As screenwriter Eric Red drove through the Texas badlands, The Doors’ song “Riders on the Storm” popped into his mind. Inspired in part by the hitchhiker Billy Cook, who brutally murdered six people during a cross-country spree in the ‘50s, its refrain is succinct, but chilling: “There’s a killer on the road.”
A month after he reached his destination, Red had a finished script. Released in 1986, The Hitcher unfolds as a sadistic cat-and-mouse game that begins when the boyish Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell), in all his naïveté, picks up hitchhiker John Ryder (Rutger Hauer) on a desolate stretch of the West Texas desert in the dead of night. What quickly dawns on him, with sickening clarity, is that this decision will cost him. From the moment Ryder gets in, director Robert Harmon positions him as a threat, amplifying the instinct that something is terribly, terribly wrong. Halsey’s friendly chatter is met with either unnerving silence or a cruel smile. Ryder lapses into sudden bursts of laughter, as though reacting to a sick joke that only he’s in on. To Halsey’s increasingly wide-eyed terror, he describes dismembering the last man who gave him a lift, and then holds a switchblade to his face. He’s in the passenger seat, but his sinister, looming presence, encroaching into Halsey’s space, cements him as the one in charge.
