Scare 'Em Straight - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Scare Em Straight

"I think this skeleton-pumped PSA perfectly reflects that era's methods of keeping children away from bad things: Exaggerate until they shit themselves straight."

— X-Entertanment

If you've spent any time in a Western public school system, then you've no doubt seen one of the films, cartoons and filmstrips whose purpose is to inform bright-eyed schoolchildren about themselves and the world around them. Judging by the way many of these films turn out, however, one might suspect that there's a special wing in Hell set aside just to produce them. There are Austrailian examples, but they are shown on TV mostly. The origin of this trope lies in the belief that children aren't all that receptive to positive reinforcement, and therefore must be informed in the least subtle way possible about all of the negative consequences which may befall them if they do evil. For instance, tell little Johnny that he has a better chance of living a long healthy life if he avoids drugs and he'll shrug, "Meh." But, tell Johnny that he'll wind up drooling in a back alley covered with sores while jamming an 8-inch long needle into his arm if he takes a single puff from a joint given to him by The Aggressive Drug Dealer, and he'll listen. He may laugh his disbelieving butt off, but he will listen.

This mentality has formed the basis of all sorts of cautionary tales, many of which employ extreme and terrifying imagery in their attempt to keep children on the straight and narrow path. Yes, yes, irreversible psychological damage might occur, but it is all for their own good, so it's okay. So what if a kid winds up a twitching vegetable afraid of venturing into the outside world? At least he won't get kidnapped by a lollipop-wielding child-molester or hit by a bus while jaywalking and smoking crack.

The theory is that when they grow older and "able to understand", adults will be able to give the "real" reasons for such mores. A common reality is that there's less to stop them from engaging in that behavior once they realize that their face won't "freeze that way".

Examples of some of the mind-meltingly scary imagery include: a boy getting run over by a train, vandals poisoning a deer, people in Africa contracting hideous diseases like sleeping sickness and elephantiasis, and a choking victim who turns bright blue and nearly dies. Let's not even get into the bloody, windshield-cracking horrors inflicted in Driver's Ed class.

Of course, not every child who sees these types of films will become traumatized by them. For every kid who pukes at the five-minute mark of Wheels of Tragedy, there will be at least one who will cheer loudly at the sight of karmically-induced gore splashing across the screen. (A phenomenon excellently spoofed in this Onion article

Note: Sometimes Scare 'Em Straight campaigns will actually backfire, and the ads that were designed to admonish a certain behavior will actually encourage it and make it look cool. There are those who believe that certain companies ''might be'' doing this sort of thing on purpose to lure in new customers.

After all, why else would cigarette and alcohol companies be so quick and eager to create ad campaigns that are supposedly against middle-schoolers using their products, when most new users tend to get hooked at that age? It's a debate that will probably rage on for as long as alcohol and tobacco remain legal and available.

Scare 'Em Straight as a whole, not only covers instructional shorts, but scary public service announcements as well. God forbid you should settle in to enjoy your Saturday Morning cartoons and your Froot-Loops without being reminded of the Lovecraftian Body Horror which can overtake you if you fail to brush your teeth. Some politicians will use these tactics to try and scare people off voting for their opponent, which is known as a Scare Campaign.

This is the modern equivalent of the (hopefully) Forgotten Trope of children's literature intended to scare the kids into good Christian behavior by depicting the torments of Hell itself inflicted on "boys and girls like you". Some fringe sects keep this tradition alive with "hell houses", but these are very much disavowed by the mainstream. However, a Hell House graced the cover of Newsweek as recently as 2007.

It could be said that the large number of examples on this page are a testimony to there being too much PSA time available to a vast number of specialized interest groups, each one convinced that their anvil needs to be dropped, and unaware that people become desensitized at a young age by the sheer volume of Scare Em Straight messages.

This is, arguably, also one of the intentions of older forms of punishment, especially where the criminal is displayed in public.

