From the Question of Soul to a Carnival of Souls: The Truncated Road Film, Gothic Automobiles, and Dangerous Women Drivers

This article argues for a revision of conceptual and historical mappings of the American road film through a rereading of Herk Harvey’s cult classic Carnival of Souls (1962) and the era’s slew of highway safety productions, related literature, and institutional practice. It suggests that the genre of the road film began with a trio of movies in the early 1960s, including Psycho (1960) and The Haunting (1963), as well as Harvey’s film, which exposed and dramatized historical anxieties about the “dangers” of women appropriating the freedoms and pleasures of the open road connected to car culture.