camera was at ground level, and the ginger was in the exact center of the shot, reclined backwards, hand outstretched in a futile attempt to stop the neighboring bus shown earlier. They did not have the budget or know how to make the scene look as threatening as it was intended to be; the bus was driving forward slowly, and before the next cut, clearly slowed down to a halt. The second child shown was the other front-seater, a young, dark skinned boy, sitting on the sidewalk. He was supposed to have a broken leg, but the effect used was an obvious prosthetic that was lying on top of his real leg. “Help!” he shouted out, with as much conviction and pain that you would expect a child actor to express on a first take, “My leg’s broken! Please get help and alert my mom and father!”
Finally, the PSA ends on a shot of the nerdy kid, who was launched past the sidewalk and into a small stream. The camera slowly dollied out, a strange bookend to the very first scene. He was sitting upright, clutching onto his eyes as if to indicate a grievous ocular injury, but his acting only made it look like he was counting for a game of hide and seek, or as if he were silently sobbing. There was no sound in this shot, no music, nothing but the whine of television dead air and the visual of the nerdy kid alone. There was a fade to black, and soon after, “HAVOC” faded in with stark white lettering. Sound was supposed to cut in, a deep voice simply saying the word “Havoc”, but due to an editing error, only the “HAV” is heard before the abrupt interruption of the next commercial. The commercial was around 36 seconds, and was the HAVOC PSA that I’ve seen most frequently while watching television as a child.
There were at least three other HAVOC commercials in this time period, though all of them were incredibly short. One that was aired around evenings was taken in a single shot, the camera angled as if it were taking in security footage despite being the same quality of camera as the first commercial. The commercial showed an outdoor swimming pool at a hotel, and a fully dressed woman stood ten feet in front of the pool, with her back to the camera. After a second and a half, the woman spontaneously combusted, and an ill-fitting stock scream sound plays, that of a man’s voice yelping out in small bursts. The woman instantly charged toward the pool, but even after submerging herself, you could see that she was still immolated underneath the smoke and the water. The footage again fades to black, and HAVOC’s logo shows up in the blackness. The deep voice from earlier started at a more fitting time. “You never know when it will strike,” he says, “HAVOC.”
This other one I have only seen once, but some others I’ve spoken to seem to remember seeing it a lot more often. It focused on a hand puppet, a particularly manic looking one that was clearly meant to be endearing, but details like the eyes were rushed. It began this commercial by calmly addressing the audience. “Sometimes your parents do a lot of work outside,” it says, “and while it might be nice to lend a hand, there are some things they do that aren’t safe for kids.” The puppet shuffled over to an actual wood chipper, quickly flicked a switch, and spoke one last time. “Don’t try this at home,” it said, “I’ll show you why.” A shot similar to the manikin shot from the school bus advert showed the puppet, entirely empty, flying through the air as if it were tossed by an offscreen hand. The PSA ended with the end of the wood chipper spewing out cotton and cloth into the air, and the bare arm of the offscreen puppeteer shown lying on the ground. Over the image of this hand, the white “HAVOC” text appears over the screen.
The last of these super short ones I have not managed to see in its entirety, only seeing the last shot that fades to the white on black calling card. In fairness to a friend of mine who swore up and down that this was played on TV all the time, I will describe what I remember them telling me. This PSA would play most often during nature shows and documentaries with extreme precision. An older child was shown outside, observing the different wonders of suburban nature. His attention is soon grabbed by a branch snap, a dull thud, and a few birds flying off. The kid inspected the spot, and a fake, injured squirrel is on the ground, chittering in pain. The boy grabbed the squirrel, this time an actual, and thankfully unharmed living specimen, and the deep voiced narrator chimed in. “Billy is a kind hearted person, and loves to keep nature protected,” he says smoothly, “But he should’ve called for help from experts, and inform others of his whereabouts in the case of an accident.” Billy, as he was called, “crammed” the squirrel into his eye in an obviously sped up scene, the sound of a strongman kneading the inside of a watermelon loudly played as he did so. Billy slumped dead onto the grassy ground, the eye in which he put the squirrel being covered by a seamless make up effect that gave the impression of never having an eye socket there in the first place, only plain skin. His unafflicted eye was kept wide open. And then, the HAVOC ending title.
