What Makes The Hitcher A Twisted Coming Of Age Masterpiece

Why The Hitcher Is A Road Movie Masterpiece

And make no mistake, The Hitcher is a monster of a movie - not just in its violence and dark psychology, but in the multiplicitous depths of its thematic content. Ryder's illusiveness lends the character to endless interpretation - is he the Devil? A dark reflection of Jim's repressed sexuality? Or maybe just the world's luckiest psychopath? Does his appearance speak to Old West folklore, or reflect a zeitgeist left helpless and perplexed by a seemingly inexplicable trend of violent crime?

The answer to all of this is "yes", basically. The Hitcher is everything and everyone - a rollicking good time at the movies, absolutely, but so fascinatingly constructed and executed that it opens up avenues of obsessive interpretation.

You can leave all of this Hitcher-fuelled mania (Hitcher Madness?) to the side, of course. On a technical and storytelling level, Harmon's film is wonderful all around - that rare example of a film where three distinct creative influences in writer, director, and cinematographer meshed together and produced something totally uncompromising. But it's also a film that hinges upon its central casting. Rutger Hauer is The Hitcher both in character and in spirit, and his ineffable charisma is the binding agent that makes the movie's molecular discomfort vibrate at such a powerful frequency. It's impossible to imagine anyone else matching him in the role, and indeed, one of the main reasons neither The Hitcher II nor its 2007 remake landed was because they tried to replace him.

There ain't no Hitcher without Rutger Hauer. That much should've been obvious.

Neither of those misguided attempts at reigniting Red's concept tarnishes the legacy of the original, however. It remains one of the smartest and most subversive horror films of the eighties - and one we really don't talk about nearly enough.