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(redirected from Main.ScareEmStraight)
"Children who make
their parents to bleed
may live to have children
to revenge that deed."
"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."
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.
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 this editor has personally been subjected to 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. And let's not even get into the bloody, windshield-cracking horrors inflicted upon her 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. (Of course, 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. (Because God forbid you 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 - this 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 (although one troper remembers one that graced the cover of Newsweek...Which was used to show how sick the people put up actual Hell Houses were).
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.
Examples:
- Struwwelpeter is a classic (1845) German children's book that warns the reader against misdemeanors like not trimming their nails or playing with matches with rather gruesome cautionary tales. One of them, for example, features a boy who sucks his thumb, so a tailor comes out of nowhere and cuts his thumb off with a pair of scissors.
- In the Discworld book The Hogfather, Peachy used to suck his thumb as a child. As a grown man (not to mention a violent gangster and thug) he suddenly finds himself in a world based on a child's mind - he is unfazed until the Scissor Man actually appears. He flees in terror and is never seen again.
- The video "Dark and Lonely Water", which was about safety in and near water, had a Grim Reaper-esque figure 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.
- "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.
- 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 being created by Showtime, 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.
- 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 basically 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!
- This editor is particuarly fond of how 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.
- This troper was extremely disappointed in Girls Beware. He'd been expecting a PSA about the dangers of lesbians.
- 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.
- 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-- I shit you not. 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 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 just plain wrong music. 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. For the curious here's a clip from YouTube.
- 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 actualy need the original authors permission. (Basicly, they used garfield, but only got permission from the publishers of the comic, who legaly could not give permission for the use of the character without jim davies' aproval, which got them into a bit of trouble)
- During high school, this editor was involved in a program called Every 15 Minutes, which is in essence a live reenactment of the basic trope. Several actual students get stage makeup of blood and bruises and then get into actual wrecked cars, and the whole school watches as real police and real firefighters remove them and send the "dead" ones to the morgue, the "injured" ones to the hospital and the "drunk driver" to juvenile hall. This editor was the drunk driver and therefore went to juvenile hall and was filmed being cuffed and imprisoned, then was "sentenced" by an actual judge in the school's gym, all to dramatize the dangers of drinking. It's the live version of Scare Em Straight down to the smallest detail, with the added factor that the people watching know the victims.
- "Scare campaigns" are common in political advertising - and several studies suggest they are one of the most effective types of political campaign.
- The 'tracts' of Jack Chick, which attempt to scare people straight quite literally in many cases, by establishing homosexuals as being ungodly deviants who corrupt the young and, in one memorable instance that this editor was unfortunate enough to stumble across, outright state that the homosexual community was willing to deliberately supply HIV-infected blood to the blood transfusion network in a form of political blackmail. They're so absurdly over-the-top that, if not for the fact that he is absolutely serious about all of this and expects you to take it seriously as well, it might be quite an entertaining parody of evangelic tracts. One of his more famous tracts is "Dark Dungeons" when he rails against Dungeons And Dragons, claiming that players will become involved in black magic and kill themselves if anything happens to their Player Character.
- Subverted by a drunk-driving PSA a few years ago which cut between shots of someone whose face wasn't shown finishing his last drink, picking up his car keys and leaving the bar; and a family in a station wagon on the road; the final scene builds up to a crash but turns out to show the wagon crossing paths safely with a taxi, presumably carrying the guy from the bar.
- 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.
- The UK PS As 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.
- This editor remembers a drawing shown to her elementary school class that still gives her friend nightmares. One section has a bunch of people praying. At the top are angels in Fluffy Cloud Heaven pouring water down on the third section which was entitled "The Church in Suffering" and was comprised of people who are surrounded by flame and screaming. At first, the entire class thought that it was supposed to be Earth, Heaven, and Hell. Nope. The last one was Purgatory. Keep in mind that for Catholics, unless you're a saint you have to go to Purgatory before you go to Heaven. So unless you're perfect, you better hope for a long life.
- 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.
