Blood and Asphalt (Salon)

A new documentary pays tribute to "Signal 30," "Highways of Agony" and the other ghoulish, crudely made yet unforgettable driver-training films of the '60s and '70s.

Starting in 1959, a small Ohio production company began producing a series of films that continue to enjoy a reputation (if "enjoy" is the proper word) as some of the goriest, most psychological-scar-inducing motion pictures ever made in the United States. Many of them had no plot whatsoever, instead consisting of one graphic, blood-soaked image after another -- hideous corpses, crushed and mutilated bodies, people screaming helplessly in nightmarish agony. These films were not marketed to the gore-movie enthusiasts who haunted the grind houses of Times Square and other seedy urban districts of the period. Rather, they had titles like "Wheels of Tragedy" and "Highways of Agony," and were widely distributed throughout the American high school system by a company called the Highway Safety Foundation.