Wood has written several books about the history of horror films. He compares the way an unpolished film like "Signal 30" gets under the audience's skin to the impact of legendary low-budget '60s horror movies like Herk Harvey's "Carnival of Souls" or George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." It doesn't seem like an accident that both Harvey and Romero got their directorial training while working for industrial film outfits in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

In "Hell's Highway," Wood interviews the two surviving members of the HSF creative team, John Domer and Earle Deems, and it's tough to reconcile this pair of ordinary-looking, mild-mannered seniors with the lurid films that made their company famous.

"They were really tough nuts to crack," says Wood. "I ask them what it felt like walking around in the middle of the night on this broken glass -- was the mood quiet and somber or were there sirens going, what did it smell like, what did it feel like -- and they'd just say, 'Well, I was too busy just trying to keep the picture focused.' I couldn't get any sort of feeling from them at all, much less explore the psychological foundation of the films or what effect they might be having on kids. I really couldn't get them to open up and talk about the deeper meaning of their films. They just seemed to think it was a strong safety message for kids and left it at that."

By the 1970s, the Highway Safety Foundation seemed poised to explode into the big time. The foundation had begun making a broad range of police training films (including an incredibly disturbing 1964 picture called "The Child Molester"), publishing safety pamphlets and brochures and even making plans to open driving academies in Ohio, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania. When Jimmy Hoffa testified before Congress in 1966 on the subject of highway safety, Time magazine ran a picture of him holding a print of the HSF production "Carrier or Killer." In 1973, Sammy Davis Jr. became the HSF's enthusiastic celebrity spokesman, allowing ghostwritten articles to appear under his name in newspapers across the country.

It was that association with Davis that helped sink the company, however. In May 1973, the singer agreed to round up a gang of his celebrity buddies (including Muhammad Ali, Paul Anka, Jerry Lewis, Rich Little, Mel Tillis and Ben Vereen) for a Highway Safety Foundation telethon. The telethon brought in $1.2 million in pledges, but the expense of putting it on stretched the HSF's resources to the breaking point, especially when Davis demanded that the foundation double the number of stations carrying the broadcast. When only $525,000 in actual pledges were collected, Wayman's company was left financially hobbled for the rest of the decade.

Wood feels the HSF's days were numbered, even if the telethon had been a success. "Within five years they would have had to change the types of films they were making," he says. "They made a couple of movies after the telethon, but the movement had definitely lost its steam and their style of educational film was definitely going out of favor. With the advent of video, schools had started junking their 16-millimeter prints and buying new educational materials. The stuff that was available on video tended to be the kinder, gentler types of drivers' ed films. All these 'death on the highway' films got shoved in the closet or just thrown away."

You can see how much times have changed, Wood says, by watching "Signal 30: Part II," which the Ohio Department of Public Safety produced in 2002. It abandons the HSF's trademark unflinching depictions of severed limbs and broken bodies and instead uses "Cops"-style digital blurring to shield audiences from any images they might find upsetting.

Wood has his doubts about the long-term effectiveness of the HSF's approach to driver safety -- he figures most people who saw its films probably drove more safely for a week -- but he does respect the eccentric integrity of Wayman and company's vision and the sincerity with which they went about expressing it. Wood's film honors that integrity by downplaying the camp value of these clumsy old movies and expressing an honest interest in this peculiar corner of American pop culture.

"I didn't want to trivialize what they were doing," Wood says. "And the last thing I wanted to do was make fun of seeing someone's dead body. It's very easy in our ironic age to poke fun at something and let it go at that. But there's more to these films than bad acting and gross-out images. I think they're powerful, creepy little films. Something happened here cinematically that was kind of ahead of its time, and you can't just laugh them off."

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