The Hitch-Hiker

"The Hitch-Hiker" is the sixteenth episode of the first season of the original The Twilight Zone television series.

Episode Details[]

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.... 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."

Episode Summary[]

The story begins with Nan Adams, whose vehicle gets a flat tire on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Los Angeles. A mechanic puts a spare tire on her car and directs her to the nearest town to fix it properly. Just before she leaves, Nan notices a strange-looking man hitchhiking. Unnerved, she drives away quickly. As she continues her trip, Nan sees the same hitchhiker thumbing for a ride at several other points on her journey. She becomes increasingly frightened of him, and when she is stuck on a railroad crossing and nearly hit by a train, she becomes convinced that the hitchhiker is trying to kill her. She continues to drive, becoming more and more afraid, stopping only when necessary; but every time she does, the same hitchhiker is there. When she ends up stranded in New Mexico, she meets a sailor on his way back to San Diego from leave. Eager for protection from the hitchhiker she's been seeing, she offers to drive the sailor to San Diego herself. However, she is still paranoid about the hitchhiker, and when she sees him on the road she tries to run him over. The sailor, who can't see him, begins to fear for her sanity and leaves her. In Arizona, Nan stops to call her mother. The woman who answers the phone, Mrs. Whitney, says that Mrs. Adams is in the hospital; she had a nervous breakdown after finding out that her daughter, Nan, was killed in an auto accident in Pennsylvania six days ago, when the car she was driving blew a tire and overturned. At this point, Nan realizes the truth: the hitchhiker is not a man who wants her to die, but is rather the angel of death, patiently and persistently waiting for her to realize that she has been dead all along. Nan returns to the car and sees the hitchhiker in her vanity mirror. "I believe you're going...my way?" he inquires, almost friendly; afterwards, a full shot of the inside of her car shows no one sitting in the car other than Nan. As Nan accepts her fate, Rod Serling narrates the final lines.

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."

Preview for Next Week's Story[]

Specie [sic] of machine known, variously, as slot machine or one-armed bandit, and if you've ever played with one of these things for a while, you've probably gotten a peculiar feeling that this is a machine with a mind and will of its own. This is precisely what happens when Everett Sloane contacts a fatal ailment we call "The Fever." You'll be an eyewitness to it next week on The Twilight Zone.

Background Information[]

Cast[]

Rod Serling as Narrator (voice only); uncredited
Inger Stevens as Nan Adams
Leonard Strong as The Hitch-Hiker
Adam Williams as Sailor
Russ Bender as Counterman
Lew Gallo as Mechanic
George Mitchell as Gas Station Man
Eleanor Audley as Mrs. Whitney; uncredited
Mitzi McCall as Waitress; uncredited
Dwight Townsend as Highway Flagman; uncredited

Crew[]

Rod Serling (executive producer: Cayuga Productions)
Buck Houghton (producer)
George T. Clemens (director of photography)
Bill Mosher (film editor)
Millie Gusse (casting; credited: Mildred Gusse)
George W. Davis (art director)
William Ferrari (art director)
Rudy Butler (set decorator)
Henry Grace (set decorator)
Ralph W. Nelson (production manager)
Edward O. Denault (assistant director; credited: Edward Denault)
Franklin Milton (sound; credited: Frank Milton)
Jean G. Valentino (sound; credited: Jean Valentino)
Van Allen James (sound effects editor; uncredited)

Production Companies[]

Cayuga Productions
Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) (in association with)

Distributors[]

Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) (1960) (USA) (TV) (original airing)
Image Entertainment (2004) (USA) (DVD)

Other[]

United Productions of America (UPA) (animated title)

Home media release[]

This episode is included on the Image Entertainment Vol. 7 DVD along with "Perchance to Dream", "King Nine Will Not Return" and "Shadow Play".

Trivia[]

