The Twilight Zone Review & Trivia: The Hitch-Hiker

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By William Kozy

Continuing down the road of my survey asking: “What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?”, in 18th place with 199 votes is “THE HITCH-HIKER” originally broadcast January 22, 1960. I would be born 18 days later. Thank you to all the respondents among Facebook Twilight Zone fan sites and writers who took part in this poll. Now let’s go for a ride:

At the outset we see a mechanic working on a car by a highway roadside as the pretty blonde woman looks on.

Opening Narration:

“Her name is Nan Adams. She’s twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store. At present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California, from Manhattan.

“How fast were ya going lady?” he asks.

“Oh 60, 65, something like that.”

As he finishes, “Blow out, skid marks, shoulders like pudding and going 65 miles an hour. Lady, you’re on the side of the angels. By rights you shouldn’t have called for a mechanic–somebody should’ve called for a hearse!” (Shoulders like pudding by the way was a reference to the highway’s shoulder’s being muddy or soft).

They smile at one another and after putting a spare tire on, he tells her, “just follow me into town and I’ll see if I can fix you up with a new tire.”

And then…Rod Serling’s opening monologue continues! It’s a rare occasion when he begins his opening narration and then interrupts it with the story unfolding, only to traipse back into the opening narration, but here it goes:

Opening Narration Continues:

“Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania, perhaps to be filed away under accidents you walk away from. But from this moment on, Nan Adam’s companion on a trip to California will be terror, her route fear, her destination quite unknown.”

The Plot:

Nan (played by the fetching Inger Stevens who would die at the young age of 35 from a barbituate overdose) gets back into her car and sees an odd sort of fellow, middle-aged in a shabby dark suit and hat, thumbing for a ride. Something about him unnerves her. At the service station in town, she is presented with the bill: $29.70 for the new tire and repairs and trip out to the desert to help her. Wow, that wouldn’t even fill your gas tank these days! She pays him saying, “Cheaper than a funeral isn’t it.” Okay, that’s the second foreshadowing piece of dialogue in the past 60 seconds. Nan then notices that very same hitch-hiker in the mirror of her cosmetics box. She quickly shuts the box closed and stares straight ahead, not turning to face hm. The mechanic returns with change, and noticing she seems shaken asks her what’s wrong. She mentions as casually as she can that she was “just looking at that hitch-hiker.”

When the mechanic looks though, the man isn’t there. And he’s gone when Nan turns to look also. She says it’s strange that she saw him back when the mechanic first changed her tire–but the mechanic nonchalantly reasons that he “probably got a lift right after we passed him.” “Probably” says Nan, looking unconvinced. When Nan pulls out of the station and heads back out onto the road, the hitch-hiker pops his head into frame looking directly at the TV viewers, breaking the fourth wall, unseen by Nan at this particular moment. And why not look at us? After all we all have an appointment with him, don’t we? He looks like a mash-up of Humphrey Bogart and Pat Morita as he gives an odd smile, almost mischievous.

Nan sees him again 50 miles later, and then again on a stretch of road in Virginia. He never does anything menacingly; if anything he’s “drab really” “just a shabby silly looking scarecrow man.” Love that sibilant alliteration! And yet it is of course disconcerting to her, his constantly reappearing. There’s a lot of voiceover in this episode, no doubt paying respect to the source material, a radio play by Lucille Fletcher, who also wrote another famous radio play, “Sorry, Wrong Number.”

At a roadside diner, Nan looks over a map as she sits at a table, with an uneaten sandwich next to her. Uneaten. Is there a significance to that sandwich being uneaten? Maybe. Anyway, she gets into a discussion with the proprietor who tells her a guy would have to be crazy to try hitching a ride on the turnpike. Some of the prices at the diner by the way include Hamburger Steak for 65¢, Hot Cakes 60¢, Spaghetti and Meatballs 85¢.

Next scene on the road, Nan is stopped by a highway flag man, telling her, “Construction ahead.” She was about to get out and stretch her legs, but then…Yikes! It’s the Hitchhiker again! She gets back in shutting the door as he creeps up to her back passenger side window, asking if she is headed west. Terrified, she says no she’s “not heading west, I’m just going up the road a little ways”. She floors it, swerving around the roadblock, before the flag man, who runs after her can stop her. I thought for a second that we could see the Hitchhiker in the same frame as the flag man, a shot that wasn’t Nan’s POV, and I thought, “Hey well, that’s a cheat–that would defy the rules of how the camera had distinguished when we see him.” So I rewound the scene and watched again, but I was wrong–the hitchhiker is not in that shot. Oh no, now I’m the one seeing the Hitchhiker when he isn’t there!!

