The cult classic horror Roger Ebert refused to give a star rating: “This movie is diseased and corrupt”
Horror has always been one of cinema’s most polarising genres and with good reason. While there’s definitely something to be said about the primal experience of being scared shitless in a cinema, blood and guts aren’t for everyone. Roger Ebert wasn’t the biggest fan of the medium, and he reserved special scorn for a dark and dingy terror that swiftly attained cult classic status.
The legendary critic wasn’t necessarily anti-horror, but he tended to prefer the classics. George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Brian De Palma’s Carrie, and The Blair Witch Project all received glowing reviews from Ebert, but there were plenty of spiritually similar titles that he absolutely abhorred.
Based on the scathing assessments he dished out to the likes of Paul WS Anderson’s Resident Evil, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Skulls, Lake Placid, and more, Ebert wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about modern horror. Film criticism isn’t supposed to be taken as gospel, and as far as he was concerned, any cinematic story about things going bump in the night, terrifying creatures, or murderous boogeymen needed something special to get pass marks.
One movie he hated with a passion was a box office bomb that failed to recoup its budget in ticket sales and ended its theatrical run without setting the critical sphere on fire. However, designation as a cult classic is something that needs to be earned and decided upon by a mass audience, and Robert Harmon’s 1986 favourite The Hitcher managed it and then some, becoming one of star Rutger Hauer’s most popular roles and enjoying long-lasting life on home video and the midnight screening circuit.
C Thomas Howell picks up Hutger’s mysterious drifter, who doesn’t hesitate in letting him know that he’s a serial killer. After making an escape, the plucky driver enlists Jennifer Jason Leigh’s waitress to track down and apprehend the psychotic John Ryder, and Ebert described the latter’s death scene as “so grotesquely out of proportion with the main business of this movie that it suggests a deep sickness at the screenplay stage.”
“On its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt,” Ebert wrote in his review. “I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level, it is reprehensible.”
Ebert was no fan of The Hitcher, then, refusing to even give it a star rating after being left so disgusting with levels of gore he viewed as little more than gratuitous. One person who’d definitely disagree is Christopher Nolan, who called it one of his all-time favourite guilty pleasure flicks.
