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alt title(s): Scare Em Straight 
"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."
— X-Entertanment
"Why is that so hard?! Just tell your kids the truth, and they'll get the idea! But nope, Public Service Announcements want to scare the shit out of us by making it look like drugs came from The Devil! And if you take drugs, you'll turn into one of his evil little minions."
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 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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Advertising
- "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.
- 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!
- 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 clip also does a good job by showing kids what to do in case someone does fall into an icy lake.
- "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?!
- These kinds of "we know what you're up to" tactics were rather ruined for this troper on starting university. After a week or so, every room on campus got an identical "We know you're watching TV without a licence, you thieving little shit, and we will come and get you if you don't sort it out!" letter - whether they had a TV or not. Probably worked on a few people in the short tem, but irrevocably coloured at least one person's perception of his All-Knowing Benevolent Big Brother...
- The chilling ad for NACAID where the grim reaper goes bowling for aids victims may well be the troop 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 reslly 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.
- This troper thought the above mentioned campaign was quite effective, until he saw the tagline, at which point it descends into pure Narm territory.
- Narm for some, maybe, but This Troper can't help feeling that it's certainy not narm for any parent who has a small child.
- 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.
- 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 remembers that ad. Being about six at the time he saw it, that was pure Nightmare Fuel.
- What do drugs have to do with drowning?
- Something about being "in over your head", I imagine.
- The ads were a warning against inhalants (sniffing glue, e.g.). Inhalants inhibit the absorption of oxygen by the brain (anoxia) just as if you were drowning.
- This troper also remembers that ad. He found it surreal and awesome. He was about eight or nine at the time.
- 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.
- This troper saw the first one with the woman and the scalding water at sixteen and shivered in complete horror after seeing that.
- This troper was woken up by the radio version of these ads several times. Not the nicest way to get out of bed in the morning. This troper also wonders if the radio versions were pulled because they might startle drivers.
- UK cinemas tend to run several of these kinds of ads before every movie. In this troper's 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 an 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.
- This troper has taken to heckling that one with "Wander out into the middle of the road unaccompanied and unsupervised at the age of six and there's a 80% chance you'll be HIT BY A FUCKING CAR!"
- 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.
- 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 break 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.
- 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.
- Questionable at best. While many cruel practices have been banned in some countries, they continue in others; which are then usually used as sources of cheap meat by supermarkets like yours. As a trained engineer, this trooper can also testify that a slaughter house that didn't cause some cruelty (through mechanical failure alone) would achieve magical and impossible levels of reliability. There is always some cruelty involved. It's simply a question of what level of cruelty you are willing to accept to produce a tasty snack. Last time I checked, KFC's own in house report proudly claimed a 99% reliability on their machinery. Which means 1 in 50 chicken wings is produced via PETA style horror.
- 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.
- 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 "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.
- Considering they can pull you over for no reason whatsoever just to check your seat belt and whether you've been drinking, this troper wishes it worked that way in upsate New York.
- 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 humon 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 unfortunadely 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.
- Apaches is a classic. A PSA shown in rural areas of the UK, it details the dangers lurking around the farmyard by killing off a group of children one by one. While the scene with a child being pitched under the wheels of a hay wagon is Narm to older viewers because of the obvious ragdoll, a couple of scenes are pure Nightmare Fuel. In the first, a boy falls into a huge pit that the manure slurry from the barns is drained into, and quite literally drowns in bullshit. In the second, a girl drinks some unidentified liquid from a can in a shed. It then cuts to that night and the girl shrieking for her mother in a performance that chills this twenty-year-old troper's blood. As the cut only shows the outside of her house, the viewer is left to imagine what actually happened. This troper immediately filled in an ebola-esque scene of guts in the toilet bowl. God only knows the effect it had on actual kids.
- The final death, with the kid on the tractor flying down the hill, had this troper in stiches laughing. It just looked too ridiculous to be remotely scary.
- This classic 80s anti-cocaine commercial- [1] This Troper finds it both disturbing and hilarious that it's Pee-Wee Herman of all people talking about crack. It's just wrong on all levels.