I have no concrete information about the HAVOC Corporation, as it were, but one thing that I assume is that they’ve always had funding and budgetary problems. Possibly one of their lowest points in their history, the late nineties and the advent of popular internet, is their second pool focused commercial. Many lunch breaks in middle school were spent with some close friends, referencing this commercial that was just so poorly made and nonsensical, evolving into different in-jokes until very few of my group even remember the source of these jokes. Of course, this second commercial took place at a pool, the same pool from the spontaneous combustion short. A cozy looking elderly couple sat on the smooth concrete floor next to the pool, with plates full of stereotypical breakfast meals on the ground and in their laps. One of them, a tall, bald, and partially wrinkled old man gets onto his feet, saying that he needs to go grab “the salt and the condiment.” He walked over to a multicolored parasol, and during a pedestrian shot where his partner, an old lady wearing flowery, cream colored clothes, you could see him twirling it aimlessly out of focus.
The old man stumbled back to their makeshift picnic, but one of his steps triggered an offscreen device. There was a quick shot of one of the plates, with a generic over easy egg and a fork. The egg and the fork are yanked off of the plate, obviously due to whatever trap the old gentleman had triggered, and there is yet another cut to the upper body of the man. The fork was supposedly jammed into his left eye socket, with the egg skewered between the silverware and the skull. The old man turned slightly as he fell, revealing the other end of the fork, unconvincingly taped on and wiggling about loosely. The limp body splashed into the pool’s water, and sank down into a round and inexplicable bottomless hole. The woman jolted onto her knees, crying out “Ron!” She leaned over the water, and began to call out for what only the director could construe as help, “His full name is Robert! Look him up on Google!” The title card showed up after a pitiful attempt at a fade, the footage of the woman peering into the pool being tugged and warped around. Victorious music, distorted like it was on an inconsistent record player, sent off the PSA.
What was probably the death knell of this campaign was the evacuation announcement. This one stands out from the others, lacking whatever craft and handmade charm the previous efforts had. This time, it started with the HAVOC title card, and fades to cheap stock footage of a calendar and computers, playing off of the Y2K fears of the time. Ariel font faded in, like this one commercial was made in Windows Movie Maker. The message read “Remember your routes in caThe case of an Emargency!” as footage of war bombings and H bomb tests were cut in. You could hear the sound recording of Herbert Morrison’s infamous weeping of “Oh the humanity!” during the Hindenburg tragedy, though distorted and slowed down. The screen went blue, and more Ariel text read “Avoid nuclear fallout, you don’t want to look like this!” “This” is a scene directly from the Australian horror film “Body Melt”, specifically the moment where the villainous doctor character walks into a home, and encounters a victim of his experimental medicine. The man’s face was partially melted, his eyes bulging out, and the nose and mouth region melted and peeled away, revealing his gums and jawbone. I’m assuming that the main reason this caused the company trouble was primarily the illegal usage of copyrighted film material, not so much the content itself.
HAVOC disappeared from the air waves for five years, whatever damage or influence it may have done long since forgotten by my small community, and never even heard of by the rest of the world at large. Even I forgot about this organization during this period, until I saw their “reboot” while watching sitcom reruns on cable during a boring 2005 summer. Their equipment for filming had improved with technology, but the clean cinematography and surreal direction were still present. The golden, nostalgic tint was replaced with a blue, clinical ambiance, and the set was dark and foggy, with pale walls serving as contrast. The PSA featured a teenager light a match casually, and then blowing it out after a moment of inaction. He discarded it, but of course, there was still some heat coming from it, which ignited a rope. This rope was the beginning of a diabolical Rube Goldberg machine, and the teen knew this. He rushed down a pale walkway, but it was too late for him. The last mechanism was activated, and a hefty typewriter was catapulted into the back of his skull. He was decapitated, a poorly green screened head flying off with the same stock sound that played when the old man was impaled by his fork. A dummy head splashed into water, and that obsidian calling card faded in. “HAVOC,” says the familiar, deep voiced, narrator, “You never know when you’ll go.” There was something off about the voice, this time though: the audio was higher quality, and strange clicks could be heard mingling with the voice.
