The Hitch-Hiker is a 1953 American independent[2] film noir thriller co-written and directed by Ida Lupino, and starring Edmond O'Brien, William Talman and Frank Lovejoy.

Based on the 1950 killing spree of Billy Cook, the film follows two friends who are taken hostage by a murderous hitchhiker during an automobile trip to Mexico.

In Mexico, Myers sadistically terrorizes the pair—at one point forcing Bowen to shoot a tin can out of Collins' hand from a long distance—and revels in the ineffective attempts by Mexican law enforcement to catch him using checkpoints.

Later, when the car is damaged, Myers forces the group to continue on foot at gunpoint, and taunts them for missing opportunities to escape even if it would mean the other would be killed.

The Hitch-Hiker was based on the 1950 killing spree of Billy Cook who, posing as a hitchhiker, murdered a family of five, kidnapped a Riverside County Sheriff's Department deputy and abandoned him in a desert (the deputy survived), and killed a traveling salesman, before attempting to flee to Mexico by taking two men on a hunting trip hostage and forcing them to drive him to Santa Rosalía.

[8] The film was written by Lupino and her former husband Collier Young, based on a story by Daniel Mainwaring which was adapted by Robert L. Joseph.

[15] The Philadelphia Inquirer said that "with nothing more than three able actors, a lot of rugged scenery and their own impressive talents as producers, authors and director, Collier Young and Ida Lupino have brewed a grim little chiller".

[16] The New York Daily News gave the film three and a half of four stars, saying Lupino made "good and exciting use" of the real-life incident.

[17] The New York Times called the film an "unrelenting but superficial study of abnormal psychology coupled with standard chase melodrama".

In addition to her critical but compassionate sensibility, Lupino had a great filmmaker's eye, using the starkly beautiful street scenes in Not Wanted and the gorgeous, ever-present loneliness of empty highways in The Hitch-Hiker to set her characters apart.

Yet her emotional sensitivity is also upfront: charting the changes in the menaced men's relationship as they bicker about how to deal with their captor, stressing that only through friendship can they survive.

They wrote, "The Hitch-Hiker's desert locale, although not so graphically dark as a cityscape at night, isolates the protagonists in a milieu as uninviting and potentially deadly as any in film noir.