Straight Examples:

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"Mr. Yuk", a grimacing green face intended to warn kids of poisonous materials, is notoriously creepy. While he was intended to be a little scary, his creators certainly did not intend for him to cause the mass nightmares and burning horror that Mr. Yuk did. Steel yourself for the short, or sing along to the full song here.
- It also establishes that even in your own home, you're not safe. No wonder this generation is paranoid.....
Scared Straight itself was a video in which hardened prison inmates tell a bunch of high school boys all about the Prison Rape they will surely experience if they don't straighten up and fly right.
Another classic from the bad old days: Boys Beware. The short swaps the word pedophile with homosexual, and is egregious enough in its mischaracterization even of that to make Pat Robertson wince. Contains lines like, "What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious; a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex." Make a "scared straight" joke at your own risk!
- Entertainingly, the film bends over backwards to demonize gays, but gives unqualified approval of hitchhiking.
- There's also the female version called Girls Beware. Remember ladies, don't talk to any man; all he wants to do is rape you.
  - The kind of people who make these sort of films are incapable of thinking women can hurt people.
  - So girls should stay away from men? Why are they demonizing male homosexuality but subtly aproving of the female equivalent?
  - Generally, if you get a boner when thinking about it, you approve of it.
"Scare campaigns" are common in political advertising - and several studies suggest they are one of the most effective types of political campaign.
- Interestingly, studies done in 2008 found that they had decreased greatly in efficiency since a similar study in 2004.
Example aimed at adults: The UK government doesn't like benefit cheats. The UK government doesn't like people who dodge their TV license payment. The UK government doesn't like people who don't pay their car tax. Their solution is to broadcast dark/grey shaded adverts with monotone voice overs that wouldn't be out of place in a horror film: "We know where you live. We can check your post. Our computers can find you anywhere." If anyone else sent a tape like this, it would be called "stalking." Instead, it's perfectly reasonable to commission a series of adverts that solemnly inform you that if you claim benefits while employed, you will be hounded by Mysterons before there's an ominous knocking at your door...
- Hilariously undermined by the recent "lost databases" fiasco. An agency which puts million-person databases on unencrypted, take-home laptops and can't even manage to keep them in the right country isn't likely to run the omniscient killing machine the adverts suggest.
  - But then again, who knows who has got your data now...
  - The most alarming part is that when put these two together, you end up with "We will find the miscreants and crush them. You're better hope we're after the right people."
- Also rather annoying. The government can fine me because it knows where I live, what car I drive, and the intimate details of my back account. Why the hell can't they just bill me automatically then?!
The chilling ad for NACAID where the grim reaper goes bowling for AIDS victims may well be the trope namer. Granted it stated that AIDS is not just a homosexual disease, but part of the backlash (apart from probably the ad giving someone a heart attack, it really is that bad) was the unfortunate implications that linked death, or Death, with homosexuality.
The UK PSAs about making sure you have a working smoke alarm have become more and more grim; years ago the reminder to regularly check the batteries was a benign "thumbs up on a Monday!" Today the ads are set in a dismal waiting room to the afterlife with a sadistic administrator barking at people why they're dead, with the punchline of a child telling their parent "you forgot to check the battery, Mummy." This same tagline was used in a disturbing poster - it's scrawled in soot on a charred wall, in a child's handwriting.
- There was also a nineties UK fire alarm advert featuring a couple weeping and constantly rewinding a video of a child opening a present, followed by the voiceover 'Check your smoke alarm.' Horrified me for years.
  - Oh god,... PLEASE don`t tell me he got an E-Z Bake Oven!
Back in the nineties there was an anti-drug PSA that featured a little girl sitting in her room when it suddenly began to rapidly fill up with water. You got to see her frantically try to open her window before presumably drowning and floating offscreen. Needless to say, this editor covered her ears and ran out of the room during every showing.
- Nope, she drowns onscreen and then you see her lifeless, open eyes float by. Gives me the creeps a decade later.
- I know what you're talking about. Saw that ad ONCE, and I've been afraid to see it ever since.