The HAVOC Reboot PSAs were short lived, I believe, with only two TV spots being produced and aired during the years of 2004 and 2005. I suppose the director wanted to end with a finale, so this final commercial was the most somber, a look back at what was done, and in my eyes, a confession. The scene was a morgue, clinically blue. The camera dollied into a familiar face: it was the nerdy kid from that very first school bus PSA. The actor playing him was a decade older, and was in simple makeup that gave the impression of him being a cadaver. The frame pans to the right, and next to him you could see the actor who played Billy in the animal safety video. As his face was going off the screen, the nerdy kid broke his role, he failed to stifle in a laugh, possibly someone off camera doing hijinks, or he was remembering his “I got beef” line. Next to the perfectly intact Billy was the teen who was struck by a typewriter, yet he was not decapitated, nor were there any indications of such. Then followed what I assume was the woman from the spontaneous combustion advert, her pale dead makeup being broken up by cartoonish soot all over her face. You can see a mortician partially intrude from the left of the frame, putting bodies into the bags and zipping them closed. Next to the woman was an unpainted hand, a familiar manic looking puppet wrapped to the wrist. The last two recognizable characters were the old couple. Something about them was exceptionally off putting, as if they were actual cadavers pumped with formaldehyde. But there was one last body, the only of the group that was meaningfully damaged.
The body was a man’s, the lower jaw completely gone, and the left cheek partly torn to the side. The open wounds were a pale pink, the body completely emaciated long before death. The camera dollied up close to the face, and the body’s eye lids opened up. For a moment, you could see the milky white, shriveled orbs inside, until they were pushed back in by bizarre, twitching blue rods with rounded black tips. These rods stuck out from just under the upper eyelid, and seemed to swivel and fixate on the camera. I swear that I caught some glimpses of the body’s neck bulging, an unseen form pushing from within, and a slimy, deep blue string curiously poking around from the torn open jaw. The mortician walks behind the body, their head off of the frame, and places the torn out jaw back into place. I saw more hints of blue behind the sides of the jaw as it straightened into place. The body laid like that for an eternal moment, the blue rods still gazing through the camera’s lens. The jaw began to move, like an animatronic, and the only sound of the commercial plays in sync with its movement. It was that narrator’s voice, except the clicking from before was more pronounced, like it was part of the voice. “HAVOC,” it said. The PSA cut to black, taking up almost as much time as the actual content, until finally, a regular car sale commercial mercifully cut in on cue.
It has been so long since any of these have come into my mind. I don’t even remember how I felt during the sendoff announcement, I can only remember the imagery. Months ago, I had a horrible dream that brought all of this back into the forefront of my mind. The details I cannot quite remember, as with most dreams, but I can remember what I saw before I was drawn out of sleep. Blue rods, six of them, were pointed at my face. They were stubby, twitchy, and only parts of a whole. They were slowly drifting away. That deep voice, more clicks than voice now, desperately called out with that line I used to find so funny long ago, “Google me.” Needless to say, I did, and I cannot find anything related to these PSAs at all. I’m going to stop being polite for a little bit here: I’m pissed off, fucking frustrated and confused. I’m reaching out because lurking is not even an option anymore, there just isn’t anything about HAVOC online. The only testimonies I have are my own, and some of my friends. The local TV broadcasters don’t even have any solid logs of them, having all possible appearances being generically labeled as “PUBLIC SERVICE”, which could honestly be anything. You might think that these PSAs are funny, or they’re stupid, or needlessly cruel, and that could all be true. But there is an underlying message to them that are muddled up by their own attempts to stand out, and these directors deserve to have their thoughts be known.
