Don't Give This Guy A Ride! (...This Album, However...)

As a kid I liked all kinds of movies. My dad installed a love for Westerns, and like most kids I liked action films and comedies, everything that moved and entertained. But the first genre I discovered for myself, because no other family member would have a taste for it, was horror movies. For a long time, with a single TV in the house, occasions were rare, and had to be seized. Several factors had to combine: I would have to watch a movie with my dad, while my mom would go to bed and read if the film didn't interest her. Then I would wait until my dad would inevitable fall asleep and snore happily away at one point, at which I could either wait for the late night horror film or quietly switch channels to get to my bounty. I distinctly remember watching The Thing on low volume, with my dad's snoring the background noise to Kurt Russell squaring off with the shapeshifting beastie - still the best horror movie of all times, folks. 

Another horror classic from my younger days is, obviously, The Hitcher. Man, that movie was a shock to the system. A variation on the slasher films of the time, the film's seeming realism that slowly gives way to something else - not quite supernatural, then definitely something leaving all senses of reality behind, which made this probably more disturbing than the clearly fantastic Nightmare On Elm Street series. The Hitcher, more than a slasher, is truly a nightmare movie. When Jim Halsey's nightmare (ha!) starts as he stops to let the mysterious John Ryder in his car, he says "my mother told me never to do this" with a geeky smile that will soon disappear, you understand that The Hitcher is essentially a scary but instructive story that the brothers Grimm couldn't have imagined better. And even though there is no Freddy Krueger here, the film has more of a nightmare feel to it than the increasingly operatic grand guignol spectacles involving the burnt-to-a-crisp undead child murderer.

Some critics didn't get it, obviously, and not only those that have prejudices against horror-themed films. It's true that at some point people will inevitably go 'eh...but Ryder can't possibly be here at this moment in time', because as Halsey's nightmare continues, it truly takes on the hallmarks of a drzam...or a nightmare, where space and time are not functioning as in the real world, getting bent out of shape, making sudden jumps in location or illogical chronology ,ot a bug, but a feature. If you're wondering why things are not adding up, you're watching this film wrong. As director Robert Harmon, who weirdly disappeared fropm the face of the earth after this film - said "You either get it, or you don't". As a film that shows how something that looks realistic, if admittedly improbable, slowly morphs into something entirely impossible, with the viewer losing all sense of real-life logic. The film logic, that The Hitcher and John Ryder impose on people trump the suspension of disbelief. 

You know what's really helping a film that emulates a dream and its logic? Why, a score that gives you tghe feeling that the real world and its restrictions are slowly melting away for example. And it so happens that Mark Isj=ham's score is exactly that kind of music. Entirely synthetic, the score was Isham's attempt to use and master then new cutting edge technology to his bag of tricks, adding the Prophet 2000 keyboard to his arsenal of old school synths like the ARP 2600 he had worked with for years. The brought in two drummers, but then proceeded to only use sampled drum sounds. And while all this sounds like the score to The Hitcher would sound awfully of its time, that's not really true. If anything the music sounds out of time, seemingly existing just on that fine line between reality and dream. 

The score to The Hitcher is one of the finest examples of a synth soundtrack from the high time of that particular type of soundtrack. Action-driven, incidental numbers like "Cars And Helicopters" are rare, most cuts here are incredibly atmospheric and just there to set a mood. And frankly, if you're coming for moodsetting - and you definitely shoud - you will not be disappointed here. I kept the soundtrack as is, as a bonus tracks there is an 'ambient suite' version of The Hitcher theme, which was of course more impressive before I knew that a simple push of the Paulstretch function in Audacity could create the ambient soundscapes of extremely slowed down tracks. Still, if you got nothing better to do, or listen to, it will give you atmospheric background music in spades. 

So, The Hitcher. If you can catch it somewhere, go and (re)watch the movie. And, of course, listen to this fantastic piece of business by Mark Isham.