Canadian work-safety ads released around 2007 we made even more popular on You Tube when passed around as "seriously disturbing"; one includes a rising chef about to get married being burned by scalding oil, including a high-pitched scream that cuts off her narrative and a close-up of her burn-scarred face. Others include construction accidents, a factory accident (in which a man stands up after having a beam driven through him to narrate), and a similarly-narrated retail accident. Of course, some people just found the commercials hilarious.
UK cinemas tend to run several of these kinds of ads before every movie.
- Ricky Gervais chastised this one for "encouraging gambling!", before adding "I like those odds, but still...".
- A predecessor in the UK government's Think! road safety campaign showed a very realistic-looking slow motion collision with a child.
- There's one 'wear your seatbelt' ad (I've not seen it for a while, so it may have been discontinued) that shows - in quite gory detail - a man having to brake suddenly for some reason. His organs get flung against his ribs, the ribs snap and dig into his lungs. On a twenty-foot-high screen. Lovely.
- It really is lovely. (Assuming that's not an entirely different ribs-into-the-lungs video...)
Without doubt one of the most favored tactics of PETA (and other animal rights groups to a degree), who resorts to using graphic images of animals being killed, accusing young children's mothers of killing animals, and repeating harsh (and debatable) warnings that eating meat will cause all manner of health problems in order to frighten the naive and squeamish. The veracity of their claims is often doubtful, as many of the videos and pictures they show portray uncommon and/or outdated practices (many people involved in animal agriculture are quite shocked at the inaccuracy and exaggeration in the materials), and many of their "scientific" claims (such as the claim that humans are "natural herbivores") are based on very outdated, flawed, biased, or just plain discredited research.
- One hilariously ineffective billboard put up by PETA showed a picture of a child eating a hamburger with every visible sign of enjoyment, that still expected us to believe it when it told us that feeding children meat was child abuse.
UNICEF did a PSA that showed the Smurfs getting carpet bombed ...So Yeah.
The "Click It Or Ticket" seatbelt ads often lurch into either self-parody and/or incitement to rebellion; as inane as the national slogan is, the local cops should definitely not be allowed to star in their own PSAs
- Many of the PSAs depict an officer pulling a person over and giving them a ticket for seat belt violations. This is inaccurate in many states where seat belt violations are only secondary offenses, meaning that you have to be pulled over for something else before you can be cited for a seat belt violation.
  - Which makes sense, considering it'd probably be impossible for the officer to tell if you're wearing a seat belt otherwise.
Many anti-drug or anti-smoking ads love to show some pretty graphic images of what will happen to your body, inside and out, if you do drugs or smoke. Bonus points for using the Guilt Trip by showing the consequences of doing either if you are a pregnant mother and show what will happen to the baby after it is born. May also show the negative effects of smoking being passed down to children in the house during the ad.
- A particularly scary one is when a smoking ad showed a human aorta (taken from a dead smoker) and then they squeezed the plaque out of it. It was graphic and disturbing, and it showed up on a channel for kids.
  - Another one featured a smoker being dragged away with a fish-hook through his cheek. This appeared on posters and on TV.
  - Yet another one is the Australian add that basically goes through their Nightmare Fuel folder, complete with strokes, gangrene, and even mouth cancer. Why must they inflict this on us non-smokers?
In Finnish radio, there is a fishing license ad where two men discuss their license situation. One man warns the other: "If you don't have a fishing license, the authorities can take away your equipment." The trick is that the word used for equipment, "vehkeet", can also mean the male-only equipment.
- So the fishermen were warned that the police might take away their rods?
The recent Brazilian campaigns to show Digital Piracy Is Evil certainly fall into this, showing the violent actions of the organized crime financed by piracy (which unfortunately is Truth In Television, even if it's not the only origin of the crime's income...).
- There are campaigns like that in Germany too. Guys who go to prison for years for pirating films and software - or for not paying their monthly TV fee.
- Amazed the British anti-piracy ads from the 90s haven't been mentioned. They depicted video pirates as bald fat men with red eyes sweating over a furnace, and were rather hilarious.
A drunk-driving PSA, which ran in Romania circa 2008-2009, started out like a car salon presentation: expensive cars with hot girls sprawled over them... and then the camera zooms in on the girls: some are missing limbs, others have half their face burnt off, and such. Got a [[Squick]] out of me, and definitely got the message across.
This classic 80s anti-cocaine commercial. It's just wrong on all levels.