Next, Nan comes to a railroad crossing and the editing in this scene is positively Hitchcockian. There’s a shot of this cool blonde beauty Hitchcock would’ve adored looking calmly at the train way down the tracks. The bell of the warning signal clangs away. Her passivity gives way to alarm as she spots the hitchhiker on the other side of the tracks beckoning her. She assesses the train’s distance and knows she can easily make it across the tracks and drive past the hitcher. (“The Hitcher” by the way is another terrifying film about a menacing hitchhiker. Rutger Hauer is great in it and it’s one of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s earliest performances, and she is of course wonderful.) Okay, so Nan tries rushing across the tracks but her car inexplicably stalls right as she’s on top of the tracks. The tension mounts effectively as we cut back and forth between shots of her trying to start the car and the train bearing down on her. The train’s horn is now blaring at her along with the clanging bell, as the hitchhiker passively, gently thumbs for a ride. At the last second, she revs the car in reverse, backing off the tracks as the train whizzes by in front of her, across the TV screen. She closes her eyes in relief, and when she opens them, the hitchhiker is gone.

Now Nan has a newfound realization that the hitchhiker is actually out to get her–not just a creepy bystander, but actively trying to get her killed. She starts crying, not knowing what to do next. Funny little thing to mention here that others have pointed out: the locomotive that nearly wiped Nan out had the “SP” logo on the grill, SP standing for The Southern Pacific Railroad.” But that train line didn’t chug along as far east in the United States as where Nan was. Pausing by the tracks she feared the next few days of seeing him when “driving through plains, driving through the desert…” The shots of the train approaching must have been shot in California closer to the TV studios and where the SP did run.

After three days and three nights of constantly seeing the hitcher on the road, Nan says in voiceover, “Route 80 isn’t a highway anymore, it’s an escape route.” Geographically, the problem is that Route 80 doesn’t run through the states she mentions driving through such as Arkansas or Virginia or New Mexico. That evening, Nan figures she’ll try to shake the hitcher from her tail by taking backroads, avoiding the main highway. When she runs out of gas off the beaten path, she gets out of the car, and gets frightened by a leaf on a branch sticking out. A nice touch, showing a gradual incompatibility with earthly things. She sees a sign for Gas and Eats Ahead, and she runs in the opposite direction from where you would assume the sign indicates: Ahead. But okay it worked out anyway for her and she comes upon a service station that is closed. She calls out for help, and then the proprietor opens his window from his home next to the station.

Now there’s a short commute! So how come he doesn’t help her? It’s not like it takes him long to get to work or get home! What a tool. A hand comes scarily into frame after Nan has been rebuffed by the owner shutting his window. That hand touches her shoulder giving Nan and us a start, but it’s a U.S. sailor on leave! He’s heading back to his ship in San Diego. He has been hitching his way back and when he hears of Nan’s plight, he aggressively bangs on the cranky station owner’s window yelling, “Hey Pop ya got some customers out here!” That did the trick as we next see them getting back to the car carrying the world’s smallest canister of gasoline. Eager to have company, Nan had promised him a ride to San Diego. He didn’t need his arm twisted, let’s put it that way. Once on the road, he asks Nan if he could take off his shoes–“My feet feel like two hot bricks.” He asks her what she thinks the odds are that his shipmates will believe he got a ride back with a beautiful dame (my word, not his…it’s just with that textbook Noo Yawk sailor’s accent of his it was inevitable he’d call her that!).

She’s preoccupied with her thoughts so he has to prod her again with the question, and surprisingly she shows some sparkle with a cute and funny response: “We can get an affidavit. I’ll get a notary to sign it.” It’s a sign she’s feeling so much more secure with company now, than having to face the hitchhiker in solitude. She’s feeling more at ease despite what we feel like is a leering sailor. The intent I’m guessing was perhaps to have us sense that this episode’s ironic twist would be that our heroine leapt from the frying pan and into the fire by taking this passenger, who let’s admit, is sitting really up close and personal to her, and really gives her the up and down with his eyes in a couple of those shots.

