Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003)
Director: Bret Wood Run Time: 91 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2003
Starring: David Krug, Earle Deems, Eric Krug, John P. Butler, John R. Domer
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
Produced between 1959 and 1979 in Mansfield, Ohio, films such as Signal 30 (1959), Wheels of Tragedy (1963) and Mechanized Death (1961) encouraged safe driving by force-feeding high school kids color footage of careless driving’s dark consequences: blood-stained wreckage, injured bodies, fresh corpses.
Eager to investigate this obscure chapter of cinema history, filmmaker and restorationist Bret Wood compiled these vanishing artifacts of grim Americana into a feature, and interviewed those responsible for this misguided educational movement.
About the filmmaker:
Bret Wood is an American filmmaker with an interest in film preservation and championing underrepresented filmmakers. After completing his first film, Hell’s Highway, in 2003, Wood wrote and directed several narrative features, including Psychopathia Sexualis (2006), The Unwanted (2014), and Those Who Deserve to Die (2019). He is the co-author of the book Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film, and he also wrote and directed two podcast dramas for iHeart Media: The Control Group (2018, 2024) and The Seventh Daughter (2020).
As SVP and Producer of Archival Restorations for Kino Lorber, Wood has produced the releases of The Complete Oscar Micheaux, The Jewish Soul: Classics of Yiddish Cinema, Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, and such noteworthy LGBTQ+ films as Pat Rocco’s Drifter, The Queen, and Kamikaze Hearts. For the acclaimed Pioneers of African American Cinema collection, Wood won the Film Heritage Award from the National Society of Film Critics.
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