"I believe you're going my way?"
Director: Alvin Ganzer
Writer: Rod Serling
Composer: Stock & Bernard Herrmann
This is an unexpectedly creepy episode of The Twilight Zone. While some of it takes place at night to makes things gain an extra eerie dimension, a majority of it is about the situation. More of the fear of the unknown and, in a sense, the unknowable. It's a chase between a force that doesn't seem capable of stopping and a regular human woman. It's also an incredibly claustrophobic episode in parts, adding loads of tension to an episode that's already unsettling.
Based on a radio play of the same name, "The Hitch-Hiker" features a woman named Nan Adams trekking from New York to California. The episode begins after a nasty accident off the highway. Nan spots a gangly old man off the side of the road and heads out, but as she drives, he keeps on appearing. She meets a few people along the way and her paranoia grows, to the point where she refuses to stop except for food, fearing that the old man is going to do something to her if she stops.
Millie Gusse casted this episode darn near perfect. Inger Stevens does an incredible job as Nan, probably her best performance in her few appearances in the series, as she plays a woman just out for a typical cross-country drive that quickly turns into the highway to held. Leonard Strong as the hitch-hiker doesn't need to do much but act just as a naive, almost bliss, old man. He never has any malice about him, never necessarily does anything to hurt Nan, and only has one line of dialogue, but it's the most important line of the episode.
The episode relies entirely on Stevens's acting and Alvin Ganzer's directing. A great load of the episode is filmed within Nan's car, so the audience is stuck with her and gets the feel more and more claustrophobic as the episode continues. Those cars back then used to be pretty massive, but within just a few scenes there's a definite feeling of relief whenever Nan steps free of the car, as if she can finally breathe free air again; however, this is where that tension from before comes in.
The car, tight and claustrophobic though it may be, is ultimately safe from the hitch-hiker. Out in the world? He can be anywhere. He appears at the end of a tunnel, the random side of a highway, at gas stations. Outside of the car he is effectively everywhere and nowhere. And, again, Strong doesn't do anything to make it this way.
Ganzer just directs this episode so well to immediately place him in a negative frame of mind. The hitchhiker is never directly in frame save for one shot, where he steps in front of the camera and seems to stare directly at the audience (this is actually one of the biggest scares The Twilight Zone has ever given me), so he's always just hanging out in the background. And because of his lack of dialogue, he's less a human than a presence, something that becomes more and more relevant as the episode continues.
This episode masterfully tightens the string of tension until the last possible moment. This must have been one haunting, interesting radio play to listen to back in the day, though likely a much different experience. It's one thing to be verbally reminded that the hitchhiker is still around, to hear that the main character is moving across the country (at a good clique of about FORTY-FIVE MILES PER HOUR...that's the real torture right there), but it's another to get a series of shots of Nan driving and seeing him over and over.
So the fear of the episode comes from the idea that there is this overbearing presence that does not leave her, and that she cannot act on. What happens if she does? We know that this old man is following her, so it's a fear that it's impossible to know what he wants without stopping, and as discussed earlier, to stop is to basically give in.
Nan's paranoia is delicately handled, too. Stevens never gives Nan a full breakdown nor that much of a break in composure. Allowing Nan to have a voiceover partway through the episode lends itself to this sensation until she picks up the sailor near the end and does decide to try and do something about the hitchhiker. Even though it raises quite a few questions later on, it's still a very effective scene.
Even it is uncomfortable for more than just the hitchhiker. That sailor is all over her, like move over dude, there's a lot of space in that car. Nan being pressed to the corner of her car is a good visual to represent the theme of the episode, and it's debatable that this works because it's still the presence of a stranger haunting her, but this is supposed to be a comforting presence. It's odd, and maybe it was just a different time.
"The Hitch-Hiker" works as an effective tale of claustrophobia out in the open and watching one woman race against a foe that she does not know the full extent of, but she knows that she absolutely cannot stop. It's one of the lesser-known episodes, which is a real shame, because it stands up there with some of the heavier hitters.
***SPOILER SECTION***
Knowing that the hitchhiker is Mr. Death can still give chills sometimes. It's almost as if he's always been following Nan, but now this is just him making himself known to her. And he's not chasing her, not coming after her in any vehement way, he's just waiting for her to follow him, for her to accept what's happening. The first scene is the one most affected by the "Nan has been dead," since that's the scene of death and from then on we're watching a "what could've happened" type scenario.
I do have to wonder if that is the case and not her interacting with other people. Maybe the other character she meets are also dead already and have accepted death, which is why they don't see him. Because, while this is going on in the Twilight Zone, it wouldn't make much sense for her to be interacting with normal people. I mean, she takes a sailor several hours down the road, it's not like he's just going to forget how he got there.
That scene where Nan gets the call from her house revealing that she's dead is arguably the best scene of the entire episode. Stevens flips from paranoid to calm and collected again in a heartbeat, and her closing voiceover about feeling so human and so open once again is phenomenally capped by the hitchhiker being in the backseat, finally caught up to her, and asking if she's ready to go. The direction, music, and acting all coalesce in a single perfect scene that makes the episode go off on a somber beat with a bit of positively. The haunt is over, and everything, for Nan at least, is going to be okay. She's accepted her fate at last.
So, we've seen several individual cases of paranoia out here in the ol' TZ. But what happens when a crew begins to go mad? In a desert land where water is scarce and madness is abound, let's explore what happens to the crew of Arrow-1 in "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" See you then!
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