The Public Information Film - or PIF as connoisseurs like to abbreviate it - is a particular fetish of the musical genre known as hauntology (think labels like Ghost Box, artists like Moon Wiring Club and Pye Audio Corner). Particularly in its U.K. manifestations, the PIF activates the memory’s equivalent to erogenous zones (elegiac zones?). A typical example – e.g. “Lonely Water,” a baleful warning about the dangers to kids posed by stagnant ponds and deceptively deep streams, with Donald Pleasence speaking the voice-over as “the spirit of dark and lonely water” - blends Hammer House of Horror and the pedagogic aura of educational films. The creaky low-budget production values, the vintage aura of ageing film stock, and the queasy-listening melancholia of the library music scores, all create a powerful sensation of time travel – at least for those who remember them from their 1970s or 1980s childhoods. In 2010, the BFI invited leading hauntologists Mordant Music to rescore a bunch of PIFs from the archives of the Central Office of Information. “Illusions”, the highlight of the resulting MisInformation DVD, must have already been a pretty disquieting film even before Mordant wrapped its uniquely musty sound around the scenes of solvent-abusing kids skulking around abandoned lots and dismal patches of urban greenery. But combined with Mordant’s dank ambient vapors and shivers of reverb, the images of spotty, zombie-eyed boys huffing fixatedly from plastic baggies full of waxy-yellow glue linger long in the mind.