eldritchhobbit

I don't usually watch horror movies, but I love reading your reviews anyway!

I just learned that people outside the U.S. and Canada do NOT grow up watching scary "don't do that" movies in school, which I never realized. In the course of learning more about a phenomenon I only recently realized was curious rather than normal (which is weird in itself!), I saw a reference that struck me as fascinating.

The wiki on "Signal 30" (the granddaddy of Driver's Ed movies like "Mechanized Death") lists an article on found footage horror movies as one of its sources. (Unfortunately, the article itself isn't linked.) It never occurred to me that our childhood/teenage nonfiction nightmare-inducers might have influenced a fictional genre!

[Less interesting from a horror-genre perspective, but very interesting from a real life perspective--another article, this one on the BBC claimed that such movies influenced car-safety requirements more effectively--because more viscerally--than other attempts at persuasion.]

BTW, I was extraordinarily lucky in that regard--while I saw my share of "don't do that" movies in school, I transferred high schools between sophomore and junior year, which resulted in my missing the Driver's Ed movie experience. Thank goodness!