Apaches was shot fast on a Home Counties farm in February 1977, twenty-six minutes long, six children from a Maidenhead junior school cast as themselves. The Health and Safety Executive had counted around thirty children killed in farm accidents the year before, and commissioned the Central Office of Information to do something about it. What they got back was a piece of folk horror with the BFI's catalogue number attached.

John Mackenzie directed it, three years before The Long Good Friday. Neville Smith wrote it. Phil Méheux shot it. The production values were below Poverty Row, the slurry pit was real, and the title sequence used the Playbill typeface from Stagecoach. Six children play cowboys and Indians on a working farm. Five never get home.

The deaths are not edited around. Kim falls from a tractor and is run over. Tom slips into a slurry pit, which is liquefied cow excrement, and goes under. Sharon drinks chemicals from an unmarked bottle while pretending it is alcohol, and dies in the night, screaming, off-camera, while her parents stand in the bedroom doorway. Robert is crushed by a gate that Michael has knocked over. Danny, the narrator, crashes a tractor into a ditch and goes through the windscreen. Michael, the cousin, the one who knocked the gate, is the only child left alive at the end.

Danny narrates the film after he is dead. This is the part that does the damage. He is calm, almost pleased, walking us through what we have just watched, while his family arrives for what he calls a party. We see the table laid for the wake, the sandwiches under cling film, the relatives in their dark clothes. The film does not break the spell to tell you Danny is wrong about the party. It lets him keep talking. The register is wrong in a way that only an English public information film could get wrong on purpose.

The COI made dozens of these. Most have curdled into nostalgia, a YouTube reel of teatime menaces. Apaches has not. It still plays as something a state did to its children with a clear budget line and a director's chair and a clapperboard. It was shown in schools all over Britain, broadcast by ITV companies on slow Sunday afternoons, and exported to Canada, Australia, and the United States. Prints kept being struck on 16mm long after every other PIF had been retired to videotape.

The strangeness is not that it is grim. Plenty of films are grim. The strangeness is the genre confusion, a western-themed death drama wearing the costume of a teaching aid. The form is didactic. The content is folk horror. The narrator is dead. The accidents are the point. There is no third-act reveal where the children turn out to have been spared, no closing title card that softens the lesson. The lesson is the deaths, and the deaths are filmed with the patience of someone who already knows how they end.

If you grew up rural and were shown this in a darkened school hall, you remember it. If you grew up urban and never saw it, you might wonder how a country could decide that scaring children to death was the responsible choice. Both reactions are correct.

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