Rutger Hauer terrorises a young man through various improbable and cruel ways in 1986's The Hitcher. This movie may have been supernatural on accident, or it may have been on purpose, I'm not sure, but I certainly like it.
Jim (C. Thomas Howell) has taken a job driving a car from Chicago to San Diego, not unlike Kowalski in Vanishing Point was delivering a car to San Francisco. But instead of becoming a symbol for doomed freedom, Jim becomes the victim of a man called John Ryder, played by an imperturbable, perpetually amused Rutger Hauer. Jim picks up John as a hitchhiker. When John tries to kill Jim, Jim outsmarts him and manages to drive off. Unfortunately, John somehow has the means to follow and torment Jim wherever he goes. Cars and helicopters are destroyed in fiery explosions, John somehow wipes out entire gas stations and police stations.
When Jim stumbles into a diner with only one waitress in attendance, the only evidence Jim gets that John has caught up to him is a severed human finger in his French fries. How did John get the finger in there? Why did he do it? From a filmmaking perspective, you can say, "Well, because it's creepy." This might bother me in a lot of films but not here. The filmmakers do seem to lean into it consciously, at least in one scene where John somehow has all the bullets for Jim's gun in his pocket. Is John some kind of manifestation of a part of Jim's personality? The film never explains but maintains a nicely nightmarish quality throughout.
The waitress is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and she's good as always. She's set up as a love interest for Jim but I think this must be the only movie in the '80s in which she didn't get naked.
Rutger Hauer is fantastic and as horrible as he gets it's hard not to get caught up in his sadistic charisma.
The Hitcher is available on Criterion this month as part of a Highway Horror collection which somehow does not include Lost Highway.
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