How A Rutger Hauer Cult Classic Introduced One Of The Most Underrated Horror Villains Ever

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.

Deep nighttime shadows render the car interiors smaller and even more claustrophobic. The danger to Halsey now is not incoming vehicles, dust and fog obscuring his view of the road; instead, it’s seated right next to him.

What elevates The Hitcher beyond the standard cautionary tale against picking up hitchhikers is Ryder’s terrifying omnipresence. In a moment of courage, Halsey shoves him out of the car and speeds off, leaving him behind, only to soon after spot him in another car up ahead. The hitchhiker’s found new, hapless victims. Later, even though Halsey sees Ryder get into another car in the distance and is too far to warn the driver, he eventually finds their positions abruptly reversed, with Ryder driving up behind him, ramming into his vehicle. Is the hitchhiker an ancient evil, capable of shaping the road to his will?

Gradually, there also arises the possibility that he might be a figment of Halsey’s imagination, or a more destructive alternate personality — notice that until the end, there are never any other witnesses to his killings. In one scene, he materializes in the shadows of a motel room; in another, he surreptitiously slips a severed finger onto Halsey’s plate at a diner, deriving great relish from toying with him. He has no driver’s license, no birth certificate or criminal records. When the police run his prints, they find no matches. An early scene depicts Halsey having fallen asleep at the wheel — is the film meant to be read as a vivid nightmare he’s having?

There’s no real desire to pick at the plot holes in The Hitcher, so exquisitely crafted is its atmosphere of quiet despair, a young man’s torment by an inescapable evil. Harmon depicts the American Southwest as a series of ghost towns, with abandoned gas stations and empty diners. The miles of open road don’t evoke a sense of freedom, but the terror of having nowhere to hide and no exit. The barren landscapes of the American Southwest convey the absence of civilization and, by extension, humanity. For all his unearthly demeanor, however, Ryder is distinctly human. He sniffles, beads of sweat appear on his forehead — the film’s most sobering reminder is that real people are, in fact, capable of bottomless depravity.

Like classic slasher villains, Ryder is seemingly indestructible. And yet for all the pain he inflicts, he wants to die too. Early on, he challenges Halsey to stop him; it’s evident he’s been looking for someone who will put up a fight. When the driver points out that Ryder’s the one with the weapon, he jeers: “So what have you got to lose? Stop me.” Halsey’s resourcefulness at being able to escape him early on is what makes the serial killer fixate on him; he knows he’s finally met his match.

The violence in the film gradually becomes more overt, and then existential, going from Ryder’s graphic description of his crimes, to visuals of the aftermath, to them playing out in front of Halsey, to Ryder putting him in the horrific position of either having to witness him torture a friend, or kill him. The hitchhiker not only threatens physical violence, but intends on corrupting Halsey’s soul.

Hauer, who had played villains in Nighthawks (1981), Flesh and Blood (1985), and most memorably in Blade Runner (1982), was looking to evade typecasting when he got The Hitcher’s script. “I thought, If I do one more villain, I should do this,” he said. “I couldn’t refuse it.” Decades on, Ryder’s cold menace and the impossibility of reasoning with him make him the blueprint for modern monsters such as No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh. Among the slew of iconic ‘80s-created horror movie villains, from Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street) to Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th) and Michael Myers (Halloween), his haunting presence is underrated, but fitting for a character you’d pull over for, never sensing danger until it’s too late.