MONSTER FEST WEEKENDER: HIGHWAY TO HELL!

No film captured the nightmare scenario of what happens when you pick up the wrong hitchhiker better than Robert Harmon’s relentless, blood-soaked road terror, The Hitcher. Featuring the perfectly cast Rutger Hauer as the world’s worst travelling companion, this nasty piece of cinema is the gold standard against which all other highway slashers are measured.When young cross-country driver Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) picks up a hitchhiker named John Ryder (Rutger Hauer) on a desolate highway, he unwittingly becomes the patsy for a relentless killer who frames him for a series of brutal murders. As the body count rises, Jim is pushed to the edge of sanity, with only truck stop waitress Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh) believing in his innocence. Directed by Robert Harmon, whose later work would include the Jean-Claude Van Damme banger Nowhere to Run, The Hitcher is a nonstop barrage of bloody carnage across the highways and byways of the Texan countryside.