The Hitcher (1986)

The mad hitchhiker film didn’t start with The Hitcher, but that didn’t stop it from leaving an indelible mark on the subgenre. Prior to its release, there had been 1947’s The Devil Thumbs a Ride, the similarly titled film from 1953, The Hitch-hiker, and, to some extent, the 1963 exploitation chiller, The Sadist. There’s even a made-for-TV movie named Night Terror that touches on a similar storyline, though with more of a rationale for the killer. Beyond these films, there have always been decades of stories, some perhaps urban legends, about the dangers of picking up strangers in one’s car in the middle of nowhere. Everyone had heard of a story of a psychopath who did all manner of foul deeds once he had access to someone alone in the confines of their vehicle with no easy means of escape.

The beginnings for the idea for The Hitcher started back in 1983, when struggling screenwriter, Eric Red, was relocating and driving cross-country in a drive-away car from New York to Los Angeles. He was bored and picked up a hitchhiker while traveling en route to Austin, Texas, but immediately began to regret his decision, as his new passenger was edgy, unclean, and kept staring at him unnervingly without talking back. Spurred on by those sordid stories of hitchhiking gone awry, he asked the hitchhiker to get out and hoped that he would. Completely broke, Red stuck it out in Austin and work as a cab driver until he could save up enough, where he began to work on the screenplay in his off hours, spinning off from his unease and feeling of vulnerability at the experience of having a complete stranger in his car, wondering what might have happened had the hitchhiker refused to step out. As he worked on the story idea, he was inspired by the classic song by The Doors, “Riders on the Storm” for its atmospheric qualities and intensity, especially the lyrics, “There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin’ like a toad…If you give this man a ride / Sweet family will die / Killer on the road.”

Once completed, he began sending out his pitch for the movie to every Hollywood producer he could get a mailing address for, which amounted to hundreds of recipients, to which he would send a copy of the script if they showed any interest. The pitch included the irresistible promise, “When you read it, you will not sleep for a week. When the movie is made, the country will not sleep for a week”.  One interested party was producer Edward S. Feldman, who handed over the pitch to his executive in charge of script development, David Bombyk, who asked for the script. Bombyk liked the story idea but considered Red’s screenplay draft to be far too gruesome and cruel to make for a commercial hit, and at 190 pages in length, it was twice as long as it needed to be. He, along with producer and uncredited scriptwriter Kip Ohman, worked with Red via phone calls (initially) and then in person when Red made his way to L.A., in order to get it into the kind of shape that would allow them to move forward with getting it made into a film. Once they finished, they sold the rights to the script to Feldman and partner Charles Meeker for $150,000, and the green light was on to produce the film.

Prior to making The Hitcher, Robert Harmon primarily made his living as a photographer (most notably, for Playboy Magazine) and videographer, gaining a bit of a rep after putting together a short film, China Lake, that would garner him an agent. That short film, which echoes some of the story elements found in The Hitcher, along with that agent, managed to secure a meeting with the producers who were looking for someone who would be inexpensive to corral, and who knew how to bring a good sense of visuals in capturing the desolate Mojave Desert to their feature. Harmon, who liked that it was a simple movie with few actors for his first attempt at a feature, consented despite his early misgivings about the script, thinking it would be too violent and morbid. He agreed to do it if he could tone the already toned-down story to make it more of an exercise in Hitchcockian suspense than in gore-filled exploitation. For instance, a scripted scene in which the protagonist finds an eyeball in his hamburger was changed to a more clever one in which he is eating from a plate of french fries and discovers one of those “fries” is a severed finger. In this way, it transcended the topes and limitations of the slasher genre much in the same way that a similarly toned and premised The Terminator did a couple of years prior.

Casting the film, they cycled through a list of actors who might be able to have the intensity to play the antagonist, John Ryder, while still maintaining a commercial appeal. Described in the script as mostly skin and bones (Red claims he had Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards in his mind as he wrote the part), top names to play Ryder included a who’s who of gaunt character actors like Terence Stamp (Harmon’s personal choice, but he wasn’t interested), Sam Shepard, Sam Elliott (interested, but out of their price range), and Harry Dean Stanton, with out-of-the-box considerations for rock stars like David Bowie and Sting.  Not working out, they decided not to worry about the look of Ryder so much as to find someone who could deliver on the unpredictable menace, giving actors like Michael Ironside a look.  Eventually, they settled on Rutger Hauer, who they thought would turn down the role immediately because he had publicly vowed not to play any more villains, but he loved the script and thought he could bring many of his own ideas in the blank canvas that was John Ryder’s psychotic character.  He even insisted on doing much of his own driving and stunt work, wanting to fully inhabit the mind of a man so evil, he becomes larger than life.

As for the protagonist, Jim Halsey, other actors given consideration included Emilio Estevez or his brother Charlie Sheen, Matthew Modine, and Tom Cruise, but C. Thomas Howell, who had initially expressed no interest in doing a thriller, agreed after reading the script, which he said was unlike anything he’d ever read. Howell brings a required naivety, as well as a palpable sense of dread and growing panic to his performance, particularly when playing opposite Hauer. Howell claims that Hauer reportedly intimidated and scared him throughout the production, whether on the set or off, though Hauer, genuinely surprised to learn about this, claims he never did anything to intentionally instill fear in the younger actor. He thought Howell’s nervousness around him was part of his staying in character and decided to play along for fun, which only exacerbated the situation.  Jennifer Jason Lee would take a smaller role than she was accustomed to at this point of her career, agreeing to the role because she wanted to work with Hauer again after their experience working together in Paul Verhoeven film, Flesh+Blood.