But pretty soon it’s he that gets the heebie jeebies, as she once again spots the hitchhiker. This time, feeling emboldened, she veers her car toward the hitcher, trying to hit him! Our sailor grabs the steering wheel, asking her what the heck is she doing. Let’s take a brief pause here for a hilarious continuity error–if you watch this episode using the link provided below, the first time she swerves to hit the hitcher is at the 17:20 mark. We cut to a wide shot outside the car showing the car swerving and suddenly the car is a jet black 1957 Ford two-door sedan! The whole rest of the episode she’s been driving a light colored 1959 Mercury Montclair four-door hardtop! Let’s chalk it up to the improbable notion that it was an attempt to subliminally inject a quick notion of the Black Death into the viewer’s subconscious. Like that frightening 1 or 2 frame shot in The Exorcist of that skeletal demon face. You don’t buy it? Nah, me neither.

The sailor says he didn’t see anybody, as he steadies the steering wheel. Nan ponders that as she seems to go off in a reverie, but then hardens again when she sees the hitchhiker and again tries to run the car into him. Popeye again thwarts the effort and the car comes to a halt. He’s shaken and says to her she should maybe let him drive. She says again that she saw the man, which based on her actions begs the question from the sailor, “What were you trying to do?” With nearly whispered aplomb she doesn’t hesitant in stating with a vacant stare, “I was trying to hit him.” Okay, so as a passenger the most likely response should be, “I’ll have the check please!”

After confirming her wishes, “That’s right. I was trying to hit him. I thought maybe if I could kill him I could make him stop.” The seaman is no longer desirous of Nan, as he backs away clear across the car seat toward the door. He tells her he’s going to go “anyplace that puts distance between me and this automobile.” They go back and forth with her pleading and his insisting, and she even sternly demands, “You can’t go, you understand me, you just can’t go.” When that doesn’t work she turns on the charm: “Look, I like you” she purrs. “I really like you very much, as a matter of fact that’s why I picked you up, because I liked you. I thought that we could be friends and I’d kinda like for you to take me out. Really. Please?” Oh boy she’s really good, because you can see the seaman really struggling, he’s looking her up and down, sweating, weighing the prospect of hooking up with a doll (again, my word not his) versus getting killed in an automobile accident.

The seaman wants to…he wants to…the seaman really wants her…but he just can’t and he abandons ship with an “I’m sorry ma’am.” She begs again, confessing that she’s been seeing this hitchhiker all across the country. Yeah, that’ll get him back in the car. He lunges for his shoes, grabs them, and offers a last piece of advice: “You listen honey. What you need is a good night’s sleep. You don’t need a boyfriend, just a good night’s sleep.” She pleads again, but he is outta there faster than a mouse on the set of a Fancy Feast commercial. Nan breaks down crying.

Dissolve to Nan pulling into a diner outside of Tucson. She wants to call home, and there’s a phone booth there. She wants to “speak to someone familiar, someone I love. Someone to bring back reality to me. Just a voice. A warm familiar voice so I won’t lose my mind.” But this is how it goes:

“Hello Mother?”
“This is Mrs. Adams residence. Whom do you wish to speak to please.”
“Who is this?
“This is Mrs. Whitney.”
“Mrs. Whitney? I don’t any Mrs. Whitney. Is this Trafalgar 41098?”
“Yes it is.”
“Where’s my Mother? Where’s Mrs. Adams?”
“She’s still in the hospital. A nervous breakdown.”
“Nervous breakdown? But there’s nothing the matter with my Mother, what do you mean a nervous breakdown?”
“Well it’s all taken place since the death of her daughter.”
“Death of her daughter?…What do…what do you mean the death of her daughter…”

Now I have a question. Three times, count ’em, three times so far Nan mentions being the daughter. And this Mrs. Whitney doesn’t address this salient issue?

Mrs. Whitney goes on, “It’s all been very sudden. Nan was killed just six days ago in an automobile accident in Pennsylvania. A tire blew out and her car turned over.”