- A relatively new PSA from the Michigan Department of Transportation shows a well-dressed man walking through an office, calmly discussing the horrors faced by road construction workers, who constantly have to contend with people driving through construction zones at unsafe speeds. "How would you like it if someone drove through your office at 65 MPH?" - and then a car does just that, revealing the office set which has been constructed across a two-lane freeway. Caused this troper to suddenly and completely crack up laughing, something that doesn't normally happen to people sitting in line at the Secretary of State's office. You can see it and its equally entertaining counterpart about human highway barrels here.
- This troper's Great Uncle worked in an office building and a train jumped the rails, plowed into the building, and severed his legs. Not as bizarre and impossibe a notion as you might think!
- 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. This troper knows of it due to the fact that he lives in Montana.
- This Troper lives in Massachusetts, and she recalls a few spots from that campaign. They aren't as common on the east coast, though. (There have only been two or three that this Troper has seen broadcast)
- 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. This troper was also shown a video in secondary school that caused him to be terrified of getting in cars for over a week, which was perhaps not the point intended (it should be noted that none of us were even old enough to drive at this point).
- 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 Australian troper finds it ironic that 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.
- 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.
- This Troper remembers seeing a rather bizarre anti-drug commercial in which some guy screeches like a maniac and beats his friend with a wooden spoon. To this day, This Troper is creeped out. Not by the anti-drug message, but rather she can't help but go "WTF is going on?" while watching it. Watch, if you dare- [2]
- 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.
- This trooper remembers a surprisingly effective poster on the walls of a cafeteria during a summer-school escapade. It was a pro-seat belt poster, with a fancy-looking prom dress half-way ripped to shreds and very bloody on a black background. The tagline was something like "Mary decided not to wear a seatbelt to her prom, because she didn't want to ruin her dress. This is what the dress looked like after the paramedics had to cut her out of it." Every time this trooper saw it, the reaction was halfway horror, halfway wondering who would be stupid enough to do that.
- 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, for this troper at least, 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.
Comic Books
- 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 ("AAAHHH... my leg's on fire!") that they're sometimes mistaken for parody, except he is absolutely serious about all of this and expects you to take it seriously as well. 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.
- Adventures In Odyssey, which usually doesn't pull this trope into effect heavily, did a similar thing in their "Castles and Cauldrons" episode, with a version of Dungeons And Dragons so exaggerated you had to wonder if they had watched even one or two minutes of people playing it. (And it still failed to live up to the silliness of the above example.)
Film
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- For this troper, Driver's Ed was full-blown Nightmare Fuel. She took Driver's Ed in high school at age 17. She is now 20, and still has not even tried to take another course to get her permit.
- 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.
- A car crash had killed this troper's uncle when she was young, so she came to Driver's Ed with a healthy respect for her car. She was spared video in her class... but two cops came in one day and told stories. One memorable one featured a high-speed crash, the impact of which had been powerful enough to knock a man's eyeball out of his head onto the dashboard. Her parents had to convince her that 10-mile-an-hour circles around an empty parking lot would not make her eyeballs fall out.
- This troper was afraid of driving with anybody else in the car for over a year after she witnessed a Driver's Ed video wherein a confused, screaming, half-crushed toddler was the only person alive at the scene of a car crash.
- This troper remembers a Driver's Ed video, played out in the style of a game show. The contestants (which included a jogger, a mother with her children, and a businesswoman on her way to a restaurant for a meeting with her boss) would be asked a question about what to do when faced with an obstacle on the road (i.e., a railroad crossing, or a traffic jam). After the contestant answered the question, the host would then ask another question, such as something along the lines of "Who would you want to have custody of your children?" or "What material would you want to have for your coffin?" suggesting that the answer that the contestant chose was wrong, and that they have been killed in an accident associated with it. Only the businesswoman survives the show, being asked how she would like her potato cooked. While this video isn't actually scary, it does have a morbid sense of humor to it. Can't remember what it was called, though...
- This troper is kind of disappointed. He didn't get any cool stuff like that. All he got was a disinterested old guy telling half the class to get in the car and drive while the other half sat back in the classroom and did busy work until they got back.
