Sometimes documentaries careen straight into horror territory. That’s certainly the case with macabre shockumentary Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films.
Kino Cult is bringing a new 2K restoration to US theaters on August 7, after it makes its World Premiere at the prestigious Festival Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna (Festival of Rediscovered Cinema).
Arguably featuring more authentic on-screen deaths than the original Faces of Death, Hell’s Highway isn’t for the squeamish despite its kitschy tone.
We’re exclusively unveiling the trailer for this morbid curiosity that aims to scare drivers straight with grisly depictions of highway-induced death.
Hell’s Highway is an “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.
“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 through the remastering of the original 16mm interview footage, as new restorations of the original educational films which appear throughout the documentary.
David Edelstein of Filmmaker Magazine called this “A Lynchian view of the nightmarish underbelly of middle America,” as seen in the new poster below, accurately describing this wild shockumentary that casts an unflinching eye on road death.
Buckle up.