The Montana Meth Project (look it up on That Other Wiki) is, despite its name, a fairly successful, multi-medium anti-meth campaign that works on showing the results, frequently given out by former meth users themselves (at least, on a few of the radio ads). Fairly notable due to being started as a privately funded campaign, although the state has taken over some of the funding duties, and for the fact that it started (as the name suggests) in Montana, but has spread to Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, and Wyoming.
Ireland has a serious drink-driving problem and has been producing extremely graphic TV ads for years now to combat it. One of the earlier examples, entitled "could you live with the shame?" has a man involved in a drink-related crash flying through a fence into someone's back garden and killing their son.
There was a PSA that showed a man who comes off as just some drug dealer. Throughout the PSA, he slowly turns into a snake monster and hisses at the end. This one really freaked out the Nostalgia Critic
Australian Scare Em Straight PS As about drunk driving are no longer "if you do it, you will die", but "if you do it, you'll get arrested", because Australians are more concerned with getting caught by police than, y'know, the whole "dying" thing.
- Well of course. They live in Australia.
This surprisingly well-animated PSA by Hanna-Barbera, where a dude wanders through a psychedelic landscape of pills and spliffs...then walks into a closet full of zombies, which grab him and age him 50 years in two seconds while a Scare Chord plays.
One anti-reckless driving ad shown in Ontario in the early 90s showed a family who'd been in a car accident being handled in the emergency room. The mother dies, and the commercial ends with a cut to black followed by the sound of tween daughter shrieking, "I want mommy!".
- Another ad from the same series had a husband who was paralyzed or in a coma following a car accident in a hospital room. His wife is telling him platitudes like "everyone in the other car was OK" while his daughter screams, "Their little girl's dead! I hate you!". Small girls screaming horrible things was the theme of the series.
A series (thankfully brief) of AIDS campaigns in France pictured a woman being, erm, made love to by an enormous spider and a man having sex with a large scorpion. You can see them both here but be warned that they are also great examples of Squick and High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
This PSA about kitchen safety. The cord that turns into a cobra is kind of scary, but it's the evil, laughing pot that does it for most people.
This PSA about texting while driving was actually so over the top that officials decided not to show it.
- Ironically, while the ad is very graphic, unlike in many PS As cited here, the events are not all that implausible.
  - I saw this during The Doctors, up until the point where the sole survivor starts sobbing and looking around. He laughed, hard, since most of the time, it looked like they were headbanging, and demands a .gif edit.
In America, there's a fleet of anti-abortion trucks that drive around showing graphic pictures of aborted fetuses, partial birth abortions, dismembered fetal body parts compared to everyday items such as erasers, quarters, bottlecaps, on the sides and backs of their trailers. High. Octane. Nightmare. Fuel. Here's the link to an article about a confrontation one of the drivers had. And here is one of the tamer pics.
- In some places (like Kansas), these types of trucks are parked in front of elementary schools. Just in case a 3rd grader was planning to get an abortion, or something.
- On the truck's bumper sticker: "Abortion causes breast cancer" What? Since when?
- Most of those pictures aren't even of what they claim to be, but show the result of stillbirths and miscarriages, because those images make for a higher grade of nightmare fuel.
Let's not forget the Montana Meth Prokect's anti-meth ads/campaigns.
- This ad is bloody enough that in America Fox News (and possibly CNN as well) have had several debates about whether or not it's affective. And, occasionally, encouraging everyone to have their teens watch it.
Those "Above the Influence" ads are usually tame, but remember the early one with the unattended little girl tugging the raft into the swimming pool, and the voiceover saying, "Just tell her parents you weren't watching her because you were getting stoned. They'll understand"? That one's arguably even worse than an over-the-top illustration of what drugs will actually do to you, because the message is more like, "You Bastard, your natural inclination to choose fun over responsibility IS GOING TO KILL THIS CHILD." Because obviously if you'll do drugs at all, you'll do them anywhere, including while you're babysitting a four-year-old with access to an open pool.
- Partially justified by the logic that if you have the gall to do drugs period, you'd do them anywhere....including while babysitting.
- There are similar advertisements in magazines, except a little Lighter And Softer.
Keira Knightly appeared in this PSA for UK Domestic Violence charity Women's Aid. It was only shown in cinemas, because it was considered too upsetting for TV

