Signal 30
Stella sends a wonderful link to the classic 1959 driver safety film “Signal 30″. Watch in shock and horror as mangled bodies of inattentive drivers are pulled from their massive hunks of twisted metal!! It’s a splendid way to spend a half-hour! (There are two parts – it should automatically start part 2 once you’ve finished part 1.)
Incidentally, I thought I’d post an old review of one of my favorite ghastly books: Car
Crashes and Other Sad Stories.
Car Crashes and Other Sad Stories
Text by Jennifer Dumas
Photos by Mell Kilpatrick
This is the perfect book for the ambulance chaser in all of us: a collection of car crash photos from the 40′s and 50′s. There’s something deeply tragic about these stark black and white images of destruction. It’s fascinating to try and piece together these shattered lives from the scant clues available – the letters strewn beside a well-dressed corpse, the cans of beer strewn from an overturned and demolished car – or, if you’re morbid like moi, you might try and figure out exactly how the bodies came to lie in those odd positions. Of course, in these days prior to seat belts, bodies flew every which way, so the variations are really quite amazing.
More ghastly books available from The Library Eclectica‘s Ghastly Gore aisle.
On a similar tip to the _Car Crashes_ book, have you ever seen Negativland’s book/CD _Deathsentences of the Polished & Structurally Weak_? It’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done, and, well, I just about adore almost everything they’ve ever done. The CD isn’t the thrust of the project — though it’s not bad, it’s not sample-based, and really noisy, so something different than you’d expect from them — the book is.
The book is a collection of photos; they went to junk yards, and took photographs of car wrecks, then looked in the wrecks for detritus of their previous owners. The layout is the car on the left page of the spread, the item on the right, along with a transcription of what it says (as random people’s handwriting is often hard enough to read when it’s not on crumpled paper taken from old, wrecked cars). It’s REALLY cool — I highly recommend checking it out.
I have a book called “Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook,” which is a facsimile copy of a VERY gruesome photo album kept by a Los Angeles detective during the late 1940s – mid 1950s. Quite fascinating, but profoundly disturbing (esp. the pictures of dead children). Anyway, there are a number of car wreck photos in it, including at least one in which the driver was decapitated. Apparently this was not uncommon in the days before seatbelts. The head or heads in all photos are “standing” in the road — that is, the stump of the neck is on the ground. It looks almost as though the victim were buried up to the neck in asphalt. This has led me to wonder if a freely-tumbling severed head has a tendency to land right-side up…? Does anyone have data on this? As a writer who sometimes writes horror, this would be a useful gruesome fact to know.
Additional images, recently discovered Kilpatrick images and article (Weegee of the West)
http://dulltooldimbulb.blogspot.com/2009/08/mell-kilpatrick-weegee-of-west-and.html
@Jim Thank you for sharing this. I just added it as a main post so no one would miss it!
@Nicholas Dollak Death Scenes is another amazing book – one of my favorites – and I am well aware of the photo you mention. However, I can’t say that I am aware of a study to that effect. Perhaps you should start one?
@Rev. Syung Myung Me This sounds awesome. I will have to post this on the main page too. Thank you for sharing this.