PopHorror Let's Get Scared
When I entered high school, I got to see my first “mock accident,” Where there was a drunk driving accident on our football field. They brought in Medivac and more; it was a super uncomfortable feeling. The rest of the day was absurd. We at Grim Reaperock funeral, where parents who lost their child gave a heartbreaking speech. That’s not all; they also found a creepy grim reaper who tapped people on their shoulders. Boom, they had pale makeup and black eyes. I would have much preferred videos featured in Hell’s Highway.
Synopsis
Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films is a morbidly curious exploration of the near mythical driver education films shown to American schoolchildren in the 1960s and ‘70s. 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.
Maybeline, You Got Me Killed
Faces of Death was nothing compared to those 1950s driver’s ed classes. We were lucky that at least our generation wasn’t that morbid. It’s like being in public, driving past your first accident, with a sheet over it, and finally realizing what that meant. That’s enough of a sobering thought. How about we add some headless accident or someone being crushed by a car? It was the Wild West of school changes, and as the years passed, these movies were long forgotten. Hell’s Highway laughs in the face of every queasy viewer, and it does nothing but show accident scenes for someone’s amusement, or even worse, an actual classroom video.
These films, however, terrified people like your grandparents, leaving the air thick with one big upset stomach just so you panic behind the wheel, these visions still in your head, but for the wrong reasons. Hell’s Highway doesn’t stop there; we are taken across various scenarios just to upset us as parents and put targets on our children’s backs. Some of the segments carried just that subject, with eerie and vague descriptions of someone’s terror, knowing this is the last time they could see the people they loved, it hits a certain chord, because of being a dad myself. I don’t want to feel that way through a learning experience such as this.
In The End
In the end, I always found these situations comical, mainly from The Simpsons or Mr. Bill. There was always some kind of chaos throughout the episode, which attracted us even more to these things. I was the last generation to be desensitized at a really young age. Maybe we were just used to tragedies, having lived through school shootings or “Disgruntled Mailmen” by the 0’s these videos were long gone, replaced with something more classroom-friendly. I say give me more gory death photos because I am just weird like that. Some people choose to be more subtle and a bit frightened.
I say bring it on.
Hell’s Highway is making a comeback due to some flashy bells and whistles that gore hounds raised a flag for.