The most recent PSA I’ve seen certainly did go for a horror feeling, but the subject matter (the importance of keeping food allergies in check) was portrayed realistically and tamely. But a lot of the other television spots that wind up on top ten lists are outright malicious and confusing. Nothing was off limits, from those warnings about workplace accidents that show graphic death and mutilation (either pre or posthumously), body horror of drug users melting, entire picnics of children being killed in an auto accident, and so on. At best, the underlying message of these are completely lost under the shocking imagery, as if made by an inhuman being trying to understand and protect human reality. At worst, the message is completely warped, seeming more like a threat than an attempt to keep people safe. The prime example of this being that infamous “No pressure” environmentalism campaign, where people are graphically and sadistically ruptured into blood and viscera, including children. When pressed, the group that made this PSA said that they thought the idea would be funny. Funny.
If there is one thing my mind is thankful for, the HAVOC PSAs fall under the category of being misguided and confusing, rather than being directly born from a place of malice. Not many people I’ve spoken to seem to really remember these commercials, but there are a few friends and peers who remembered pieces of their decade long campaign. These announcements must have also been entirely focused in the local area in which I lived, because no footage of these have made their way onto sites like YouTube or DailyMotion, at least not yet. If they do manage to be uploaded, I would like to believe that you would be able to tell that these are the real deal: as muddled as the underlying messages may be, there was a strange finesse and craft towards the cinematography, with nearly all shots being perfectly composed and engaging. The acting and gory special effects, to be polite at the expense of being truly descriptive, left a lot to be desired. This combination of excellence and rookie mistakes, the contrast of the real, the unreal, and the bizarre, gives all of these commercials a timeless, dreamlike quality, yet thinking about them after having seen them recalls them perfectly, shot for shot, in your mind’s eye.
The earliest commercial I know about aired from the early to mid-nineties, and you can tell from the first shot alone. The scene was inside of a school bus, with the expected ambience mixed in with a goofy attempt at a hip hop instrumental. The focus of this shot was a particularly “nerdy” looking kid, with thick glasses, freckles, and a smile that accentuated buck teeth. The film itself has a minor golden tint that makes it look particularly ancient. This first shot lasts for just under a second, using a dolly set up to zoom in on this nerdy kid’s face as he says “I got beef.” While this means that someone is holding onto a deep seated bitterness and hatred in the parlance of our times, the context of this commercial made it seem that the writers and director were under the impression that it was the hip new nineties way to claim dibs. The next shot was behind the kid’s shoulder, showing the front seats of the bus, indicating that he wanted to claim a seat closer to the front once his stop comes up. There was a nineties style “zany” zoom in, taking a noticeable Dutch angle toward the end. There were two other kids in the other seats toward the front, neither of which seemed to be particularly noteworthy, and the bus’s driver.
Child focused media in the nineties tended to portray figures of authority as bumbling, incompetent villains, and this bus driver was no exception. His lanky body was twisted and bunched up over the wheel, his face was narrow, and he had on his best defeated, pouty look. I tend to think that there is “beef” between this driver and the nerdy kid whenever I think back on this commercial, a beef big enough for it to be a syndicated child’s television show. The next shot was from in front of the driver’s left shoulder, but the focus was on the bus’s sliding doorway, and the other school bus that was driving alongside it. A crooked and sour glee overtook the driver’s face, the hip hop music stops abruptly, and he declared to himself and the audience, “I’ll show those little brats. Besides, it’s always funny when somebody dies!” With a failed attempt at comedic timing, the driver sharply twisted the steering wheel clockwise, in an attempt to use the forces of sudden speed and inertia to hurl the kids out of the doors and windows.