Wordlessly, Nan puts the phone down quietly and wanders out of the booth into the night air to deliver this monologue in a detached voiceover:

“Very odd. The fear has left me now. I’m numb. I have no feeling. It’s as if someone had pulled out some kind of a plug in me and everything — emotion, feeling, fear — has drained out. And now I’m a cold shell.” She breathes deep. “I’m conscious of things around me now. The vast night of Arizona. The stars that look down from the darkness. Ahead of me stretch a thousand miles of empty mesa–mountains, prairies, desert. Somewhere among them he’s waiting for me. Somewhere I’ll find out who he is. And I’ll find out. I’ll find out what he wants. But just now, for the first time looking out at the night I think I know…I think I know.”

She gets into the car, adjusts the rear view mirror, and there is the hitchhiker’s face reflected back at us, as he sits in the back seat. He says, “I believe you’re going my way?”

Closing Narration:

“Nan Adams, age twenty-seven. She was driving to California, to Los Angeles. She didn’t make it. There was a detour. . . through the Twilight Zone.”

Okay, so I have some questions.

So…she’s…a ghost? Or at best let’s say she’s in between the world of the living and the dead. What about the car? Is it a ghost car? I thought it “overturned”, so why in that opening scene is the mechanic simply changing the tire? And where is everybody else if this was such a horrific accident, where’s the ambulance, the sheriff, the rubberneckers? And this ghost car is able to have physical interaction with real living people like the mechanic, and the sailor? And she too for that matter, she as a ghost has physical interaction with people? (I thought for a brief second, “Oh wait a minute, we never do see her touching another human do we!? That’s cool of you director Alvin Ganzer!” But I reviewed and she kinda touches the mechanic when paying him, and she definitely touches or is at least touched by the sailor.) I don’t mean to get too scientific about it, but she’s interacting with the physical world and even with all the people simply by talking to them, expelling vocal sound waves that contact their ear and so on and so forth. Handing over money, throwing the window sash back open, etc. I mean y’know everything! So in a sense, the bigger question becomes, well then what’s to stop anyone from continuing an existence like that, and what is actually the difference between the living and those who have presumably died but walk around like Nan does?

I mean you still hear music, you walk and feel the Earth under your feet, you eat (though we don’t see her eat the cake), a person can even talk and flirt with people, and I assume you can have sex (why would that be the line drawn?), you can talk across the country on the phone…absolutely nothing is different. Her memories are intact, and all physical capacity, even emotions and feelings remain. And why is she the one that experiences this phenomenon? Why is she oblivious to what happened to her? Does everybody who dies go through this? That is an awful lot of ghosts running around handing over money to people and driving cars and dancing and walking and talking, before waiting for the epiphany. That’s the difference between a masterfully made film like The Sixth Sense and this episode. The filmmakers of The Sixth Sense thought more carefully about the rules of the world they were depicting and what the consequences of those rules would be. Here, in “The Hitch-Hiker”, I get the feeling they just threw all that “thinking” away, and just figured the poetry would carry them through. But even the poetic voice-overs aren’t that great, not really.

Yeah they have a poetry-like “feel” to them, but the ideas are mush. What does she say in that last monologue as she walks back to her car looking “meaningfully” about her?: “I’m conscious of things around me now”–Huh? Did she ever once seem like she wasn’t? You can tell the voiceover reaches for something profound and simple like Emily Webb’s final speech in Thornton Wilder’s iconic Our Town, but “The Hitch-Hiker” doesn’t come close to the heartbreak and mystery Wilder’s writing in that play’s ending. Nan says, “Somewhere I’ll find out who he is. And I’ll find out. I’ll find out what he wants” and in the very next sentence says “But just now, for the first time looking out at the night I think I know.” Well gee, that was quick. The tune feels nice, by the lyrics are nonsensical. And getting back to comparing this to The Sixth Sense, isn’t it even more impressive that despite that film’s being handcuffed, being more restricted in a way by adhering consistently to its rules—that despite its being more tightly bound, it was still a humdinger of a surprise ending? An iconic one at that, echoed to this day as one of the greatest unexpected twists in film history, whereas in this episode with all its lack of adherence to a thought-out universe where they can play willy nilly with rules….you can still predict the ending from a mile on down the road.

