What Makes The Hitcher A Twisted Coming Of Age Masterpiece
What Makes Rutger Hauer's Hitcher One Of The Greatest Horror Movie Villains
From that initial encounter, The Hitcher's coming-of-age subversion becomes evermore apparent. Jim's ticking off all of his firsts - his first job, his first road trip, and eventually his first romance, which arrives in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh's Nash. Nash is a diner waitress who helps Jim by cooking him some grub, lending an open ear, and, sometime later, freeing him from a police arrest, with Ryder having framed Jim for his highway rampage in an escalating game of mental torture. It's a game Ryder takes to sickening depths the further he pushes Jim away from his safety nets, with one truckstop sequence quite literally tearing Jim and Nash's burgeoning romance apart in a moment of pure guttural horror - one made all the more unnerving for what it leaves out of frame than what it leaves on it.
Throughout the film, Hauer plays Ryder almost as if he's some divine trickster god, cutting a playful, sadistic figure whenever he's on screen with a smirk that could cut through steel. With his performance, Hauer intimates both an earthly and uncanny threat, the multitudes contained within his portrayal invoking both contemporary fears of roadside sickos and the iconography of Old West mythology. The latter feature is cemented especially by Seale's sunbaked, arid photography, as well as through Ryder's trench-coated, shotgun-wielding silhouette.
Together, they recollect old school genre imagery and further connote not only the supernatural dimensions of the character as a figure possibly thrown up by the past, but also the metatextual and more genre-minded elements of Red's screenplay.
It's a throughline shared between The Hitcher and Red's other eighties masterwork, Near Dark, which also dwelled on Old West and coming-of-age motifs, but the former is absolutely the more visceral example of his writing. According to Red, The Hitcher unfurled from a lonely drive and the disquieting vocals of Jim Morrison on "Riders on the Storm", and much like The Doors' song, it resulted in something thunderously elemental. Hauer - with his piercing eyes, playful smile, and dirty blond hair - was the perfect lightning rod to animate it into something monstrous.
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