The buses collided, indicated by a quick shot of the bus’s interior with the frame quaking about, an admittedly subtle and effective attempt to hide the fact that no buses actually made contact. A split second of stock children screaming played right before a quick cut to an obvious manikin. It was meant to be one of the kids at the front, despite the thick winter clothing not resembling anything the three wore, or even suitable for the time of year the outdoors looked from the final few shots of the commercial. The first of the three children shown was one of the two who sat at the front, a boy who had bright ginger hair. The camera was at ground level, and the ginger was in the exact center of the shot, reclined backwards, hand outstretched in a futile attempt to stop the neighboring bus shown earlier. They did not have the budget or know how to make the scene look as threatening as it was intended to be; the bus was driving forward slowly, and before the next cut, clearly slowed down to a halt. The second child shown was the other front-seater, a young, dark skinned boy, sitting on the sidewalk. He was supposed to have a broken leg, but the effect used was an obvious prosthetic that was lying on top of his real leg. “Help!” he shouted out, with as much conviction and pain that you would expect a child actor to express on a first take, “My leg’s broken! Please get help and alert my mom and father!”
Finally, the PSA ends on a shot of the nerdy kid, who was launched past the sidewalk and into a small stream. The camera slowly dollied out, a strange bookend to the very first scene. He was sitting upright, clutching onto his eyes as if to indicate a grievous ocular injury, but his acting only made it look like he was counting for a game of hide and seek, or as if he were silently sobbing. There was no sound in this shot, no music, nothing but the whine of television dead air and the visual of the nerdy kid alone. There was a fade to black, and soon after, “HAVOC” faded in with stark white lettering. Sound was supposed to cut in, a deep voice simply saying the word “Havoc”, but due to an editing error, only the “HAV” is heard before the abrupt interruption of the next commercial. The commercial was around 36 seconds, and was the HAVOC PSA that I’ve seen most frequently while watching television as a child.
There were at least three other HAVOC commercials in this time period, though all of them were incredibly short. One that was aired around evenings was taken in a single shot, the camera angled as if it were taking in security footage despite being the same quality of camera as the first commercial. The commercial showed an outdoor swimming pool at a hotel, and a fully dressed woman stood ten feet in front of the pool, with her back to the camera. After a second and a half, the woman spontaneously combusted, and an ill-fitting stock scream sound plays, that of a man’s voice yelping out in small bursts. The woman instantly charged toward the pool, but even after submerging herself, you could see that she was still immolated underneath the smoke and the water. The footage again fades to black, and HAVOC’s logo shows up in the blackness. The deep voice from earlier started at a more fitting time. “You never know when it will strike,” he says, “HAVOC.”
This other one I have only seen once, but some others I’ve spoken to seem to remember seeing it a lot more often. It focused on a hand puppet, a particularly manic looking one that was clearly meant to be endearing, but details like the eyes were rushed. It began this commercial by calmly addressing the audience. “Sometimes your parents do a lot of work outside,” it says, “and while it might be nice to lend a hand, there are some things they do that aren’t safe for kids.” The puppet shuffled over to an actual wood chipper, quickly flicked a switch, and spoke one last time. “Don’t try this at home,” it said, “I’ll show you why.” A shot similar to the manikin shot from the school bus advert showed the puppet, entirely empty, flying through the air as if it were tossed by an offscreen hand. The PSA ended with the end of the wood chipper spewing out cotton and cloth into the air, and the bare arm of the offscreen puppeteer shown lying on the ground. Over the image of this hand, the white “HAVOC” text appears over the screen.
The last of these super short ones I have not managed to see in its entirety, only seeing the last shot that fades to the white on black calling card. In fairness to a friend of mine who swore up and down that this was played on TV all the time, I will describe what I remember them telling me. This PSA would play most often during nature shows and documentaries with extreme precision. An older child was shown outside, observing the different wonders of suburban nature. His attention is soon grabbed by a branch snap, a dull thud, and a few birds flying off. The kid inspected the spot, and a fake, injured squirrel is on the ground, chittering in pain. The boy grabbed the squirrel, this time an actual, and thankfully unharmed living specimen, and the deep voiced narrator chimed in. “Billy is a kind hearted person, and loves to keep nature protected,” he says smoothly, “But he should’ve called for help from experts, and inform others of his whereabouts in the case of an accident.” Billy, as he was called, “crammed” the squirrel into his eye in an obviously sped up scene, the sound of a strongman kneading the inside of a watermelon loudly played as he did so. Billy slumped dead onto the grassy ground, the eye in which he put the squirrel being covered by a seamless make up effect that gave the impression of never having an eye socket there in the first place, only plain skin. His unafflicted eye was kept wide open. And then, the HAVOC ending title.
