Seduction on The Blacktop: The Eroticism of 'The Hitcher'

A while back, my friend Max Booth came on The Scares That Shaped Us for an episode, and she picked a film I already knew to be an All-Time Banger: The Hitcher.

Released four decades ago this year, the film marked the feature screenwriting debut of horror scribe Eric Red and stars Rutger Hauer as the title character, a man cryptically named "John Ryder" who hitches a ride with a kid named Jim (C. Thomas Howell) and proceeds to make his life hell.

That's the conceit you'll find on the back of the VHS box, anyway. I first saw The Hitcher at some point a few years back while I was filling a few gaps in my horror viewing history, and that's the film I saw back then. Upon repeat viewings, though, and particularly after talking with Max, I found an entirely different movie lurking beneath that premise. While the ignition of The Hitcher is certainly its reliance on the urban-legend style fear of picking up a dangerous hitchhiker, the fuel that keeps the film rumbling along, and eventually makes it catch fire, is something else. For all its action-horror swagger, this film is, at its core, a seduction.

Ryder arrives in the rain, drenched from the downpour in the desert when Jim picks him up, and there's something undeniably sexy about Rutger Hauer going full Blade Runner again, dripping from head to toe, smiling wryly as he settles in and shrugs off his disheveled appearance. Hardly any time passes before he's taken all that bedraggled charm and tilted it, admitting to Jim that he's already annihilated at least one motorist, and he's about to do the same to him.

Narratively The Hitcher functions as an almost comical string of bad luck for one man, as Jim ditches Ryder – the first time by simply shoving him out of his car – time and time again, only to have the mysterious hitcher pop back up again, bursting with more charm and more threatening words. He waves at Jim from the window of a car where he hugs and plays with a little girl he later murders. He turns up in diners. He slips into motel rooms. He's everywhere, and Jim can't shake him even when he tries to phone the authorities, or ask another person for help, or simply just keep driving until he's free. The film is one long labyrinthine quest for our hero as he tries to outrun a monster.

If we look past the narrative, though, and draw out the metaphorical implications of Ryder's omnipresence, we find something else, something going on beyond Jim's desperate eyes and even more desperate driving. In the film's most revealing story moment, with Ryder in the car next to him, Jim asks the obvious question: What do you want? And Ryder answers I want you to stop me.

It's a line that would not feel out of place in a Gothic romance, or an erotic thriller, which is when you realize that even in light of everything else going on in this film, The Hitcher absolutely is an erotic thriller. From the moment they met, Ryder's been trying to seduce Jim, if not into a direct sexual encounter, then at least into following his own path of fulfillment (sexual and otherwise) through the world. We never learn much about Jim, just that he really wants to get to California for some reason, and we learn even less about Ryder and why he's chosen this drifting kid to be his new project. Maybe it's nothing more than raw attraction. Maybe he's the literal Devil and we're witnessing some new kind of temptation in the desert. However the spark ignited, it's there now and growing hotter.

This is all helped along by Red's script and, even more importantly in the metaphorical vein, by Robert Harmon's direction. There is something automatically phallic about cars, and shotguns, and knives, and even human fingers when they're wielded the right way, and Harmon never misses a moment to play that up. Throw in the film's most shocking scene, in which Jim's potential love interest Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is literally torn in two by Ryder, and it's very clearly the story of a very dangerous man telling a potentially dangerous younger man that no one can love him like he can.

Of course, if you just want to watch a cool horror movie with gun battles and car chases and some really gnarly deaths, you'll get that too, but it's the erotically charged, rain-soaked tension of The Hitcher which stays with me most now. It's one of horror's most potent seductions, and deserves to be seen that way just as much as it deserves all the attention for its more horrific elements.