When the Transport Accident Commission got started with its television advertising in 1989, its approach was one of unrelenting realism. The pseudo-documentary format of earlier entries like "Girlfriend" and "Beach Road" swiftly evolved into the more salacious shocks of "Darren" and "Fireball", which sought to recreate the sensation of being inside a doomed vehicle moments before a crash, causing the viewer to feel less flies on the wall than active participants in scenarios destined to end in tragedy. The emphasis was squarely on the raw immediacy of those life-changing accidents, and on pinpointing the moment at which we'd slipped past the point of no return and were left to soak in the harrowing realisation that, for the persons involved, things were never going to be the same again. But even the most audacious of formulas can only retain their teeth for so long. Numerous variations and countless psychologically scarred Victorians later, and TAC felt that a fresh angle was in order to complement the emerging millennium. "Haunted" from 2005 shows a dramatic shift from the shock-driven tactics of those earlier campaigns, with an approach that leaned more toward the spirit of the UK's "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Live" series, where emphasis tended to rest less on the accident itself than on the longer term fall-out - in this case, the very longer term. "Haunted" is impressively ambitious in its narrative scope, telling a story that spans multiple decades and demonstrates the bitter extent to which a single failure to heed your responsibilities as a driver can recolour your entire existence, if not necessarily as conspicuously as you might imagine. It seeks to address the very question that was explicitly raised by Ken Stott's character at the end of "Fireman's Story", but was there treated as defying any kind of comprehensible answer - how does a drink driver get on with life whilst having to accommodate the knowledge that their foolish actions brought fatal consequences? Even if you are able to maintain the guise of normalcy going forward, is it not the kind of thing that would be perpetually tearing you up inside?
"Haunted" makes for a fascinating comparison with "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives", since it does the one thing that campaign seemed determined to avoid, and does it very effectively - it has you sympathising fundamentally with the perpetrator. This was a perspective largely downplayed in D&DWL, where PIFs centring on the consequences for the drink driver were either about the immediate horrors of being booked for an offence and becoming the most hated person in the room ("Arrest") or filtered through snapshots of the broken innocence for which they were accountable ("Kathy" and "Eyes"). The drink driver was usually the incorporeal boogeyman, and rarely humanised ("Mates", one of the few specimens in which we actually got to meet them in the flesh, had them depicted as a snivelling wimp, not unlike the bloody idiot seen staggering about the hospital corridors in "Girlfriend"). They are, naturally, the antagonists of these equations, with the traditional route being to regard them as objects of contempt (something still manifest in the uncompromising campaign tagline), but the stance taken by "Haunted' is nevertheless a valid one - we do need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes, and appreciate how their lives could so easily become our own if we were to make the same mistakes. In "Haunted" we find ourselves immersed in the world of the perpetrator to the point of entrapment. The claustrophobic cruelties of being wedged inside a steel box hurtling along on a collision course are supplanted with the equally horrifying experience of being stranded inside the head of a man whose outlook has been irrecoverably altered by an ill-advised decision he made at an earlier junction in life, when he hadn't grasped how easy it was to go over the alcohol limit. We get something resembling DETR's "What's It Like?" campaign, with its nightmarish impressions of the offender's inner turmoil, but from a more narrative-driven angle.
"Haunted" follows a man named Chris from his early 30s into the later stages of middle age, all throughout which he is persistently troubled by visions of a mysterious boy in an ominous black shirt. Chris gets older, while the boy stays the same age. A subtext of child neglect seems to intermittently suggest itself (Chris's initial reluctance to acknowledge the boy, the lack of a shoe on the boy's left foot), raising the possibility that the boy might be the childhood Chris, or an abandoned son from a prior relationship. It is evident that the boy's appearances represent intrusions on Chris's life within the present, reminders of a past that he would sooner leave behind, but remains beleaguered by. A flashback eventually reveals the identity of the boy - he was the victim of a road accident that Chris caused in his early 20s, when he got behind the wheel after drinking a couple of beers, something that he hadn't considered a huge deal until was faced with the worst possible outcome and blood on his hands. The boy's metaphorical ghost has attached himself to Chris ever since, ready to make himself known whenever Chris gets a little too comfortable in the here and now.
