The road to hell
HOW THE HITCHER DEFIED CRITICS (ONE IN PARTICULAR) TO BECOME A MODERN CULT CLASSIC
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
ROGER EBERT, ONE of the most famous film critics of them all, built his career on his opposable thumbs. “Two thumbs up” remains an indelible phrase. Yet it’s a dark irony that when he came to assess Robert Harmon’s 1986 thriller The Hitcher, afilm built around the mayhem that happens after a psychopath (Rutger Hauer) uses his opposable thumb to ensnare a driver-cum-victim (C. Thomas Howell), Ebert pointed his pollex in only one direction: down. All the way down. On TV, he and his colleague Gene Siskel absolutely rinsed the movie. But it was in Ebert’s regular Chicago SunTimes column that he really twisted the knife. “This movie is diseased and corrupt,” he wrote.
Nearly 40 years on, Robert Harmon bristles when the review is brought up. “Roger Ebert, as far as I could tell, and not just because of his reaction to my movie, knew nothing about movies,” he says. “He was absolutely infuriated by it, as though it was a moral outrage to the universe at large.”
Harmon may be annoyed, but he’s still relatively diplomatic. Not so Eric Red, the man who not only conceived The Hitcher but imbued the screenplay with what Ebert perceived to be a “deep sickness”. “Roger Ebert,” says Red, “is an idiot. It’s one of the best horror movies made during the ’80s.”
Of course, critics can, and do, get things wrong. Ebert remains one of the great film critics. But it’s fair to say that he was way off when it came to The Hitcher. And Red, despite his obvious and understandable bias, is on the money. The Hitcher is now seen as a cult classic and, on the eve of a remastered re-release, it’s the perfect time to give it a lift.
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IT BEGAN WITH RED, WHO WAS THEN JUST 23, and trying to make his way as a writer. “I went to Texas to live for about a year,” he tells Empire. “And while I was driving through Oklahoma, I was completely unnerved by the wide open spaces, where you can see forever, but there’s no escape. That was very much something I tried to work into the script.”