The Twilight Zone, S1E16, "The Hitch-Hiker"

Opening: 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. … Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania. Perhaps, to be filed away under “accidents you walk away from.” But from this moment on, Nan Adams’ companion on a trip to California will be terror. Her route: fear. Her destination: quite unknown.

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When I was growing up, my parents had audio cassette tapes of old radio thrillers like Suspense, Lights Out, and Escape, and we would listen to them on long car trips. Some of my favorite childhood memories involve sitting in the backseat, riding through the dark, listening to episodes like “Sorry, Wrong Number” and “Three Skeleton Key.” My sister and I used to try to draw illustrations for them.

“The Hitch-Hiker,” starring Orson Welles, was always a personal favorite, and so for years, I was so attached to the original radio play that I assumed the TV adaptation would leave me slightly cold.

In fact, I think TZ’s version is slightly better—and considering the original radio drama really is a classic, that’s saying something. The story benefits from the switch to a female protagonist: Nan Adams (Inger Stevens¹) is vulnerable in ways Ronald Adams isn’t, and both she and the audience are aware of that vulnerability and attuned to it.

The hitchhiker (Leonard Strong²) is as desexualized as the episode can make him, because the emphasis needs to be on Nan’s instinctive, subconscious fear of what he represents: death. If he’s too clearly a sexual threat, then the focus is on that and not on the uncanny—we need Nan to be immediately disturbed and repulsed by him for reasons she can’t initially identify.

But while “The Hitch-Hiker” defuses what would otherwise be the central sexual menace, it uses our overhanging awareness of Nan’s sexual vulnerability in dark and interesting ways. It inflects the whole conversation she has with the gas station attendant, who’s so dismissive of this obviously terrified woman who is pleading for help because a man is following her; when Nan scrambles for some sort of way to make the inchoate threat of the hitchhiker concrete, she says he might rob her, and here “rob” stands in for “rape” the way “he killed me” stands in for it in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “Revenge.” We understand it immediately, the original 1960 audience would have understood it immediately, and certainly the gas station attendant understands it immediately. He just doesn’t care. She can come back when the guy does rob her, he says—which is, of course, a familiar refrain in stalking cases. Talk to us when he’s done something.

The unspoken subtext is especially well-used in Nan’s encounter with the sailor (Adam Williams³). He enters the scene by putting his hand on her shoulder in the dark, and she starts, horrified—but she’s instantly, overwhelmingly relieved when she sees he’s not the hitchhiker, just a strange man she’s alone with at night. He could still be a threat, but he’s at least a human one. Whatever danger he represents feels like nothing compared to the beckoning figure who lured her onto the train tracks.

The sailor badgers the gas station attendant into opening up for them—of course he opens up for the irate man and not the terrified woman—and then Nan almost begs for the opportunity to give him a ride.

At first, his presence steadies and rejuvenates Nan, and we get a little more of the personality and humor we saw at the start of the episode, before fear ground her down into a jumpy mess. She’s still on-edge—and her tension is subtly off-putting to the sailor, who, understandably enough, can only read her as giving off red flags—but she’s able to make jokes and get him to relax into what, at first, seems like an extraordinary bit of luck. He even goes along with her baffling quasi-word problem about whether or not it would be at all possible for an ordinary hitchhiker to continue to outpace a driver. (Again, it says something that at this point Nan would be relieved to simply have the man stalking her be human and bound by the laws of physics.)

When Nan swerves to try to kill the hitchhiker, her dangerous driving alarms the sailor—who didn’t even see anyone there. He rallies at first, simply saying that maybe she should let him drive, but then she admits how deliberate the swerve was: “I thought maybe if I could kill him, I could make him stop.”

That’s a bridge too far for the sailor, who no longer cares how attractive she is—he wants to get out of the car and as far away from her as possible. The kicker comes when Nan tries desperately to seduce him into staying with her, and we see how utterly panicked she now is at the thought of being alone. It’s maybe the best moment of Inger Stevens’s consistently great performance: the terror of a hunted creature never leaves her eyes even as she frantically tries to find some coded, faux-normal way to appeal to him. In this moment, being sexually exploited by an opportunistic hitchhiker is the better option for her; what would have been nightmarish at the start of her trip has become a lifeline. She’ll choose any human, comprehensible risk over the inevitable unknown.

But she doesn’t get that option. No matter what kind of offer is on the table, the sailor is no longer willing to take his chances: his “gift of fear” has finally kicked in. He leaves, and she weeps—this is Nan at the end of her rope, and the story wisely moves immediately on to the climax.

Before we get to that, I want to mention some other standout bits of this episode—ones not as tied to gender shift and terrific lead performance.

There are a lot of good shots in this episode. I have to give the MVP award to Stevens, but director Alvin Ganzer also deserves a nod for making such a visually distinctive experience out of what used to be a purely auditory one. (The story’s audio origins are preserved via an ongoing inner monologue from Nan—unusual for the show but necessary here, since we need it to convey Nan’s growing fear and disquiet.) From listening to the Blu-ray commentary, I understand that the oncoming train shot was the hardest one to pull off, but my favorite is Nan coming through the tunnel and seeing the light at the end of it interrupted by the dark stain of the hitchhiker’s silhouette.

