Highway to Hell is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus, who entered Hades to bring his dead wife, the nymph Eurydice, back to life. There are two main changes in this telling of the story. First, Orpheus used the beauty of his singing and lyre playing (he was the son of a muse) to charm the guards of hell, Charon and Cerberus, and to persuade Hades to release Eurydice, while the hero of the movie uses a big gun and powerful car. Second, the Greek myth is tragic -- Orpheus was warned not to look back at Eurydice as they left the underworld. He did; she was kept back; and he himself died soon afterward. In this telling, the happy couple escapes Hell.
It might be an interesting project for a film student to compare the story to other film versions of the myth -- among others, there is a film of Offenbach's opera "Orpheus in the Underworld," a 1990 movie called "Shredder Orpheus" whose IMDB plot summary is, "Skateboarder named Orpheus and friends go to Hell to stop television signals that are brainwashing America," and two great classics, Jean Cocteau's Orphee (1949) and Marcel Camus's Orfeo Negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), set in Rio's carnival.
It might be an interesting project for a film student to compare the story to other film versions of the myth -- among others, there is a film of Offenbach's opera "Orpheus in the Underworld," a 1990 movie called "Shredder Orpheus" whose IMDB plot summary is, "Skateboarder named Orpheus and friends go to Hell to stop television signals that are brainwashing America," and two great classics, Jean Cocteau's Orphee (1949) and Marcel Camus's Orfeo Negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), set in Rio's carnival.