If you ever had to watch one of those horrifying “educational” films while taking a driving course, there’s a new film headed your way this August 5th. The new film Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films explores the traumatic films.
Here’s the description:
Produced between 1959 and 1979 in Mansfield, Ohio, films such as Signal 30 (1959) encouraged safety by force-feeding high school kids color footage of careless driving’s dark consequences: blood-stained wreckage, injured bodies, fresh corpses.
In the 1970s and ’80s, these traumatic films disappeared from the American classroom and assumed an almost mythical status. Eager to document this obscure chapter of cinema history, filmmaker and restorationist Bret Wood compiled these vanishing artifacts of grim Americana into a feature, and interviewed the filmmakers responsible for this misguided educational movement.
Originally produced in 2002 in standard-definition video, this new edition of Hell’s Highway has been reconstructed by Wood through the remastering of the original 16mm interview footage, as new restorations of the original educational films which appear throughout the documentary.
