 <p>Fatal errors don't produce 500 errors in and of themselves, they would return 200 with blank page typically (if no output had been flushed to browser at the point of the error) . Plus this will not help you anyway, as Apache would be no longer involved when PHP is having the error.</p> <p>Maybe you could register a shutdown function to send 500 header (to get 500 result) and display the content you want to display.</p>