There’s also another scene I would rank right up there with Nan’s encounter with the sailor, and that’s when Nan has to pull over because of construction. The hitchhiker catches up with her, and she’s forced to simply sit there, exposed, and let him approach her. There’s something almost grotesque about how he hunkers down to speak to her through the window; it’s like a spider looming over a fly. “Going west?” he says, and Nan—again, another sharp observation here—feels like she has to be polite. There’s barely contained panic in her voice as she stammers out that no, she’s “just going down the road a little ways”—and then she’s so rattled that she speeds away despite the construction, breaking the social rules she just pressed herself to the limit trying to uphold. It’s magnificently done.

All this speaks to Rod Serling’s adaptation of Lucille Fletcher’s original play, too—it’s impressive how thoroughly he thought through the different ways the story would play out with a female protagonist. Per SyFy, Fletcher⁴ apparently didn’t care for the change, feeling that it “minimized” the dramatic effect: I think I’d agree if the threat the hitchhiker posed had felt more plausibly human because of it, but as I’ve said, I think the episode does a great job emphasizing his uncanniness by contrasting him with the more ordinary threats she could face.

Ganzer also nails the in-between nature of roads and journeying—the diner owner calls it “lonely country,” and it looks like it. There’s a surreal blankness to Nan’s journey and its endless stretches of highway. We see her stop for food but never for the night, as if there’s only one kind of rest she needs now.

If she had never realized the nature of her accident back in Pennsylvania, would she have ever reached California? Or would she have simply kept driving forever, always on her way to a destination that is no longer within her reach? There’s an intuitive sense that the road is where you could encounter a spirit in transition, where Nan’s haunting could be particularly solid and she could have more luck convincing herself that she was still alive.⁵

Ganzer also does a great job highlighting the unsettling horror of the hitchhiker. Right from the start, he puts us in Nan’s shoes—Ganzer has the hitchhiker step in front of the camera, look directly at us, and smile. It’s a real jolt, and it’s a meaningful one—it tells us that he’s far more than he seems. The Twilight Zone often presents a humanized Death as a gentler figure: an impatient bureaucrat who could develop a serious soft spot for a friendly pitchman or a young, tender Robert Redford. This Death isn’t like that at all, and Ganzer doesn’t even shoot him like he’s a neutral, inevitable force. There’s a dark humor to him. Even after the revelation, I don’t feel like he’s patiently reappearing and reappearing until Nan realizes the truth, I feel like he’s hunting her and enjoying himself.

That leads to the chilling, ambiguous ending—another instance in which the TV version has a leg up on the radio original. The radio drama ends on the moment of clarity just after Ronald’s phone call, where he discovers that he died several days ago. He knows he’ll encounter the hitchhiker again and that this time, it will come with a revelation—that he’ll know who the hitchhiker is and who he is. The Twilight Zone episode presses that moment a little further.

Nan has the same phone call. (As familiar as this story is, I get actual goosebumps at Mrs. Whitney saying, “Well, it’s all taken place since the death of her daughter.”) She has the same sense of free-floating clarity: “The fear has left me now. I’m numb, I have no feeling.” She describes herself as a “cold shell,” exquisitely conscious of her vast surroundings and the force that’s waiting for her somewhere there.

“I’ll find out what he wants,” she says. “Though just now, for the first time, looking out at the night, I think I know.”

She gets back in the car, at a cold kind of peace that comes from acceptance without any sense of comfort. She adjusts her rearview mirror—and the hitchhiker sits in her backseat. He smiles.

“I believe you’re going my way?” he says.

The camera pulls back and back—and we leave them there, with Nan in her cold shell, given no reassurance, handed over to a figure of Death that we don’t trust. Maybe it’s crucial that in both “One for the Angels” and “Nothing in the Dark,” the characters are dying natural deaths that they have to accept. This feels more like being accosted.

She doesn’t even get to embrace her fate to the extent of letting him into the car; he was already there. He’s just a force she collided with, and while she got away for a little while, he finally caught up with her. She’s in the driver’s seat, but he’s in control.

It’s a haunting ending with a lingering chill to it, and while I’m glad that the series usually provides us with a little more warmth than this, I still think this hits. It’s a fable, which means it’s a little simple and a little obvious, but it’s always left a mark on me.

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Closing: 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.

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1. Stevens worked regularly, especially on TV, but she had tragically little time to establish her career: she died at only 35, a fact that makes this episode even more haunting. ↩︎
2. Regrettably, Strong spent most of his time playing Asian caricatures. (The internet appears to be divided on the question of whether he was potentially part-Asian, but as far as I can judge, the consensus is no.) This late career role was a rare step outside the yellowface stereotypes and fake accents that won him notoriety on such shows as Get Smart. ↩︎
3. We’ll see him again in “A Most Unusual Camera,” and if we continue with AHP and also move on to Thriller, we’ll see him there too: the guy worked. You may also recognize him from minor roles in North by Northwest and The Big Heat, among many other projects. ↩︎
4. She also wrote the aforementioned “Sorry, Wrong Number,” making her an early favorite dramatist of a pre-teen me. And for a bonus TZ connection, she was married to Bernard Hermann, composer of the original Twilight Zone theme; his score for her original play is re-used in this episode. ↩︎
5. Stephen Graham Jones has an excellent horror novella called The Elvis Room that touches on the idea that ghosts might prefer large anonymous spaces like hotels and airports. ↩︎