The short works as well as it does, in part, for the lack of any really overt drama outside of the flashback sequence, and even that is handled with a healthy degree of moderation - the featured scenario is similar to that of "Beach Road", with the paramedics trying unsuccessfully to revive the boy while Chris is questioned, only minus the presence of any distraught relatives, a move that allows the emphasis to be purely on Chris's horror. On the surface, the Chris of the present appears to be leading a normal and positive life. What the consequences of his drinking driving incident were from a strictly legal standpoint we do not learn, but they are seemingly behind him. He now has a job and a couple of kids of his own, with whom he shares a visibly loving bond. He hasn't completely gone to pieces in the aftermath, but holding it together underneath remains an unending struggle for him. Initially, I did wonder if there was any significance to his riding a bus instead of driving in the present, although I suspect that the purpose of that scene was to show Chris as an active member of a community whilst illustrating the extent of his isolation. Awareness of the boy's omnipresence is a burden that he alone has to carry. There are intermittent hints that its weight may be placing a strain on his relationships, most notably in a shot that shows the boy lying in bed between Chris and his wife, who are both facing in opposite directions - although, having said that, Chris is still wearing a wedding ring in the final sequence, so I don't think the implication is that it literally drove them apart. Rather, the physical separation emphasises how intrinsically alone Chris is in his suffering, even when surrounded by other people. Those close to him might well be aware of his past, but that grief and personal accountability is not something in which they can actually share.
For Chris, life must go on, but a part of himself has certainly died at the scene of the accident, while the anonymous kid has acquired a kind of ghoulish immortality, as the unabating shadow to Chris's emotional state. Chris is locked into the horror of that terrible moment when the boy was declared dead; in a powerful stylistic touch, the present day is depicted in predominantly gloomy, storm cloud-ridden tones, in contrast to the overwhelming brightness of the flashback, firmly established as the incident that overshadows and defines all else. In a way, the boy does represent the younger Chris, in becoming a symbol for their mutually extinguished vitality. The kid is unable to progress any further, while the ageing Chris is unable to fully embrace the life right in front of him, so that even an occasion as ostensibly joyous as his daughter's wedding is undercut by his self-doubts. In the full version (see below) we hear a reference to the speech Chris is due to deliver as the father of the bride, and sense that he perhaps sees himself as a fraud, in being called upon to toast the future that he feels he has already cancelled. The film has a cyclic narrative, closing as it began with Chris, now in his 60s, standing alone out of doors with only his memories, the pain of which has clearly not dulled over time. The final shots within the present are set against a darkening evening sky, indicating that there's little prospect of alleviation from his demons.
I would rate "Haunted" as one of TAC's most affecting pieces. The balance of realism with more abstract storytelling is infinitely more successful than in "Glasses", and it builds up a convincingly intimate portrait of Chris as a genial guy paying for a single mistake from which there is unfortunately no going back. Of note is that the film exists in two versions, one two minutes in length, the other trimmed down to just 60 seconds. The version uploaded to TAC's official YouTube channel is the shorter of the two, and completely omits a sequence where Chris is seen in his kitchen preparing lunch for his own children, as well as other small touches like the paramedics laying the deceased boy's shirt back over his chest.
Interestingly, toward the tail-end of the decade the UK had "Live With It", an anti-speeding PIF from THINK! with a near-identical premise, although the execution was markedly dissimilar. I wouldn't say that it in any way eclipsed the sombre potency of "Haunted", but for what it's worth it stands out as one of the better THINK! entries, proof that a compelling premise can come in multiple flavours (although in this case always some variation on grim).