What Makes The Hitcher A Twisted Coming Of Age Masterpiece
The Hitcher - A Cult Classic Still Waiting For The Mainstream
Like some of the best horror movies, The Hitcher commences its story in darkness. Our lead, C. Thomas Howell's Jim Halsey, is a young 20-something out on the road for his first big job, delivering a car from the Windy City to the Golden State. There's a sense of freedom and peril to Jim's journey, akin to something like a rite of passage. Just as he's crossing from east to west - echoing the old, perilous journeys of America's past - so too is he crossing the threshold of adulthood. But the evolution of wagon trains to cars and dust trails to tarmac hasn't made things much safer. Instead of outlaws and war parties, the westward travellers of the 1980s have to contend with different threats, including that most disturbing of post-Vietnam era phenomena - the serial killer.
On this occasion, the sicko in question is the eponymous Hitcher himself, John Ryder, played by Rutger Hauer in perhaps his greatest starring turn. As The Hitcher, Ryder turns the car from a symbol of independence and freedom into a rolling coffin, stabbing, shooting, and disembowelling the good samaritans who stop to lend him a hand. To Jim, though, he's a lot more than that. When he encounters Ryder on that stormy Texas night, it feels almost pre-ordained. Ryder isn't there simply to torture and kill Jim, but to throw down a challenge.
"I want you to stop me."
With these words, Ryder is daring Jim to push back - to fight his own battle as a man out on the road. Layered into this initial encounter are additional clues as to Ryder's purpose and origins - exchanges that grimly mirror real-life serial killer episodes, but ones that also speak to supernatural and psychological motifs. He's able to outmanoeuvre the police by weaponising their discomfort with homosexual overtures towards Jim (a sexuality that emerges as a core component of Hauer's performance), and, once ejected from Jim's car, reemerges and disappears periodically throughout the film with spectral menace.
The Hitcher wastes no time at all in laying its cards on the table, with Harmon, Seale, and Red evoking the multifaceted terror of their story but a few minutes after the opening titles have concluded. It's all there - the coming-of-age anxiety, the repressed psychology - even the idea of the highway as a sprawling, lonely place it was easy to disappear in, reconfigured into a sort of liminal, dreamlike hellscape.
Like the worst nightmares, it's a setting that Ryder lures Jim deeper and deeper into. The open road, ironically, becomes a fixed track, and while Jim is given momentary places of respite, this world between worlds is the Hitcher's domain. All Jim can do - like us - is punch his ticket, sit back, and see where the journey takes him.
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