After so many decades, The Twilight Zone is still known for its eerie twist. However, out of the many episodes from the original five-season run, if there’s one daring twist that folks still talk about, it’s Season 1, Episode 16, “The Hitch-Hiker.” It’s a haunting hour of the beloved Rod Serling series that challenges our perceptions of reality and pushes its leading lady to the absolute brink. It’s a wild episode, and if you’ve never had the pleasure, then you need to add it to your watchlist right away. There was never a twist so daring as this one in the show’s original run, and it remains a masterclass in tension, character-driven horrors, and storytelling that keeps one invested until the very end.
“The Hitch-Hiker” Is A Chilling Episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’
While The Twilight Zone is often creepy, “The Hitch-Hiker” is among the most chilling storylines. This episode begins with Nan Adams (Inger Stevens), a vacationing 27-year-old from New York on her way to Los Angeles, as she sets out on her journey. She narrowly survives a 60-mile-per-hour car accident, but after getting her car fixed, she fails to stop for, you guessed it, a hitchhiker. But things start to get frightening when this hitchhiker (played by Leonard Strong) appears at several stops throughout Nan’s journey, and she soon becomes convinced that the man is trying to kill or rob her. Stopping in New Mexico, she enlists the help of a young sailor (Adam Williams) to ride with her, but he soon abandons ship after coming to believe that she’s lost her mind. Her obsession with this spectral hitchhiker — who cannot be seen by anyone else — starts to become dangerous when her reckless driving gets the better of her.
Throughout her trip, Nan experiences many dangers, but it’s not until she’s in Arizona that she stops. Broken and alone, Nan calls her mother in New York. But it’s during this call that she receives the shocking news that her mother is beside herself after her daughter, Nan, was in a car wreck days earlier. Despite how it seemed earlier, Nan realizes the awful truth that she didn’t survive the car accident, and her countenance changes completely. Any hope she had of reaching Los Angeles (alive or otherwise) vanishes, and she immediately accepts her fate. Upon getting back in the car, the hitchhiker arrives to reap her, as he is revealed to be the personification of death. “I believe you’re going…my way?” the hitchhiker says to her, thus concluding this venture into The Twilight Zone. Talk about a great plot twist.
Given its spooky ending (and the unsettling way that Nan simply accepts the truth of her own death), “The Hitch-Hiker” has continually been named among The Twilight Zone‘s greatest episodes. Although there are no gremlins on airplanes or time-travel shenanigans in “The Hitch-Hiker,” it’s a monumental ghost story that deserves such high praise. Stevens is fantastic as the frantic and driven Nan Adams, who has absolutely no idea that she’s already dead. The way the episode foreshadows this throughout — be it with the mechanic’s comment that Nan nearly needed a hearse or her own statement about the repair being cheaper than a funeral — leaves the audience none the wiser. In this case, it makes total sense that death would be discussed in a jovial manner, as it simply appears that Nan avoided its narrow clutches. But the opposite proves true, as the specter follows her across the country until the time is right to take her to her final destination. The jokes about it throw the audience off, allowing the final reveal to be utterly shocking.
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Rod Serling Changed The Original Radio Play, Arguably Making It Better
With that ending, “The Hitch-Hiker” deserves the recognition it has received over the years, though, admittedly, it is an incredibly simple premise that would’ve been spotted a mile away in today’s world if not solely due to the end of The Sixth Sense. However, especially for the time, it handles the concept so well that we cannot help but emphasize how shocking it would have been when it premiered in the 1960s. Frankly, the first season of The Twilight Zone was quite groundbreaking and includes some of the series’ best episodes, so it’s no wonder that this surprising story falls within that first batch of episodes. Although many believe that Rod Serling (who penned this hour) came up with “The Hitch-Hiker” himself, Marc Scott Zicree notes in The Twilight Zone Companion that it was actually an adaptation of a radio play of the same name by Lucille Fletcher. Though Serling took some creative liberties, he stuck true to Fletcher’s original ending.
Interestingly, Fletcher criticized Serling’s main change to her original radio play, which was turning Ronald Adams into Nan Adams. “I was not asked to adapt the play to television, nor was I asked about the change of gender in the main character,” she explained. “I don’t think a female in the part added anything to the play. In fact, I think the dramatic effect was minimized.” But for many Twilight Zone viewers who had never heard Fletcher’s original play, the gender of the protagonist made no difference. Oddly enough, despite writing the main character as a man, Fletcher’s original story was inspired by her own driving experience when she saw an odd man on the Brooklyn Bridge. Later, she wrote about it as a ghost story, and eventually, it became known to the world as “The Hitch-Hiker” even before Serling brought it to television.
These adaptation controversies aside, “The Hitch-Hiker” is a triumph that accomplishes exactly what The Twilight Zone always set out to do. Again, a short story like this would perhaps be more obvious in today’s television environment, where death has shown up in many forms over the years, and audiences have learned to expect the unexpected. Yet, back in January 1960, it was a groundbreaking achievement to personify death in such a way. Nobody could comprehend what Serling aimed to accomplish here, making one question every interaction and character beat, yet it was incredibly effective. To this day, “The Hitch-Hiker” still shocks Twilight Zone newcomers, proving that Rod Serling was a true master at work.