In 1981, while a student at the AFI Conservatory, writer Eric Red had made the short film Gunmen’s Blues, a modern day western, with a view to it being his calling card to bigger and better things. But he nearly bankrupted himself in a futile attempt to get the film distributed and, looking for a way to recoup his losses, decided to earn money delivering a car from New York to Austin, Texas. Along the way, he listened repeatedly to the 1971 Doors song Riders on the Storm, taking inspiration from its haunting lyrics (“There’s a killer on the road… If you give this man a ride/Sweet family will die”). The experience would prove to be the genesis of a new script, ultimately filmed by Robert Harmon as The Hitcher. It turned out to be a trim, relentless gem, one of the best horror films of the 1980s, and one that hits the ground running and never lets up.

It begins with Red’s alter ego, Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) making his own cross-country road trip, delivering a car from Chicago to San Diego. Things are pretty fraught for Halsey even before the film really starts, falling asleep at the wheel on a long desert drive through West Texas and almost colliding with an oncoming truck. The titles are barely over before Halsey has spotted a lonely figure at the roadside, features obscured by a torrential downpour and decides, despite his mother always warning him against such rash action, to offer him a lift. His passenger introduces himself as the ironically named John Ryder (Rutger Hauer) and terrorises Halsey by telling him that he murdered the driver of an abandoned car they pass on the road and that he intends to do the same to him. Halsey is able to eject Ryder from the car, but his problems are only just beginning. Ryder keeps turning up, seemingly stalking Halsey, causing mayhem along the remote desert road. Halsey befriends Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a waitress at a roadside diner but is pursued by the Texas police (often so inept that you can’t help but wonder if they were the same idiots who failed to notice what the cannibal family were up to in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)…) as Ryder continue to run rings around all of them.

Some of the best horror films can work if the writer gets a handle on the villain’s lack of motivation. Done wrong and it can be decidedly irritating (see The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007) for example). Done right, as Red and Harmon did here, it can make the antagonist all the more chilling, his unfathomability and unpredictability making him all the more dangerous. “I want you to stop me” is as close as Ryder gets to offering any explanation for what he’s doing and why. He latches on to Halsey for reasons that we never get to the bottom of, determining to not just kill him (that would have been far too easy) but to utterly destroy him emotionally first. Ryder appears, disappears and reappears again in a way that hints – though never too broadly – at there being something almost supernatural about him. We learn nothing about him or where he comes from, but he feels like an elemental force, impossible to separate from the desert he haunts.

In this regard, the film echoes Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) which also featured a desert drive turned nightmare as an innocent man (Dennis Weaver) is menaced by something that may or may not be a manifestation of the supernatural. Spielberg’s film is, understandably, quoted a few times throughout The Hitcher and Harmon also tips his hat towards James Cameron’s The Terminator () (the police station massacre) and plays similar Hitchcockian games to Richard Franklin who also pitted his hero against an implacable desert foe in Roadgames (1981). Harmon throws in everything he can muster in his feature film debut – there are some textbook examples of suspense (he makes excellent use of long stretches without dialogue), some expertly choreographed car chases and crashes and, in the severed-finger-in-the-bowl-of-chips scene, one of the most memorable scares on the decade.

What it doesn’t have, and this may have contributed to its poor performance at the box office (it cost $7.9 million but only took $5.8 million), was the gore that mid-80s horror fans had become accustomed too. Even the harrowing death of one of the lead characters, torn apart after Ryder straps them between a truck and its trailer, takes place off screen, but Red’s original script was much stronger meat. But producers HBO Pictures and Silver Screen Pictures only agreed to finance it if the violence was considerably toned down (it had earlier been rejected by 20th-Century Fox because, according to executive David Madden in a Los Angeles Times interview, “there were some people at the studio who thought it was pretty gross.”) It would be easy to complain about the film we didn’t see get made, but it’s entirely possible that the absence of explicit violence is what led Harmon down that more Hitchcockian route, resulting in what may well be a better film.

Harmon really should have been a much bigger deal on the basis of The Hitcher. He’s worked consistently since, but never made anything else as good as this again and largely ended up directing for television, including the series of television films starring Tom Selleck as Police Chief Jesse Stone. Red on the other hand went on to enjoy a decent career both in films (he wrote Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990) and a 2007 remake of The Hitcher, and wrote and directed several others) and as a novelist. Harmon certainly deserved the same fate.

As well as the inferior 2007 remake, directed by Dave Meyers with Sean Bean in the title role, echoes of The Hitcher can be heard in Richard Stanley’s desert-set horror Dust Devil (1992) whose enigmatic protagonist is referred to as “Hitch.” There was also a sequel to the original film, The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting (2003), directed by Louis Morneau which sees the return not of the character we wanted to see, Hauer’s deeply malevolent Ryder, but Howell’s blander and more undistinguished hero. The film’s title and some of its plot was quoted in Umberto Lenzi’s Paura nel Buio/Hitcher in the Dark (1989) and René Cardona III’s Mexican made Sendero mortal/Deadly Road (1993) acts as a sort of unofficial spin-off/sequel/remake.