Directed by: Ida Lupino.

The Hitch-Hiker is a 1953 American film noir thriller co-written and directed by Ida Lupino, starring Edmond O’Brien, William Talman and Frank Lovejoy, about two friends taken hostage by a hitchhiker during an automobile trip to Mexico.

The Hitch-Hiker was the first American mainstream film noir directed by a woman. It was selected in 1998 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

The film was a fictionalized version of the Billy Cook murder spree which, along with its consequential trials, made national headlines; the murders for their unprecedented gruesomeness (and pointlessness), and the trials for their dramatic controversy. The event was also referenced in the lyrics to the Doors’ Song, Riders on the Storm. The German philosopher Thomas Collmer argued that the line “Into this world we’re thrown” recalls philosopher Martin Heidegger‘s concept of “thrownness“—human existence as a basic state.