- This troper recalls a video about the dangers of food-poisoning. Everyone who didn't follow the strictest, most paranoid procedures became violently ill.
- 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.
- One of this troper's high school art classes included a yearly effort to design an anti-drunk driving billboards, one of which was actually put up not far from the school. During the year she was involved, the one actually used involved a huge image of the Twin Towers burning and a comparison of the numbers who died on September 11 to the number of people who die in drunk driving accidents. It was removed a few weeks later.
- UK cinemas tend to run several of these kinds of ads before every movie. In this tropers town however, a small group of regular cinema-goers has started getting downright bored with seeing the same cute little moppet telling people that at 40 miles and hour she's got an 80% chance of dying, and at 30 and 80% chance of living, and have begun loudly suggesting alternatives such as that if the driver had been going 50, they would have missed the girl entirely.
- 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. Just two problems: The car involved was an ancient Nissan and the front wheels were clearly locked in a huge skid. The immediate response of most people was probably 'Well thats why we invented Anti-Lock Brakes!'. Given a little thought 'Well if the road tax and petrol duty weren't so high perhaps he could've afforded a newer car!' seems like a reasonable argument too.
- Duck And Cover. This editor once saw a fanvid of it which added the caption "Educating the people by keeping small children awake at night." That's pretty darn accurate.
- And in The Iron Giant it's parodied by showing just how useless enacting the video would be.
- This troper's middle school was shown a presentation about gang violence by an LAPD officer. The presentation included exceedingly graphic crime scene photos of various murders. ("This slide is Grumpy's brain on Crenshaw Boulevard.") Epilogue: The officer belonged to the now-disgraced LAPD C.R.A.S.H. unit which was the basis for The Shield.
- 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.
- UNICEF did a PSA that showed the Smurfs getting carpet bombed.
- In Northern Ireland,a grim and graphic PSA in the times of The Troubles advertised a confidential telephone line for anonymous informers,showcasing the conspiracy of silence by families,the passive acceptance of violence and the passing-on of hatred to the younger generation that had perpetuated it for 20-odd years. Though looking at it now,it's conflict-neutral,back then no-one this troper knew would trust it,because it was run by the almost entirely Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary. Watch it here. This was shown on prime-time television so much that it degraded into Narm; hearing the words/tune to "Cats in the Cradle" became a shorthand for "not that advert again" and the punchline for several jokes.
- The old flour sack baby assignment you would be given in health class.
- 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
- This troper's class was once subjected to a video about the dangers of joyriding and playing with fire. It lost most of it's wham factor when a girl covered the car in petrol, accidentally spilling some on herself, then stood near the car laughing while her boyfriend threw a match onto the car. The sheer stupidity of it...
- Semi-backfired with this troper. When she was in third grade, and her brother in first, the school was close enough to walk to and from it. Of course, the guidance councellor came in to talk about strangers. Near the end of class, this troper drew a map that led from her house to the school, along with the route she would take when she encountered a stranger. At the end of the day, she wasted at least five minutes outside the school, standing on the sidewalk, wondering when a stranger would show up so she could put her plan to use.
- 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 Gulit 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.
- Students at a school in Oceanside, California were were told that some of their classmates had been killed in drunk driving accidents. Most of them were sad, some cried hysterically. Hours later, it was revealed that their friends were alive, and the whole thing was a hoax to scare 'em straight.
- That sounds similar to something that happened at this troper's local high school when he was a freshman. One time during the period before lunch, the teacher's told the students not to go to the front of the school. Naturally, I rushed there, and still struggled to get a view, since half the student body was there. There had apparently been a bad car accident, and when I got there, they were hosing off the "blood". The period after lunch, we were told it was a demonstration against drunk driving for the prom. Unfortunately for them, one of the juniors recognized her friends as one of the supposed victims, and was so upset that she sent around a petition condemning the school distract for a huge lack of taste. They eventually printed a news article apologizing for the harsh method.
- 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.
- This editor was scared shitless by this ad about the dangers of doing crack.
- 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 unfortunadely is Truth In Television, even if it's not the only origin of the crime's income...).
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