Sid Davis, a prolific educational filmmaker of the 1950s and ’60s whose cautionary movies — from “The Dangerous Stranger” to “The Bottle and the Throttle” — sought to terrify an entire generation of young people into straitlaced middle-class obedience, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 90.

The cause was lung cancer, his family said.

A former Hollywood stand-in for John Wayne, Mr. Davis was considered one of the foremost practitioners of the social-hygiene film. Originally underwritten by Mr. Wayne, Mr. Davis’s work took on a range of subjects that most educational filmmakers considered taboo: sex, drugs, alcohol, rape and molestation.

Mr. Davis lost count of all the films he made, but there seem to have been at least 150, perhaps as many as 200. His best-known titles, familiar to legions of baby boomers, include “The Terrible Truth” (about marijuana); “Name Unknown” (juvenile delinquency); “Why Take Chances?” (flying kites in rainstorms and other heedless acts); “Girls Beware” (sex) and “Seduction of the Innocent” (marijuana, barbiturates and general depravity).

The movies are squarely in the tradition of cautionary literature for children, whose best-known example is probably “Struwwelpeter,” the German tale of the dreadful fate of a dreadful child, which has been traumatizing young miscreants since the mid-19th-century. Mr. Davis’s films, most live-action, some animated, are 16-millimeter equivalents. They are small mirrors of postwar anxiety in an age when juvenile delinquency was perceived as a looming threat.

The Sid Davis universe is fraught with peril. Every transgression — a swig from a bottle, a drag on a cigarette — leads to swift and certain doom, usually in under a half-hour. Among the series of unfortunate events to which Mr. Davis’s young protagonists fall victim are these: abduction, murder, rape, stabbing, robbery at gunpoint, falling off a cliff, suffocating in an abandoned refrigerator, being burned to a crisp, being stuffed into the trunk of a car, being run over, pregnancy, venereal disease, unemployment, time in pool halls, time in prison, myriad auto accidents, heroin addiction (a direct result of smoking marijuana), prostitution (ditto) and bad hair (ditto).

Even by the standards of independent filmmaking, Mr. Davis’s budgets were minuscule. He made several of his early pictures for just $1,000 apiece. He directed and photographed most of his work himself, featuring friends, family members and local police officers in the cast.

To modern audiences, Mr. Davis’s work can look like high camp. Some of his films have aged strikingly badly, in particular “Boys Beware,” which warns of the dangers of child molestation at the hands of roving, predatory homosexuals. (Mr. Davis played one of them in a brief cameo.)

But a few films have artistic merit even now, Rick Prelinger, a historian of nontheatrical films, said in a telephone interview yesterday. Among them, he said, are “Gang Boy,” made with real gang members and notable for its social realism and fantastic dream sequences. He also cited “Age 13,” about a youth growing up poor in Southern California. Both films were directed by Arthur Swerdloff.

Sidney Davis was born in Chicago on April 1, 1916, the son of a housepainter and a seamstress. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1920, and as a boy, Sid found work as an extra in Hollywood films. To help support his parents, he dropped out of school in junior high. (Mr. Davis would later make “The Dropout,” cautioning against just such a course of action.)

From 1941 to 1952, Mr. Davis, a strapping man of over 6 feet, worked as Mr. Wayne’s stand-in. He became a filmmaker in 1950, after his young daughter, Jill, seemed unimpressed by parental warnings about strangers. Borrowing the money from Mr. Wayne, Mr. Davis made “The Dangerous Stranger,” in which several children accept rides and are never heard from again.

His other films include “Vandalism,” “Gossip,” “Too Young to Burn,” “What Made Sammy Speed?,” “Say No to Strangers!,” “ABCs of Walking Wisely,” “Alcohol Is Dynamite” and “Keep Off the Grass.”

Mr. Davis’s wife, the former Norma Henkins, whom he married in 1941, died in 1996. He is survived by his companion, Shirley Friesen, and one grandson.

Also surviving is Mr. Davis’s daughter, Jill Davis, who as a child was shown being impaled by an errant pair of scissors in “Live and Learn.”