Abstract
Recent commentators and politicians have praised the Australian federal government’s 1987 AIDS awareness campaign — which featured the Grim Reaper bowling down tenpins of ‘ordinary Australians’ — as an innovative and effective approach to scare citizens into changing their behaviour. However, the use of the Grim Reaper in such a campaign was not a pioneering approach, nor was it proven to be effective in modifying risk-taking behaviour. This paper will question the mythology of the Grim Reaper campaign, and show how and why officials and the public often assume that memorable media health campaigns were also successful public health measures.This article has been peer-reviewed.
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