- The film "Trashed" dissuades new drivers from drunk driving by showing unedited footage of the emergency room after horrific DUI-related crashes. This troper lasted all of five minutes into the movie and promptly fainted.
- 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.
- Well, it wouldn't be *entirely* useless, because it would make you less likely to get hurt or killed by debris knocked around by the shockwave. Close enough to the blast, you'll be dead before you notice what's happening. But ducking and covering isn't a bad idea as such. Now, telling everyone that a nuclear bomb could go off at any time so they always need to be ready to dive for cover... that's another story.
- Whenever someone sings the "Duck and Cover" theme, my mother's a fan of amending (while also singing), "...and kiss your ass good-bye!"
- This troper and other Army Reservists were watching a cautionary video in Basic Training about the dangers of handling unexploded ordinance. It featured a small child finding a buried shell, carrying it back to his family's campsite, then dropping it, whereupon the shell exploded…leading to peals of laughter from the audience. The officer presenting the video made the best of the situation by saying: "While the video took a humorous tone, there's not denying the serious message behind it…" (Later on another officer who told the story of an army cadet who lost his hands because he tried hammering in a stake with what turned out to be an unexploded mortar shell was treated more seriously).
- 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.
- This troper is endlessly grateful that this video was posted here, as it's essentially an in-joke in her school science class. Especially the "perverted shower guy". A personal favourite part is the obviously fake arm being set on fire, then not moving away from the fire and just letting itself burn.
- The Vagina Dentata film Teeth is bad enough for normal guys. Imagine how it must terrify rapists...
- ...who gives a fuck how terrified the rapists would be?
Literature
- 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 History of the Fairchild Family, a popular Victorian Sunday School prize, had lots of these, including a child nearly dying of a fever for eating stolen plums, a father taking his quarreling daughters on a walk in the woods to see a dead man hanging on a gibbet, and another girl burning to death while playing with a candle. Later editions either toned down or completely removed the latter two incidents.
Live Action TV
- The HBO series Oz. This troper and several people he knows will NOT so much as steal a stick of gum after watching that show.
- On Saving Grace, Grace's niece and best friend went to a "scavenger" party where they took random drugs, and the best friend died. Her father and Grace dragged the niece down to the morgue and forced her to look at her friend's corpse.
Real Life
- The old flour sack baby assignment you would be given in health class.
- Speak for yourself...this troper's high school does it with robot babies that cry. You have to insert a key into a slot in their back and twist it until they let out a Satanic-sounding cackle. Which, naturally, inspired this troper's friend to ask "So, if we try this with our real babies, can we sue you when it kills them?"
- This troper's glad she's not the only one who was terrified by that baby.
- This troper was given a key whose elastic had broken and been retied, and was thus too short. Getting the blasted thing to shut up required contortionism. At least, until he realized he could just untie it and remove the key.. and give it to his mom for a bit, who felt the entire thing was just goddamn ridiculous.
- Students at a school in Oceanside, California 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.
- Anyone who lived in Ontario around 1998-2000 while in grades one and two was probably scared shitless by the Ontario Hydro Diorama, this troper certainly was. Essentially, it was a little model town filled with kids doing various stupid things with electricity, such as flying kites too close to hydro lines or jamming forks in toasters. The presenter explained the obvious danger in the below situation before pressing a button that caused the kid to light up like a christmas tree, spew sparks, and let out an indescribably horrific zapping sound. What really got to most of us is how desensitized the presenter seemed to be of the situation.
- They've been using this one since the '80's, as this troper (who definitely wasn't in grades 1 or 2 in the 90's) distinctly remembers it.
- This troper, during his senior year at high school, had to attend an assembly along with his entire senior class in our school's auditorium the Friday before prom about the dangers of drunk driving. They played a video showing a guy in a wheelchair talking about all the horrible things that would happen to you... the usual. Then, the screen rose up back into wherever it goes, and wheelchair-dude was behind it. I swear, he was freaking Mitch Hedberg in a wheelchair. He tried to reinforce the message in person but sounded too stoned and hilarious to do anything but make my friends and I laugh.