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Isn't this what slashers do with their depicting people who have sex getting killed? Or people who are born male getting killed? Hell, 99% of slashers seem to have the Family Unfriendly Aesop of 'If you're a man, no matter how nice and kindhearted or smart or resorceful or likeable you are, you will die. She, on the other hand, won't, even if she's a whining moron or an unsufferable bitch, because she's got a vagina, and that makes her better than you.
- Or maybe "men are expendable in this film because you don't want to look at them, you want to imagine yourself with the sexy, skimpily-dressed heroine who will inevitably show her tits." Horror films are about objectification - they're not exactly made by and for teenage girls, even if I'm sure a fair parcel of girls wind up in the audience.
The video "Dark and Lonely Water", which was about safety in and near water, had a Grim Reaper-esque figure (voiced by Donald Pleasance!) stalking through swamps, then looming over children playing by streams and sending them to their deaths. It ends with a chilling voiceover of "I'll be back..."
"One Got Fat", a 1963 film on bicycle safety, no doubt scared many a child. Narrated by Edward Everett Horton, it featured kids in creepy papier-mache monkey masks riding their bikes to a picnic, and getting into disturbing slapstick accidents for not obeying such rules of the road as "ride alone", "watch signs" or "use lights". The kid carrying everybody's lunches obeys all the rules and makes it to the picnic grounds in one piece (he's also the only one not wearing a mask, because "he's no monkey"), but seems unconcerned with his friends' plight and eats all their lunches (hence the title of the film, "One Got Fat").
- The irony being supplied by the fact that, after generations of ominous warnings about the various dangers Out There, the authorities are now worried about kids...getting, um, fat.
Reefer Madness is a 1936 exploitation film revolving around the tragic events that follow when high school students are lured by pushers to try "marihuana": a hit and run accident, manslaughter, suicide, rape, and descent into madness all ensue. This one was so incredibly over-the-top, it was actually adopted by the pro-marijuana community as an indictment of the hysteria that surrounds marijuana (as well as, perhaps ironically, really fun to watch while stoned). This way of looking at the film turned it into a cult classic, and even led to a musical version, which plays the whole thing off with a wink, a nudge, and a whole lot of catchy songs.
- It gets better. For their 2008 Four Twenty celebration, the magnificent bastards at G4 debuted the movie Reefie's Madhouse, in which they took the original movie and gave it a Gag Dub. Like the original, it can only truly be appreciated if one is high while watching it.
Driver's Ed, of course, has had some classics. Like a video about road rage. Here the innocent driver goes, down the highway... and the other driver pulls over, gets a crossbow out of the trunk and shoots him for not turning his high beams on.
- So I wasn't the only person disturbed by that video.
- Or the video about wearing one's seatbelt, and especially the ones about not driving drunk. This editor remembers graphic, crash-scene photos of severed limbs, streaks of brains and blood on the pavement leading up to a now-headless body, a body impaled on a tree limb about ten feet in the air, and a partial decapitation - the head had been split horizontally at about nose-level. The flute player in the marching band fainted halfway through.
- This editor found plenty of this in Driver's Ed. One might recall, for example, the film titled Crimson Asphalt III. Just about every video, at least one shown each class for 4 weeks, began with no less than 3-5 minutes (and sometimes up to 10) of gory footage and a deep-voiced narration of the tale of Johnny Everyteen and his friends getting drunk at a Sweet 16 party and driving to their corpse-mangling doom... immediately followed by Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" and a cheerful old man ready to teach us how to drive.
- Oh, just pray you never do defensive driving online. The videos they make you watch on those pages...one of them, an anti-drunk-driving one, featured the tagline..."Matthew wanted to celebrate winning the big game. So he killed his best friend." Less Scared Straight, more Scared Into Laughing My Ass Off.
- The film "Trashed" dissuades new drivers from drunk driving by showing unedited footage of the emergency room after horrific DUI-related crashes.
Starting with Safety, a chemistry lab safety video that aims to impart a thorough understanding of the importance of laboratory rules. It was made in 1991, but is still a popular choice for beginner labs for preteen students all the way through college labs. Highlights include the "glassware to the palm", the "camera bath", rampant mannequin abuse, and a demonstration of the safety shower complete with uncomfortably attentive classmate. It combines late 80's-brand cheesiness with laughably cheap special effects and somehow manages some genuinely wince-inducing moments.
- The film has actually gained a modicum of infamy due to how weird it is. There's even a Facebook group for it.
Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle has an early scene where the two are watching tv and a (fake) PSA shows a guy getting high and claiming he's invulnerable, putting a shotgun to his mouth.
The late 80s-era cartoon special "Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue" features popular cartoon characters of the time talking to kids about the dangers of doing drugs. Along with some Nightmare Fuel drug-trip sequences, the cartoon all-stars include the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (unironically), the Muppets, and most disturbingly, Winnie the Pooh. How's this: I promise to never do drugs if you promise I never have to hear Pooh Bear discuss pot again. 'Kay?
The "Deathrace" episode of Metalocalypse has Toki and Skwisgaar forced to go to driving school after a DWI arrest. The school forces them to watch a film about drunk driving, with accident scenes so graphic that they become afraid to drive a car, and fail the test as a result.
There was a video this troper once saw in a high school health class (the name of which eludes her) about not doing drugs. There was emergency room footage of a guy who had shoved a pen deep into his eye while on some kind of drug, maybe meth. It was horrible.

