Why Horror Films Turn the Open Road Into a Highway to Hell

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho devoted less than a sixth of its runtime to driving scenes, yet it became the founding text of road horror, reversing 170 years of romantic road imagery that began with Walt Whitman. That is the central argument of a new critical essay tracing how the horror genre exposes the automobile's promise of freedom as a mirage.

The essay opens with Whitman's "Song of the Open Road," first published in 1856 in the second edition of Leaves of Grass—three decades before Karl Benz invented the first gasoline-powered automobile. Car culture and cinema, the author notes, developed on parallel courses, and the open road became one of film's most iconic images: escape, adventure, individualism, freedom. In horror, those same highways "expose themselves as highways to hell."

What does Psycho reveal about escape?

The essay's anchor is Marion Crane, an unmarried woman in 1959 whose view of marriage—as she tells Sam Loomis, "When you're married you can do a lot of things deliberately"—frames her theft of $40,000 as a bid for liberty. Instead, her flight ends at the Bates Motel, fifteen miles from her destination, where Norman Bates delivers the genre's thesis: "We're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out."

The author's takeaway is blunt: no matter how far you drive, you can never escape yourself. Marion's guilt-filled voiceovers and the claustrophobic camerawork make her a trapped figure before any danger appears.

Is driving amnesia or schizophrenia?

David Lynch described Lost Highway as a "psychogenic fugue," echoing Jean Baudrillard's claim in America that "Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia." The essay counters that Baudrillard is only half-right. Driving instead produces a dual self—one attending to the road, one wandering through memories and hallucinations. "The mind creates its own traffic," the author writes.

Lynch's film becomes the model: ouroboric, beginning and ending with the same image of headlamps on broken lane lines. The road turns into a Möbius strip—linear movement that leads nowhere. The essay extends this to The Hitcher, Dust Devil, Passenger, Duel, and Dead End, where hitchhikers and vehicles appear and disappear as oneiric presences, and where distance flattens so pursuers always catch up.

Freud's "royal road to the unconscious" gets rerouted too: it leads only to the impossibility of arrival, what the author calls the "royal road to the un-understandable."

Cars, sex, and death

The essay's boldest claim: "The car is, first and foremost, a sex object." Freud's essay "Infantile Sexuality" linked railway travel and sexual pleasure; Henry Ford's mass-produced Model T gave young people private space away from parents and helped usher in the sexual revolution.

Baudrillard's The System of Objects supplies the key distinction: we say "my brakes" and "my steering wheel" but never "my hooves." The car is a machine concerned "not with having but with being"—a cyborgian prosthesis. John Carpenter's Christine literalizes this as narcissistic projection; Arnie Cunningham desires in Christine an idealized version of himself. The auto-erotic, the author concludes, is always autoerotic.

David Cronenberg's Crash and Julia Ducournau's Titane push the logic further. Robert Vaughan's cult of crash survivors, recreating celebrity collisions, calls the car crash "a fertilizing rather than a destructive event." The accident must be repeated: the closer the proximity to death, the more pleasurable the living.

Rearview mirror diplomacy

Richard Franklin's Road Games—a loose Rear Window remake set on Australia's Nullarbor Plain Highway—reframes voyeurism for the road. Truck driver Patrick Quid is mobile yet confined; the road's neighborhood is provisional, its travelers constantly overtaking or falling behind. Spielberg's Duel dramatizes the nightmare of failed road reciprocity: a faceless trucker whose road rage becomes machine-like menace.

The essay closes by conceding Whitman one point—the road does offer realization. But in horror, what is realized is the "always-already-terror" waiting beyond the headlamps: "Think you're escaping and run into this vacancy. It is the vacancy in you; you are the vacancy in it."