Amid the still-evolving terror of the early HIV/AIDS crisis, Ken Camp’s 1984 trance-slasher film Highway Hypnosis asks something prescient: Could the impression of death be scarier than the real thing? Following a serial killer driving the monotonous desert stretch between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Camp uses the highway and its car-wheel soundtrack as a chloroform rag. The exhaustive present—necessary alertness in a world of cold war conservatism and mass governmental neglect—becomes a cudgel for peak horror as the viewer drifts into submission. The murders blend together with the scenery, a slow collage of oversaturation and vacancy.

Like the film Cruising —released three years earlier to massive community protests around homophobic representation— Highway Hypnosis took inspiratio

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