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The massive, multi-series crossover special Cartoon All Stars To The Rescue featured just about every major Saturday morning cartoon character of the early '90's inflicting massive amounts of psychological torture on a teenage addict to try and scare him off of drugs. (They'll be lucky if their efforts haven't driven the kid to drink.)
- Too bad nobody showed the producers the PSA about how publishing companies can't always give you the rights to use characters from their publications, and that you may actually need the original authors permission. (They used Garfield, but only got permission from the publishers of the comic, who legally could not give permission for the use of the character without Jim Davis's approval, which got them into a bit of trouble)
The Space Whale Aesoptastic Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids was based around the classic Buffy The Vampire Slayer tactic of linking some kind of negative behaviour (e.g. being lazy and arrogant, being a couch potato, playing knock-down-ginger) with a spectacularly Disproportionate Retribution such as being reduced to a drooling vegetable, turned into a potato chip, or hollowed out by termites, all with the intent of terrifying small children into being good little zombies.
One episode of Home Movies had a schoolteacher who was a former prison guard locking the kids in a cell for a few hours in order to scare them straight. They used the time to brainstorm about their next film project.
- And it was a white-collar prison - the kids thought the whole setup was pretty sweet.
- Another episode had Brendon filming a cautionary warning about putting marbles in your nose, which led to a rash of kids putting marbles in their noses - of course it had a metal song in it with the lyrics "Don't put marbles in your nose/Put them in there/Do not put them in there!"
The Finnish primary childrens' TV show had a segment in the '80s and '90s that seems to have been out to intentionally traumatize toddlers about thin ice. Featured were panic, Uncanny Valley animation and music that was just plain wrong. Good thing, too - the way Finland is crammed full of nature means that each winter fills the country with open, inviting death traps. Falling through lake ice doesn't dick around but kills you in a hurry.
- The clip also does a good job by showing kids what to do in case someone does fall into an icy lake.
The cartoon Play Safe delves deep into the well of Nightmare Fuel to convey a somewhat dubious message about train safety. Complete with jerky rotoscoping, Deranged Animation, a horrifying soundtrack, and a Space Whale Aesop to boot (playing in train yards results in... hijacking a sentient streamliner and crashing it into another train?). You too can view the madness here.
Beavis And Butthead go to prison on a school-sponsored 'Scared Straight' program - you can guess how they absorb the message.
- The dumb duo also take in a 50's drivers-ed video, starring two meatheads with a suspicious resemblance to our protagonists. They then proceed to replicate the accident during their own driving test.

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