One thing that kids of The Haunted Generation era are all agreed on is that TV adverts were often terrifying or plain creepy – even when advertizing the most mundane kinds of products. The particularly eerie adverts for Castrol Oil are a firm case in point.

But there’s one advert for one such product that completely scared the bejeezus out of me as a young child, that I have yet to hear anyone else recollect when unprompted by me, and which does not seem to have resurfaced online. This advert was for a product called IMPACT.

I can’t remember exactly what kind of product Impact was, other than that it was a completely mundane household product of some sort, probably a cleaning product. But the TV advert (which I think ran around 1984-85 or so) was well and truly terrifying.

For some reason, the bottle for the Impact product had a close-up of a scary-looking Great White Shark’s face on the label. The advert ended with a close-up of the bottle – IIRC it kind of shot towards the screen, with the shark staring right at the viewer through the screen… and if this wasn’t disturbing enough, it was accompanied by a particularly threatening-sounding voiceover man saying “Impact – puts you right in there, and Won’t Let You Go.”

My toddler mind could not quite fathom that this ‘Impact’ was merely a harmless household product, and interpreted it as some kind of warning that the shark was out there, and was coming to get me – or that the product would unleash the shark on me, or something. Either way, I remember being truly petrified every time the advert came on and that shark stared right through the screen at me, accompanied by the chilling words of the voiceover man.

I have asked about this ad on the Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s) group on Facebook, and one other group member recollected it, agreeing it was horrific. But other than that, this advert remains elusive. A search on the History of Advertising Trust website has revealed the following adverts that may be related:

Fungicides Commercial: Impact Extra

Fungicides Commercial: Early Impact

These commercials seem to indicate that Impact may have been a fungicide, but either way they’re mild and completely unscary compared to the advert that traumatized my young mind.

So here’s an appeal to anyone who may have any recollection of the Impact commercial, or better still have a copy of it – if you recall this advert or are able to make it available for viewing again, please comment here or email us!

UPDATE, 03/10/24: Thanks to Jack Mortimer, one of our readers, we now know more or less for sure that Impact was a brand of bathroom cleaner. Jack stumbled across an advert for the product on a YouTube ad break from 1985, a still from which is below:

While there’s no shark on the bottle, it seems pretty certain this advert is for the same product the elusive shark advert was promoting. Thanks Jack for sending us this!

If you are able to help us find the terrifying ‘shark’ advert for Impact, or have any memory of it, please comment below or email us!