- Whenever this troper was bored, she used to go to On Demand and go to a section that had millions of what she called 'School-Scare' films; she used to find them hilarious until she watched the one about people breaking into houses, waiting for the owners to come home, and then killing them. It doesn't help that the victim was around this troper's AGE.... It also doesn't help that she was alone in the house at the time, either. Needless to say, this troper turns on all the lights in her house at night.
- ...making it easier for the burglars to find you and kill you. :)
- Quit frightening the other children!
Western Animation
- 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.
Parodies and Subversions:
Advertising
- 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.
- An example of a parody of this trope, done so well that many mistake it for an actual safety film (no doubt helped by its German language), is "Staplerfahrer Klaus" (i.e. "Forklift driver Klaus"), wherein the titular character's ignorance of forklifting safety on his first day leads to numerous decapitations, mutilations, chain-sawings, and culminates in a headless body driving two fork-lift impaled men off into the sunset... One of the few 10 minute Youtube clips seriously worth watching.
- The film is actually narrated by Egon Hoegen, who also narrated a very popular educational traffic show on German TV, and his voice is unconsciously familiar to many people.
- It does get mistaken for one. This troper is even acquainted with someone who owns a small anime-based business, has created t-shirts based on Staplerfahrer Klaus, and said owner tells everyone (that will listen to him for thirty seconds) that they're based on a German safety video.
- Bill Hicks thought it would be more honest if anti drugs campaigns mentioned Keith Richards: "Drugs are bad! Drugs are evil... except for that guy. They work real well for for him."
- Not so much a parody as a subversion: anyone born in Canada circa 1990-95 had the distinct pleasure of growing up with Concerned Childrens Advertizers, a series of overtly goofy and surreal ads that gave a series of messages that aged with the kids, in the early nineties, they centered around not eating random crap without your parents permission, but by the later part of the decade, the focus shifted to how being out of shape can affect fairly unlikely scenarios in your life. To all my fellow Generation Yers, I hope you remembered not to put in your mouth.
Film
- Mercilessly parodied in the film Johnny Dangerously, in a Show Within A Show PSA, "Your Testicles and You".
- The sketch-comedy movie Amazon Women On The Moon ends with a black-and-white parody of Reefer Madness which depicts the horrific dangers of getting a "social disease".
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 has riffed many, many, MANY of these things.
- ""Riff Trax" is following in MST 3 K's steps by riffing these—one of them is "One Got Fat" one.
- Last Clear Chance is a classic: "I have a feeling one of these characters is about to see their own intestines soon."
Live Action TV
- Spoofed on Teen Angel, which has a class being shown a video on drunk driving. As you hear the crashing sounds, the students start cheering. The teacher wonders why they are cheering instead of being shocked/scared from what they just saw, and the popular/cool student, Jordan, replies "Years of watching TV has desensitized us to violence!"
- Saturday Night Live character Matt Foley (Chris Farley) uses this kind of technique when it comes to "motivating" people, and also adding his signature..."You're going to be doing a lot of (insert action here) WHEN YOU'RE LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!"
- Brass Eye features "Schools Heightened-Aversion Drug Therapy" (SHADT for short), a typically over-the-top parody of the concept. Children are taken to see a real drug addict to witness first-hand the effects of drugs, which would be reasonable were he not kept in a dungeon within the school specially designed for the purpose and made to wear a horse's head. Later (in a sequence eerily prescient of the California drink-driving scheme mentioned above) a girl is told that her parents died of drug overdose, going so far as to attend a mock funeral, before it's revealed that they were alive all along.
- The Weird Al Show had a ball reediting old classroom films about manners, dental hygiene, fire safety, etc. into cheerful mockeries of this trope. ("Run, run before the germs get you too!", "...and never let your dog drive the car," etc.)
- One Tree Hill had a fundraiser for one of the main characters to pay his bills after getting in a car wreck and being cut off from his parents' money. The only movies they found for the fundraiser were Driver's Ed reels like Red Asphault. Instead of being shocked and horrified, they just made popcorn and cheered during the movies.
