The scariest thing I saw on television as a child was an episode of the animated G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero in which seemingly solid characters melt into a purplish ooze. I learn now, on the interwebs, that the episode was a Twilight Zone-inspired two-parter called “There’s No Place Like Springfield,” and that my terror as an 8- or 9-year-old was shared by many.
The cartoon violence I could handle, but a stable person suddenly dissolving into nothing? For my developing mind, that was a bridge too far. The episode would forever be referred to, in my household, as “the melty one,” and whenever it appeared in syndication, my parents quickly found something else to divert my attention over avant-school pancakes.
Would that I’d have attended a middle or high school in the 1960s, I might have been better primed to handle a case of animated melting. Back then, as the sobering 2003 documentary Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (Kino, $30.57 Blu-ray, $20.97 DVD) revisits, students in classrooms across America were subjected to some of the most graphic visuals ever forced upon their uncorrupted optic nerves in the guise of driver-education films. Mangled cars and mangled humans — faces charred beyond recognition, brains literally spilling onto the concrete — beamed from 16mm projectors in faded, splotchy, torn prints, which must have made the experience all the more voyeuristically lurid: the snuff film as a public service.
The footage, most of it of a genuine documentary nature, was obtained by photographers and videographers notified by the sheriff’s department of Mansfield, Ohio — the nexus of Highway Safety Films, the company the produced the shock docs — in the immediate aftermath of a traffic accident. There are no good actors, reads the pulpy disclaimer before one such docu-short, “only bad actors who received top billing only on a tombstone.”
Bert Wood, the unblinking director of Hell’s Highway, shows us enough of these clips to allow us to get the gist, supplemented by historical, sociological, and psychological analysis from key interviewees in the business of this darkest corner of educational cinema. We meet John Domer, a first responder of sorts, who has no regrets about his role in documenting smoldering crash sites for the first of Highway Safety Films’ shorts, such as Signal 30 and Mechanized Death, as well as a colleague of Richard Wayman, the puritanical, and by some accounts hypocritical, Ohio impresario behind Highway Safety Films. Mike Vraney, an expert in exploitation cinema who reissued the shorts on video, explains how they become cultish talismans for a certain type of cinephile, and a form of “high camp.”
The best takes are from Richard Prelinger, a historian of social guidance films, who situates the Highway Safety series in a continuum of postwar “youth panic” bromides intended to scare teenagers straight: from drugs, from sex and from reckless driving, all threats to the filmmakers’ imagined Mayberry. The producers even coined a term, “teenicide,” in which hedonistic young drivers’ befouled minds and bodies lead them to perish behind the wheel, James Dean-style. It’s repeated ad nauseam in these early films, like an effective radio jingle.
Prelinger is right to point out the insidious motives of Highway Safety Films — to shift the blame for car accidents away from vehicle manufacturers and onto inept, altered, distracted or ill-trained drivers. Ralph Nader’s landmark Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile is never mentioned in Hell’s Highway, but I thought of the book often while following Wood’s narrative. Nader published his treatise in 1965, and within a year, the U.S. had created the United States Department of Transportation; within five years we had the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It’s no coincidence that the grisly crashes documented in Hell’s Highway, in which cars and people are mutilated beyond comprehension, are seldom if ever seen anymore. It’s hard to scare young drivers straight with video of impacted bumpers, deployed air bags and seatbelt rashes.
And so these hallucinatory fever dreams of unsafe driving receded from American culture by the ’70s and ’80s. Highway Safety Films itself eventually went bottoms up after an ill-fated traffic-safety telethon, organized by Richard Wayman and hosted by Sammy Davis Jr., left the company $5 million in debt. By then, as Wood documents in the least interesting passages of Hell’s Highway, the company had expanded its scope beyond traffic accidents to target sexual deviance (read: gay men’s hookups in public restrooms), shoplifting and even the writing of bad checks. Its morbid visionaries had run out of gas.
Most of Wood’s subjects agree that the violence of the ambient everyday — video games, slasher films, the news and now social media — has desensitized us to the bloody scare tactics of Highway Safety Films. But even at the time, as others in Wood’s documentary reflect, the shorts were as ineffective as later ad campaigns like “Just Say No.” These days, the hectoring narration of these films, inevitably delivered by stentorious white men with mid-Atlantic accents, places them in the same category as Reefer Madness — curios that, surely to the chagrin of the families whose victims bled out onscreen, exist largely for our ironic amusement.