The Hitcher

The Hitcher (1986) is a cult horror-thriller from Robert Harmon you can watch online on iFILM. Driving a car across the desert from Chicago to California, exhausted Jim Halsey picks up a hitchhiker to keep himself awake on the empty night highway. It's the worst decision he'll ever make.

The stranger is John Ryder, played by Rutger Hauer as a soft-spoken, impeccably polite, utterly remorseless killer. Ryder doesn't simply want Jim dead — he toys with him, framing the kid for a trail of bodies and turning the law against him. C. Thomas Howell's Jim slowly hardens from terrified passenger into someone willing to fight back, while Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the waitress dragged into the chase.

Harmon wrings dread out of barren Texas roads and the silence between sudden bursts of violence. Who Ryder is and why he does this is left deliberately unexplained, which only makes him scarier. Lean and nasty, it's a road-horror built for anyone who likes their villains without a tidy motive. Stream The Hitcher online on iFILM.