Trivia Tidbits:

In Lucille Fletcher’s original story, the lead character was a male named Ronald, and it was first presented in 1941 on “The Orson Welles Show.” Ms. Fletcher recalled, “It reached radio and Orson Welles, because Benny, my husband, was musical director of the Mercury Theatre on the Air. I knew Orson, and in fact, had done a lot of publicity on him, when I was working at CBS before my marriage to Benny. I wrote the show for him, designing the narration more or less to fit his style and manner of speaking. Welles did it eloquently and imaginatively and I was very pleased with the result.” “Benny” by the way is the incomparable Bernard Herrmann, the man who composed the music for both the radio and television productions. The radio play version was performed again on September 2, 1942 for a summer replacement series called “Suspense” again starring Orson Welles. It proved to be a hit and so Welles used the same script for “Philip Morris Playhouse” on October 15, 1942 and “Mercury Summer Theater on the Air” on June 21, 1946.

Now, prior to The Twilight Zone’s adaptation, in 1955 Alfred Hitchcock tried to buy the rights to “The Hitch Hiker” from Lucille Fletcher for $2,000 for his show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” but she turned down his offer. Serling had heard that original broadcast of “The Hitch Hiker” back in 1941 on “The Mercury Theatre on the Air” and it made a memorable impression on him. For that same price tag of $2,000 plus $1,100 per rerun, Cayuga Productions later purchased the rights from Ms. Fletcher for it to be made as a “The Twilight Zone.” “The Hitch Hiker” was the only Twilight Zone episode ever that was originally a radio play. A press release on the week of the episode’s premiere broadcast stated that it took Rod Serling just 6 hours to adapt the radio play into a television script. One of the changes he made was to have the lead character be a woman instead of a man, because he thought an audience would feel more for the plight of a woman in distress. And he named the character “Nan” after one of his daughters named Anne, but whom the family nicknamed “Nan.” Anne would say later, “That one always bothered me. I thought, why did he have to use that name?”

Serling didn’t know that the story Lucille Fletcher wrote was inspired by something that actually happened to her. He was perhaps just prescient that way. Ms. Fletcher related the incident this way: “I first got the idea for The Hitch-Hiker in 1940, when I crossed the country from Brooklyn to California with my first husband, Bernard Herrmann and we saw an odd-looking man, first on the Brooklyn Bridge and then on the Pulaski Skyway. We never saw him again. However, I didn’t quite know what to do with the idea until a year later, when, shortly after my first daughter was born, I conceived the idea of doing it as a ghost story. After that I wrote it in a couple of days, during the afternoon, when my newborn baby was taking a nap.” Lucille Fletcher would also mention that “I was not asked to adapt the play to television, nor was I asked about the change of gender in the main character. If I had been, I would never have approved of it, for good though Inger Stevens’s performance was, I don’t think a female in the part added anything to my play. In fact, I think that the dramatic effect was minimized.” Uh oh! Them’s fightin’ words! I got 20 bucks on Serling!

This episode featured Death personified (by actor Leonard Strong) for the second time out of three appearances overall in The Twilight Zone episodes. The first time was in “One For the Angels” played by Murray Hamilton and the third time was in “Nothing in the Dark” and played by Robert Redford. Yes, THAT Robert Redford.

Total production costs for “The Hitch-Hiker” episode of “The Twilight Zone” were $47,721.63.

“The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas” released in 2002, featured many of The Twilight Zone’s teleplays adapted and reformed into radio dramas. Some of them are revamped to include modern technology like cell phones. For “The Hitch Hiker” radio drama the role of Nan Adams was played by Kate Jackson.

The June 1952 issue of Atlas Comics Marvel Tales #107 features a 4-page unauthorized adaptation (by the legendary Stan Lee) of Lucille Fletcher’s “The Hitch Hiker”, which the horror comic book retitled “Going My Way?” There was little doubt in their version that the hitchhiker was Death personified because he was depicted by illustrator Bernard Krigstein as a smiling skeleton wearing a top hat. You can also find it republished in the 2013 “Messages in a Bottle: Comic Book Stories by B. Krigstein”, edited by Greg Sadowski. When horror comic books became popular after World War II, it was common for writers and editors to “borrow” material from other sources to fill the demand (3 to 5 stories per comic book). Lucille Fletcher was in good company as H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury were also writers whose work was adapted without permission or payment.

Watch it here for free. 

Here is a well done parody for free.

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