I have no concrete information about the HAVOC Corporation, as it were, but one thing that I assume is that they’ve always had funding and budgetary problems. Possibly one of their lowest points in their history, the late nineties and the advent of popular internet, is their second pool focused commercial. Many lunch breaks in middle school were spent with some close friends, referencing this commercial that was just so poorly made and nonsensical, evolving into different in-jokes until very few of my group even remember the source of these jokes. Of course, this second commercial took place at a pool, the same pool from the spontaneous combustion short. A cozy looking elderly couple sat on the smooth concrete floor next to the pool, with plates full of stereotypical breakfast meals on the ground and in their laps. One of them, a tall, bald, and partially wrinkled old man gets onto his feet, saying that he needs to go grab “the salt and the condiment.” He walked over to a multicolored parasol, and during a pedestrian shot where his partner, an old lady wearing flowery, cream colored clothes, you could see him twirling it aimlessly out of focus.
The old man stumbled back to their makeshift picnic, but one of his steps triggered an offscreen device. There was a quick shot of one of the plates, with a generic over easy egg and a fork. The egg and the fork are yanked off of the plate, obviously due to whatever trap the old gentleman had triggered, and there is yet another cut to the upper body of the man. The fork was supposedly jammed into his left eye socket, with the egg skewered between the silverware and the skull. The old man turned slightly as he fell, revealing the other end of the fork, unconvincingly taped on and wiggling about loosely. The limp body splashed into the pool’s water, and sank down into a round and inexplicable bottomless hole. The woman jolted onto her knees, crying out “Ron!” She leaned over the water, and began to call out for what only the director could construe as help, “His full name is Robert! Look him up on Google!” The title card showed up after a pitiful attempt at a fade, the footage of the woman peering into the pool being tugged and warped around. Victorious music, distorted like it was on an inconsistent record player, sent off the PSA.
What was probably the death knell of this campaign was the evacuation announcement. This one stands out from the others, lacking whatever craft and handmade charm the previous efforts had. This time, it started with the HAVOC title card, and fades to cheap stock footage of a calendar and computers, playing off of the Y2K fears of the time. Ariel font faded in, like this one commercial was made in Windows Movie Maker. The message read “Remember your routes in caThe case of an Emargency!” as footage of war bombings and H bomb tests were cut in. You could hear the sound recording of Herbert Morrison’s infamous weeping of “Oh the humanity!” during the Hindenburg tragedy, though distorted and slowed down. The screen went blue, and more Ariel text read “Avoid nuclear fallout, you don’t want to look like this!” “This” is a scene directly from the Australian horror film “Body Melt”, specifically the moment where the villainous doctor character walks into a home, and encounters a victim of his experimental medicine. The man’s face was partially melted, his eyes bulging out, and the nose and mouth region melted and peeled away, revealing his gums and jawbone. I’m assuming that the main reason this caused the company trouble was primarily the illegal usage of copyrighted film material, not so much the content itself.
HAVOC disappeared from the air waves for five years, whatever damage or influence it may have done long since forgotten by my small community, and never even heard of by the rest of the world at large. Even I forgot about this organization during this period, until I saw their “reboot” while watching sitcom reruns on cable during a boring 2005 summer. Their equipment for filming had improved with technology, but the clean cinematography and surreal direction were still present. The golden, nostalgic tint was replaced with a blue, clinical ambiance, and the set was dark and foggy, with pale walls serving as contrast. The PSA featured a teenager light a match casually, and then blowing it out after a moment of inaction. He discarded it, but of course, there was still some heat coming from it, which ignited a rope. This rope was the beginning of a diabolical Rube Goldberg machine, and the teen knew this. He rushed down a pale walkway, but it was too late for him. The last mechanism was activated, and a hefty typewriter was catapulted into the back of his skull. He was decapitated, a poorly green screened head flying off with the same stock sound that played when the old man was impaled by his fork. A dummy head splashed into water, and that obsidian calling card faded in. “HAVOC,” says the familiar, deep voiced, narrator, “You never know when you’ll go.” There was something off about the voice, this time though: the audio was higher quality, and strange clicks could be heard mingling with the voice.
