"I want you to say four words: I want to die."
For my money, THE HITCHER might be flat-out one of the best movies ever made. Rutger Hauer gives one of the most sinister performances I've ever seen, and C. Thomas Howell and Jennifer Jason Leigh are so believably terrified to balance it out perfectly. It starts out with a young man driving through a long stretch of desert highway, who picks up a hitchhiker and you start to wonder how long the charade can possibly keep up and sustain audience suspension of disbelief. I remember that being the very first thing I thought about when I first decided to watch it. I’ve never really grown up in an era where hitchhiking was seen as a remotely safe thing. Naturally my first thought was, “how long can you really travel with this guy without realizing he’s a killer?”
Turns out, that's not a concern. The Hitcher, John Ryder (though that name is clearly nothing more than a momentary convenience), reveals that he killed the last person that picked him up within minutes, our hero Jim throws him out of the car, and we think the danger's over. But things only get so much worse from there, as Jim becomes the prime suspect in Ryder's crimes, and things get worse and worse for him as the body count mounts, and Jim continues to blame the murders on a man he can't even really prove exists.
The scene in the diner, where Ryder confronts Jim at his most desperate and it becomes so clear that he could kill Jim at any moment if he wanted, is unbelievably tense. It's Jim's moment to get answers and there aren't any, because whatever game Ryder's playing, he's keeping it entirely to himself.
Ryder is one of the scariest villains in horror history because of how little we know about him. It's the ultimate case of less is more. We don't know why he's doing this. We don't know his real name, we don't know who he is or where he comes from. And he's all the more terrifying because of it.