Basic Trope: A PSA that uses scary or violent imagery to push its message.
- Straight: The movie Danger on the Road teaches a Safe Driving Aesop. It mainly showcases violent footage of car accidents to encourage student drivers to pay attention.
- Exaggerated: Danger on the Road is loaded with Gorn-filled footage of people being disfigured or losing limbs from car accidents, family members grieving, and painful medical procedures that said drivers had to go through afterwards.
- Downplayed: Danger on the Road tells you that you could get into an accident or be injured if you're goofing off behind the wheel, but doesn't go further.
- Justified: Truth in Television; there are PSAs that do rely on violent footage.
- Inverted:
- Hooray for Safe Driving! showcases a student driver behaving nicely and driving well, then getting rewarded with ice cream.
- Danger on the Road doesn't even mention that car accidents happen, and simply says that everyone is a safe driver.
- Subverted: While the movie does show situations that'll lead to accidents, it cuts away or uses Relax-o-Vision before the actual collisions.
- Double Subverted: We do see the aftermath, though, and it's not pretty.
- Parodied: None of the violence shown is actually related to car accidents. The PSA itself admits that it just wanted to show you gross stuff.
- Zig-Zagged: Some of the violent footage is censored, while the rest of it is uncut. And it ends on a happy note, reminding people that if we all do our part, the roads will be safer than ever.
- Averted:
- Driving Safely is a video that simply outlines some standard rules of driving with no description of accidents or injury.
- Driving Safely briefly calls attention to the fact that driving can be dangerous, but it puts much more of a focus on how to prevent accidents, and doesn't show any scary/violent imagery.
- Enforced: The staff behind Danger on the Road really want their viewers to understand a moral, so they put scarring visuals in it.
- Lampshaded: "Pay attention behind the wheel, or you could end up like those victims!"
- Invoked: Mary has to teach Cecil how to drive. She intentionally gives him a violent PSA to watch.
- Exploited: Mary doesn't want Cecil driving, so she uses a violent PSA to scare him out of it.
- Defied: Mary chooses a safe, more tame driving video for Cecil to watch.
- Discussed: "Doesn't violent imagery tend to show up a lot in PSAs?"
- Conversed:
- "You ever see Danger on the Road? Pure Nightmare Fuel!"
- "After watching Danger on the Road, I really don't want to drive while distracted... honestly, I'm not even sure I wanna drive at all anymore."
- Deconstructed:
- Danger on the Road tends to either put people off of driving entirely, to their detriment, or desensitise them and make them more likely to drive recklessly as they refuse to take the scaremongering seriously.
- Some decide to take matters into their own hands, and explicitly go and personally brutalize anyone they think will be inclined to disagree with their PSA. It works too well, making the people so terrified and broken that they either end up hiding away completely from the world, or commit suicide out of sheer paranoid terror of being harmed for doing "the wrong thing".
- Played for Laughs: Danger on the Road is a Black Comedy safety PSA parody akin to Forklift Driver Klaus, and it shows the characters dying in over-the-top Bloody Hilarious ways.
Don't click on the link back to Scare 'Em Straight, or you'll end up like ol' Alice and Bob, stuck clicking links for all eternity!
