The following notes on The Hitcher were written by Josh Martin, the Cinematheque’s Project Assistant and a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison. A 35mm print of The Hitcher will screen on Halloween, Friday, October 31, in the Cinematheque’s regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Josh Martin
Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (1986) begins with the imposing nocturnal darkness of an empty desert highway. Young Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) is cruising down a West Texas road in a drive-away Cadillac, humming along smoothly as he takes this vehicle to its owner in San Diego. The lights of Jim’s car—paired with the lone cigarette dangling between his lips—provide just about the only illumination in this wasteland, a space that is haunting in its desolation, where the eerie, nearly alien nighttime ambience makes it feel even more devoid of life than it would in the light of day. Confronted with this abyss of total darkness, Jim finds himself struggling to stay awake, eyes slowly closing as he barrels headfirst into a waking nightmare. After drifting into the other lane and nearly colliding with a semi-truck, the sight of a hitchhiker on the side of the road, thumb pointed westward, seems like divine salvation for Jim. After all, what could be better than a little company on a lonely night, a friend on the road to help him stay alert, staving off the temptation of slumber? “My mother told me never to do this,” the boyish Jim nervously exclaims to this anonymous stranger, seemingly both relieved by the sight of another human being and anxious about the man he’s inviting into his car.
That fear is well-earned: the titular hitcher in question is John Ryder (Rutger Hauer), and from the moment he appears on screen, there is never a doubt about his sinister intentions. Hauer’s killer exudes menace—he is an avatar of almost superhuman evil. Quickly, Jim learns that Ryder has murdered another driver, leaving him dead after severing his limbs. Before he can even come to grips with what’s happening, Ryder has a knife at Jim’s neck, recounting the ways in which he has seen human beings perish. “What do you want?” Jim pleads. Ryder’s reply is chilling and to the point: “I want you to stop me.” For the next 90 minutes, Jim will attempt to do just that. Where most of Ryder’s victims seem to have just rolled over and accepted their punishment, Jim refuses. “I don’t want to die!” he screams as he abruptly launches Ryder from his vehicle, bellowing with joy as he drives away, celebrating his narrow escape from the angel of death. But what Jim believes is the end of this story is only the beginning: as Harmon’s camera pushes in on Ryder, rising from the asphalt and gazing forward, it’s clear that this demon of the desert has finally found a formidable opponent to pursue.
The Hitcher was the brainchild of screenwriter Eric Red, perhaps best known for co-writing a pair of screenplays—1987’s Near Dark and 1990’s Blue Steel—with director Kathryn Bigelow. As a profile in the Los Angeles Times from the film’s release recounts, Red sent a notice to various Hollywood executives asking them to read The Hitcher—which ran a whopping 190 pages in length at the time. In this letter, Red offered a showman’s braggadocious sales pitch, stating that, “When you read [The Hitcher], you will not sleep for a week. When the movie is made, the country will not sleep for a week.” Producer David Bombyk found “a level of challenge, intensity and poetry” in Red’s script and took a gamble on the film with Kip Ohman, recruiting first-time director Robert Harmon to helm the picture. However, the film’s violent screenplay (by all accounts a significant measure grislier than the finished film) proved prohibitive to finding a studio home for The Hitcher. Eventually, HBO and Silver Screen Partners agreed to make the film after some script adjustments, with TriStar releasing it in theaters via a preexisting distribution deal. While The Hitcher contains elements of slasher-style exploitation (a torture/murder sequence with a truck proved to be the source of much consternation), its creators believed the film to be more accurately classified as a suspense vehicle—a “Hitchcockian-type thriller,” in the words of Ohman. The Hitchcock influence extends far beyond the suggestive obscuration of violence. The Hitcher’s narrative is a classic Wrong Man plot, in which Jim is blamed for Ryder’s rampage of violence and forced to go on the run with Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a diner waitress convinced of his innocence. Likewise, consider the quintessentially Hitchcockian mistrust of authority coursing through the film, with nearly every officer and Texas Ranger haplessly off-base and behind the curve.
Despite the purposeful toning down of Red’s script, the evocation of Hitchcock, and the elision of more graphic violence, there was no pleasing all viewers upon the film’s release. Noted horror film skeptic Roger Ebert described the film as “diseased and corrupt,” a “reprehensible” excursion with violence indicative of a “deep sickness.” While Harmon recently highlighted Ebert’s 0-star pan as a particularly venomous response, Gene Siskel and Janet Maslin were no kinder in their assessments. The film was treated as precisely what Bombyk believed it not to be: an exercise in cheap, brutal thrills, with little on its mind beyond hurtling toward its next gory kill. Yet like many horror gems from an era in which mainstream critics seemed to have little appetite for the genre’s pleasures and idiosyncrasies, The Hitcher has found a significant following in the years since its debut, an audience wiser to Red and Harmon’s loftier psychological ambitions and seductive artistry.
Without discounting Howell’s impressive work—his wide-eyed expressiveness communicates the full spectrum of Jim’s fraught experiences throughout the film, from sheer terror to profound helplessness—it is Hauer’s sweaty, gleefully monstrous turn as the malevolent Ryder that lingers after the credits roll. Director Christopher Nolan, perhaps The Hitcher’s most famous fan, singles out Hauer’s performance and the “mind-bendingly arbitrary” narrative in his appreciation of the picture. Indeed, the influence of Ryder on Heath Ledger’s famed rendition of the Joker in the director’s The Dark Knight (2008) is apparent. When Ryder is arrested late in the film (only to, of course, escape), the befuddled Captain Esteridge (Jeffrey DeMunn) acknowledges that they have nothing on him: “No prison record. No driver’s license. No birth certificate. We ran his prints… we came up with nothing.” One can see a clear echo of this dialogue exchange in the very similar catch-and-escape sequence at the center of Nolan’s film, which positions the Clown Prince as a mysterious force rather than a rational human being. Add in the characters’ mutual predilection for elaborate moral quandaries and nihilistic button-pushing, and it suddenly becomes easy to draw a straight line from Ryder to twenty-first century pop cinema’s iconic figure of senseless chaos.
Yet even as Ryder has endured and morphed into new cinematic forms, it is the relationship between Ryder and Halsey—this endless cat-and-mouse pursuit—that forms the crux of The Hitcher as a propulsive chase movie. “There’s something strange going on between the two of you,” Esteridge acknowledges to a determined Jim as the film nears its end, “I don’t know what it is, I don’t wanna know.” Much has been made of the characters’ psychic link: Ebert argued that the film renders allegorical this “sadomasochistic” relationship, while other critics have more closely interrogated and made explicit the hints of homoeroticism between Ryder and Halsey. Harmon and Red are almost begging their audience to interpret, to read into the film’s images. But if the Hitchcock comparison rings true, The Hitcher also works as a kind of pure cinema, a cosmic clash of good and evil that feels as elemental and primal as its apocalyptically barren and expansive desert setting.