Music
- Jonathan Coulton's song "Bacteria" is a Stupid Statement Dance Mix of a Kentucky Fried Chicken employee video about salmonella. The actors involved sound unbelievably earnest.
Newspaper Comics
- This is parodied in Calvin And Hobbes. For a school project, Calvin makes a traffic safety poster that says "Be Careful or be Roadkill" and paints the blood stains with spaghetti sauce to attract flies.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Spoofed, like so many other things, in The Simpsons: when Homer is required to take a driver's safety course after being arrested for drunk driving, the group is shown a particularly grisly safety film (hosted by Troy McClure, of course). While the rest of the class reacts with appropriate horror, Homer just laughs, remarking "It's funny 'cause I don't know him."
- In addition, that particular road safety film has a light, silly score, comedic sound effects, and Troy McClure providing commentary not unlike Bob Saget's on "America's Funniest Home Videos."
- Spoofed on Beavis And Butthead as the pair naturally laughs uproariously at the onscreen carnage ("Cool, his brain fell out!"), before getting into a car and reenacting the crash with the Driver's Ed teacher inside.
- A similar incident in an episode of Megas XLR. When Coop discovers that his license has expired and he's not going to be able to pick up his impounded giant robot car until he renews it, he goes, takes the boring driving safety course, watches the obnoxious video-then climbs in the car and starts running over the pedestrian-shaped cardboard cutouts, high-fiving Jamie and quipping, "Two hundred points!" He does, eventually, get his license renewed, mostly by pulling off all sorts of unconventional moves like bootleg turns and whatnot as he's amusing himself on the safety course, but pointing out to the terrified tester that he's doing so quite safely because he's a skilled driver and there's no need for all this hubbub over his driving skills. The tester gives him the license and begs him never to return.
- This is spoofed in Family Guy, where Peter, in order to promote non-littering, dresses and acts like a cross between a bloodthirsty panther and a mentally deranged gunman.
- Also in "Prick Up Your Ears." Abstinence education at the high school tells the students that having sex will cause all sorts of ridiculous consequences. This lesson leads to the students all doing it up the ears instead (no, really!) and an outraged Lois pointing out what "unnatural" results the Scare Em Straight tactics have caused. So yes, Family Guy used Scare Em Straight tactics about Scare Em Straight tactics.
- The Futurama episode "I Dated A Robot" has the Professor show Fry the film, "Don't Date Robots" which warns that the human race will become extinct if humans date robots.
- Justified somewhat in that this did nearly happen in Futurama's future-history.
- The film parodies PSAs where the proposed cause and effect are not clearly related; at first the protagonist becomes lazy and does nothing but make out with his robot; one would assume that the means of production would slowly fade away and everyone would starve to death. Instead, the Earth explodes with no explanation (moreover, this happens after the protagonist dies happily of old age, having spent his entire life making out... why shouldn't I date robots again?)
- It should be noted that it completely fails to Scare Fry Straight, and the Professor mentions he should have shown him "Electro-Gonnorhea: The Noisy Killer."
- South Park spoofed Duck and Cover by applying the same tactic to lava flows. Later, two men try it and get roasted.
- They later had a famous episode where parents paid a company to hire 30-year-old actors to play "future" versions of their kids. The "future" kids would show up and tell the shocked children how bad their lives were, thanks to marijuana. Stan and Kyle eventually figure all this out, of course, and confront their parents. Stan's dad responds with a speech that essentially said, "OK, look, if you smoke marijuana you almost certainly won't die or become a terrorist. But it has these legitimate problems, and I want you to have a better life than that." Stan sighs and says, "I really, really wish you had just told me that before."
- Rockos Modern Life had a driving safety film that had footage of crash tests with stacks of tomatoes with faces drawn on them as dummies, for that extra touch of realism.
- Parodied,horrifyingly,in this web animation,based off what could happen if Charlie,from Willy Wonka Andthe Chocolate Factory,and his grandfather didn't burp,when they were heading towards the fan.
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