Ida Lupino's seminal 1953 feature The Hitch-Hiker has been referred to as a Desert Noir by many film scholars, an apt description given how it shifts the tone and style of a traditional film noir from its conventional city setting to a more isolated desert area. But for my money, The Hitch-Hiker was also evocative of those torture horror films that were all the rage in American cinema in the mid-2000s, the likes of Saw and Hostel that were all about the grotesque horror experienced by normal people at the hands of sadistic individuals. The Hitch-Hiker, thanks to Haye's Code era restrictions, can't even begin to be as gruesome as your average Eli Roth movie but its emphasis on the misery of its two lead protagonists evoked those grisly modern films to me anyway.