The HAVOC Reboot PSAs were short lived, I believe, with only two TV spots being produced and aired during the years of 2004 and 2005. I suppose the director wanted to end with a finale, so this final commercial was the most somber, a look back at what was done, and in my eyes, a confession. The scene was a morgue, clinically blue. The camera dollied into a familiar face: it was the nerdy kid from that very first school bus PSA. The actor playing him was a decade older, and was in simple makeup that gave the impression of him being a cadaver. The frame pans to the right, and next to him you could see the actor who played Billy in the animal safety video. As his face was going off the screen, the nerdy kid broke his role, he failed to stifle in a laugh, possibly someone off camera doing hijinks, or he was remembering his “I got beef” line. Next to the perfectly intact Billy was the teen who was struck by a typewriter, yet he was not decapitated, nor were there any indications of such. Then followed what I assume was the woman from the spontaneous combustion advert, her pale dead makeup being broken up by cartoonish soot all over her face. You can see a mortician partially intrude from the left of the frame, putting bodies into the bags and zipping them closed. Next to the woman was an unpainted hand, a familiar manic looking puppet wrapped to the wrist. The last two recognizable characters were the old couple. Something about them was exceptionally off putting, as if they were actual cadavers pumped with formaldehyde. But there was one last body, the only of the group that was meaningfully damaged.
The body was a man’s, the lower jaw completely gone, and the left cheek partly torn to the side. The open wounds were a pale pink, the body completely emaciated long before death. The camera dollied up close to the face, and the body’s eye lids opened up. For a moment, you could see the milky white, shriveled orbs inside, until they were pushed back in by bizarre, twitching blue rods with rounded black tips. These rods stuck out from just under the upper eyelid, and seemed to swivel and fixate on the camera. I swear that I caught some glimpses of the body’s neck bulging, an unseen form pushing from within, and a slimy, deep blue string curiously poking around from the torn open jaw. The mortician walks behind the body, their head off of the frame, and places the torn out jaw back into place. I saw more hints of blue behind the sides of the jaw as it straightened into place. The body laid like that for an eternal moment, the blue rods still gazing through the camera’s lens. The jaw began to move, like an animatronic, and the only sound of the commercial plays in sync with its movement. It was that narrator’s voice, except the clicking from before was more pronounced, like it was part of the voice. “HAVOC,” it said. The PSA cut to black, taking up almost as much time as the actual content, until finally, a regular car sale commercial mercifully cut in on cue.
It has been so long since any of these have come into my mind. I don’t even remember how I felt during the sendoff announcement, I can only remember the imagery. Months ago, I had a horrible dream that brought all of this back into the forefront of my mind. The details I cannot quite remember, as with most dreams, but I can remember what I saw before I was drawn out of sleep. Blue rods, six of them, were pointed at my face. They were stubby, twitchy, and only parts of a whole. They were slowly drifting away. That deep voice, more clicks than voice now, desperately called out with that line I used to find so funny long ago, “Google me.” Needless to say, I did, and I cannot find anything related to these PSAs at all. I’m going to stop being polite for a little bit here: I’m pissed off, fucking frustrated and confused. I’m reaching out because lurking is not even an option anymore, there just isn’t anything about HAVOC online. The only testimonies I have are my own, and some of my friends. The local TV broadcasters don’t even have any solid logs of them, having all possible appearances being generically labeled as “PUBLIC SERVICE”, which could honestly be anything. You might think that these PSAs are funny, or they’re stupid, or needlessly cruel, and that could all be true. But there is an underlying message to them that are muddled up by their own attempts to stand out, and these directors deserve to have their thoughts be known.