As far as the plot goes, such as it is, C. Thomas Howell stars as Jim Halsey, a young Chicago native driving a car cross-country to California. The Texas road he’s currently on is lonely and Jim is tired, but he spies a way he might stay awake in the form of hitchhiker John Ryder (Hauer). It doesn’t take long before Jim becomes unnerved by his new passenger, as Ryder claims he’s decapitated viciously the last person to give him a ride and that he will do the same to Jim. Jim finds a way to kick Ryder out of the vehicle, but he keeps showing up again, killing more victims along the way. Things go from horrific to maddening once the grisly body count rises and Jim becomes implicated in the murders, as all signs seem to point to him.

The project gained the early interest of 20th Century Fox, but they thought it more of a limited appeal horror film and wanted to make the film for a budget much lower than the producers had asked given the subject matter.  Red was commissioned to continue to shop the project around, but couldn’t find any major studios desiring to take the chance with a film that runs so heavily on violence. A couple of studios said they’d be interested if they could replace the untested Harmon as director, but the producers were sticking to their man.  They eventually found an inroad with Silver Screen Partners, who produced films for HBO, though the brass did has some major reservations as well regarding the brutality, especially a specific scene in which a character meets a grisly death. They argued against the death altogether, or ways to soften it up, but the makers said that it would alter the trajectory of the movie too much to temper the deed. Ultimately, Harmon, who also had misgivings, convinced them that he never planned to shoot this heinous act of extreme violence, and the story would proceed without it ever being shown on the screen.

After all of the compromises and finagling involved in order to tone the film down enough to be palatable to general audiences, it proved to be still too violent for many critics and audiences. Originally a disappointment in its theatrical release back in 1986, it would meet with mixed-to-negative reviews (Roger Ebert gave it one of his rare ratings of ‘zero stars’, citing it as diseased, corrupt, and reprehensible. Roger’s partner on “At the Movies” would also deliver a rare “zero stars” rating, describing the experience of watching it as “nauseating”). The Hitcher would have a disappointing box office take of under $6 million, which was almost exactly what the production budget had been. Nevertheless, once it hit cable and video, it would eventually find its audience. The Hitcher has gone on to become something of a cult film for thriller junkies. Over time, the film has gone on to be considered a good and effective chiller, even among those who may have initially dismissed it as violent trash back in the day, perhaps more a sign of the changing nature of acceptable violence in American cinema over the years than anything else.

The reason why it has found its audience is clear: it grabs you with its sordid developments and never relents until the explosive, bloody finale. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense, as it’s never clear just who John Ryder is or why he has chosen to make Halsey’s life a literal living Hell, but trying to come up with your own theories is part of the fun. In many ways, it is a derivative film of another great deadly road game of cat and mouse, Steven Spielberg’s Duel, but in this telling, the stalker is riding along in the car with him much of the way.  The Hitcher also influenced many other films in its own right, most notably in the 2003 hit, High Tension and 2004’s Highwaymen.  It would also garner a straight-to-video sequel in 2003, The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting, which also featured C. Thomas Howell reprising his role as Jm Halsey (Eric Red disavows the sequel even though he took screenwriter credit for it due to it essentially remaking large elements of his original film), and a less effective remake in 2007.  However, audiences, even those who thoroughly enjoyed the original, didn’t care to see any films that were just a rehash of the formula, especially without the mesmerizingly effective performance of Rutger Hauer at his most hypnotically diabolical.

Eric Red’s script is appropriately minimal, including a few shock moments that jolt you into attention, while first-timer Robert Harmon’s direction is stylish, moody, and claustrophobic, especially when Hauer and Howell are together. In a way, it’s a complete subversion of Western tropes, with the good guy completely ineffective to thwart the bad guy, with the men of law completely inept and vulnerable, and with a protagonist unable to save the damsel in distress. In essence, you can’t destroy evil while remaining purely good; Ryder taunts Halsey to stop him throughout, forcing him to be a killer if he wants to stop a killer. As that twisted form of Western on wheels, the desolate desert atmosphere, as seen through future Oscar-winner John Seale’s stark cinematography, is particularly effective — who can you turn to when there’s no one around, and where does one hide when there’s nothing to hide behind? More, questions abound, such as the seeming omniscience of Ryder — is he a real-life killer, Halsey’s alter ego, is Jim dead and Ryder there to direct him out of purgatory (the pennies on the eyes moment would certainly lay credence to this), or merely the nightmarish embodiment of his boredom-induced, furtive imagination?

By the end, you come to realize the theme of the film is about the importance of confronting what you fear head-on. You can’t simply do nothing and you can’t run from it, because it will still be there, always with you, until you vanquish it. The intended originally scripted ending is more in line with this, as one character decides to murder the other in a helpless state. The studio had issues with this, so it was revised so that the killer has an appreciable reason for his action.

The Hitcher‘s genre rests somewhere on the borderline between psychological thriller and slasher horror, not explaining enough for us to come away with solid knowledge of what it’s striving to achieve other than sheer terror. Logic isn’t something the makers of the nihilistic film strive for except to give the semblance of a way out for Jim, who becomes less sure that the world is working according to the rules as he goes along.  The more he tries to escape to profess his innocence, the more others suffer — it’s quite the conundrum of survival, avoiding certain death only to endanger the lives of countless others. The more mythical, perhaps even outlandishly absurd the sadomasochistic homoerotic relationship becomes between a seemingly primal, supernatural predator and his rattled and tormented prey, the more the palpable terror becomes believable, as we never get to a moment when we feel absolutely safe and secure. If you can tune in to its warped, existential frequency, it effectively gets under your skin to deliver a taut, suspenseful vehicle that won’t let you out, even when the ride stops.

Qwipster’s rating: A-

MPAA Rated: R for strong violence, grisly images, sexual references, and language
Running Time: 97 min.

Cast: C. Thomas Howell, Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Director: Robert Harmon
Screenplay: Eric Red