The production of this episode cost a total of $47,721.63.
Alfred Hitchcock tried to purchase the rights to the radio play for his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for $2000 but his bid was rejected. Nevertheless, Cayuga Productions was able to obtain rights to Lucille Fletcher's script for $2000 and $1100 for each episode re-run.
Gasoline price at the first station was 32.9 cents/gallon (equivalent to $2.60 in 2013 dollars.)
In the original story, the character of Nan was a male, Ronald. Rod Serling believed that a female in the situation would be reacted to with more feeling by audiences.
Unlike Nan, Ronald's fatal car accident did not occur in Pennsylvania, but rather on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Unlike Nan, Ronald's first encounter with the hitch-hiker would not be after his death, but rather immediately before his death when he swerved around the hitch-hiker just before crossing the bridge; in contrast to Nan, who was revealed to have been killed after her car turned over when a tire blew out, swerving around the hitch-hiker was likely what killed Ronald.
The protagonist's voice-over narration references the radio-play source of the episode.
The original radio play was originally produced for a summer replacement series called "Suspense" on September 2, 1942 and starred Orson Welles. The program was so popular that Welles restaged the same script for "Philip Morris Playhouse" on October 15, 1942 and "Mercury Summer Theater on the Air" on June 21, 1946.
Musical cues Bernard Herrmann composed for the 1946 radio production were re-scored for this episode.
The Hitch-Hiker only has a total of two lines.
Unlike with Nan Adams, who meets up with the hitch-hiker being present in her vanity mirror after calling her mother's residence, original story did not explain how Ronald Adams encountered the hitch-hiker after calling his mother's residence and finding out about his death. Unlike Nan, he called his mother's residence from Gallup, New Mexico, rather than Arizona, and concluded the story while he was still sitting in the trailer camp where he called his mother from.
Whens Nan goes to the gas station after her blow-out, some pumps are branded "Magnum" oil company. This is the same brand of oil-company truck from the famous biplane scene in North by Northwest.
The character of 'Nan' was named after Rod Serling's daughter.
Ironically, Nan Adams actress Ingar Stevens, who was only 25 years old when the episode first aired, would herself die at a young age in 1970 after committing suicide.

v • e The Twilight Zone (original series) episodes
Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" • "One for the Angels" • "Mr. Denton On Doomsday" • "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" • "Walking Distance" • "Escape Clause" • "The Lonely" • "Time Enough at Last" • "Perchance to Dream"• "Judgment Night" • "And When the Sky Was Opened" • "What You Need" • "The Four of Us Are Dying" • "Third from the Sun" • "I Shot an Arrow Into the Air" • "The Hitch-Hiker" • "The Fever" • "The Last Flight" • "The Purple Testament" • "Elegy" • "Mirror Image" • "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" • "A World of Difference" • "Long Live Walter Jameson" • "People Are Alike All Over" • "Execution" • "The Big Tall Wish" • "A Nice Place to Visit" • "Nightmare as a Child" • "A Stop at Willoughby" • "The Chaser" • "A Passage for Trumpet" • "Mr. Bevis" • "The After Hours" • "The Mighty Casey" • "A World of His Own"
Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" • "The Man in the Bottle" • "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" • "A Thing About Machines" • "The Howling Man" • "Eye of the Beholder" • "Nick of Time" • "The Lateness of the Hour" • "The Trouble With Templeton" • "A Most Unusual Camera" • "Night of the Meek" • "Dust" • "Back There" • "The Whole Truth" • "The Invaders" • "A Penny for Your Thoughts" • "Twenty-Two" • "The Odyssey of Flight 33" • "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" • "Static" • "The Prime Mover" • "Long Distance Call" • "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" • "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" • "The Silence" • "Shadow Play" • "The Mind and the Matter" • "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" • "The Obsolete Man"
Season 3	"Two" • "The Arrival" • "The Shelter" • "The Passersby" • "A Game of Pool" • "The Mirror" • "The Grave" • "It's a Good Life" • "Death's Head Revisited" • "The Midnight Sun" • "Still Valley" • "The Jungle" • "Once Upon a Time" • "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" • "A Quality of Mercy" • "Nothing in the Dark" • "One More Pallbearer" • "Dead Man's Shoes" • "The Hunt" • "Showdown with Rance McGrew" • "Kick the Can" • "A Piano in the House" • "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" • "To Serve Man" • "The Fugitive" • "Little Girl Lost" • "Person or Persons Unknown" • "The Little People" • "Four O'Clock" • "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" • "The Trade-Ins" • "The Gift" • "The Dummy" • "Young Man's Fancy" • "I Sing the Body Electric" • "Cavender is Coming" • "The Changing of the Guard"
Season 4	"In His Image" • "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" • "Valley of the Shadow" • "He's Alive" • "Mute" • "Death Ship" • "Jess-Belle" • "Miniature" • "Printer's Devil" • "No Time Like the Past" • "The Parallel" • "I Dream of Genie" • "The New Exhibit" • "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" • "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" • "On Thursday We Leave for Home" • "Passage on the Lady Anne" • "The Bard"
Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" • "Steel" • "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" • "A Kind of a Stopwatch " • "The Last Night of a Jockey" • "Living Doll" • "The Old Man in the Cave" • "Uncle Simon" • "Probe 7, Over and Out" • "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" • "A Short Drink From a Certain Fountain" • "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" • "Ring-a-Ding Girl" • "You Drive" • "The Long Morrow" • "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" • "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" • "Black Leather Jackets" • "Night Call" • "From Agnes—With Love" • "Spur of the Moment" • "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" • "Queen of the Nile" • "What's in the Box" • "The Masks" • "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" • "Sounds and Silences" • "Caesar and Me" • "The Jeopardy Room" • "Stopover in a Quiet Town" • "The Encounter" • "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" • "The Brain Center at Whipple's" • "Come Wander With Me" • "The Fear" • "The Bewitchin' Pool"