Death Is a Highway

Some of horror’s most memorable monsters travel by road. As seen in the Highway Horror collection I have programmed for the Criterion Channel, automobiles can function as death traps, murder weapons, and, in some cases, even sentient killers. In many ways, the films in this lineup represent the road movie’s evil twin. If that latter genre stands for the promise of what can be found on the open highway, these movies represent the threat of what’s barreling down the other side of the road.

In tracing the evolution of this subgenre, there is perhaps no film more important than Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971). Made for television when the director was only twenty-four years old, the film dedicates most of its run time to the high-speed cat-and-mouse game between a psychotic gasoline truck driver and a commuter (Dennis Weaver) who has the audacity to pass him on a desert road. Duel is a tremendous feat of low-budget filmmaking, turning a filthy truck into one of horror’s great monsters (anticipating both Jaws and The Terminator as similarly single-minded killing machines) and creating a template for fight-for-your-life survival stories on the highway. What makes the film so effective is how unrelenting the truck driver is in his attempts to run Weaver off the road without any rational motive (all while remaining a faceless character), and Spielberg is similarly relentless in choreographing the action for sustained suspense in what is essentially a feature-length chase. Duel not only jumpstarted its  director’s career, it opened up the possibilities for vehicular terror on-screen and spawned many imitators over the next few decades.