In 1954, Richard Wayman came upon an accident involving a train and a motorcycle. Wayman, who was a hobbyist photographer, helped the police by documenting the carnage. Wayman started appearing at car accident scenes with his camera clicking. This soon became his obsession and he was showing up more and more crash scenes.

Over the next 20 years, these pictures and movies put fear into drivers almost as bad communism and the atomic bomb. Some people called his films pornographic for the amount of death and carnage. But, he did made drivers take the safety of their vehicles seriously.

In 1958, Wayman and Vaughn started showing their photos to Ohio school groups. Soon they started to take movie cameras to the crash scenes and the greatest little film company was formed. Their Highway Safety Foundation film company puts Quentin Tarantino to shame when it comes to blood and guts. The first film was Signal 30 (Ohio State Highway Patrol for a fatality). It was tame compared subsequent releases. But, it had charred and bloodied bodies.

In 1961, Wayman followed up with Mechanized Death. This film has the best narration of any Wayman film with puns and ironic dark humor. The company would release many more driver education films and even branched out into anti-shoplifting, on the job safety and checking fraud.

The pinnacle of Wayman’s work is Wheels of Tragedy. This film uses actors to show how the crash happened and real accident footage to show the carnage. It was also one of the goriest.

By the mid 1970s, some of the carnage had been stopped thanks to safer vehicles with better brakes and padded dash boards. There is no real reason why Wayman’s company stopped making films. Maybe the American people were seeing enough carnage on the nightly news from Vietnam.

Today, with all of the digital cameras in the world this type of footage is making a comeback on video sharing sites. But, I think we need a Wayman to edit it together with  dead pan narration in order to scare the motoring public again.