Sandbox / Harmful to Hitchhikers

"Were you murdered while hitchhiking, too?"

— Ghost of a Hitchhiker, Ghosts (UK)

Harmful to Hitchhikers is the inverted version of Hostile Hitchhiker, in which the driver is the homicidal maniac that the hitchhiker needs to beware of. This overlaps with Bad Samaritan. If they're really unsubtle about it, they might even be driving around in a Creepy Stalker Van.

Films — Live-Action

• Pee-wee's Big Adventure subverts this. Early on in his journey, Pee Wee hitches a ride with Mickey, who is quickly established as an escaped convict. However, he never harms Pee Wee and even lets him drive. When Pee Wee crashes the car and almost kills them, he still doesn't kill him but instead forces him to find new transportation.
• Friday the 13th:
  • In Friday the 13th, one of the first victims in the franchise is a hitchhiking Annie, who is murdered by an unseen Mrs. Voorhees en route to Camp Crystal Lake.
  • In Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, this trope is zigzagged by featuring another hitchhiker murdered by Jason Voorhees, who is not driving a vehicle but sneaks up on her from behind while she waits for a ride.
• The opening and closing scenes of Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead showcase that this is one of Rusty Nail's methods to obtain victims.
• In The Nail Gun Massacre, a hitchhiker flips off a vehicle for speeding past him. Unfortunately, it's being driven by the killer — who stops, waits for the hitchhiker to approach, and then fills him full of nails.
• Played for Laughs in Rat Race, as the Funny Foreigner accidentally ruins a transplant heart, and the courier hints that he plans on using the foreigner's heart as a replacement.
  Enrico: Oh, look, a dreefter, let's kill him! (Wisely runs away)
• In Road Games, Smith (alias Jones) is a hedonistic serial killer who rapes, strangles, and dismembers young female hitchhikers.
• Warlock: The Armageddon: The warlock picks up a slutty woman on the road. Eventually he gets so annoyed with her that he scalps her before throwing her out of his vehicle.
• In Sweet Hostage, Doris Mae flags down escaped mental patient Leonard Hatch after her car breaks down. He offers to give her a ride into town, but instead abducts her to his secret cabin in the mountains.

Literature

• In an early scene of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the main characters threaten and terrorize (but don't, and may not really intend to, physically harm) a young male hitchhiker.
• Maya's Notebook: Maya runs away from the facility for troubled youth that she had been staying in. A truck driver offers her a ride to Las Vegas. He ends up drugging her and raping her. Then he drops her off in the middle of the Strip, patting her on the head and claiming she reminds him of his little daughter.
• In Julie Orringer's short story "Stars of Motown Shining Bright," the main character — on the road with someone who is trying to drag her into a scheme she doesn't like — decides not to get out and hitch a ride home.
  "She imagined herself standing beside the highway in her short white skirt. It seemed like an image from a slasher movie."
• Played for laughs with a creepypasta entitled "The Demon Within", in which the narrator picks up a teenage girl hitchhiking on the side of the road. After they continue on down the highway she falls asleep, and he starts describing the eponymous demon as a rising urge that he wouldn't be able to control indefinitely... which culminates in "the most monstrous fart I’d ever released."

Live-Action TV

• Strange Frequency: One episode/story ("My Generation") features both forms: Wheeler (a driver Serial Killer that kills hitchhikers) and Walker (a Hostile Hitchhiker played straight). They focus on music (Grunge Rock for Wheeler and old-school Rock and Roll for Walker — if someone likes those genres, they are immediate targets), trying to kill each other and, when they wreck the car they are in, doing casual conversation on their killing methods as an old man that was passing by with his RV helps them fix the car... and soon after going on the road and thinking of teaming up, the car's brakes malfunction and they crash fatally. Turns out that the old man is a third Serial Killer, one that has a modus operandi of sabotaging vehicles... if you don't like Big-Band music.
• Masters of Horror featured an episode, "Pick Me Up", where Wheeler is a truck driver who kills hitchers that he picks up, and Walker is a hitchhiker who kills people that pick him up. The third serial killer in this scenario is a pair of ambulance drivers.
• A 1983 ABC Afterschool Special called "Andrea's Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy" was about a girl dealing with the aftermath of being raped while hitchhiking.
• An early CHiPs episode has a pair of teenage girls hitchhike to get where they're going. This works well until the person who stops for them turns out to be a kidnapper. One girl abandons the other and Ponch and Jon come to the rescue.
• Betty spends most of the fifth season of Riverdale investigating the Lonely Highway where hitchhiking women are being murdered by mysogynistic truck-driving Serial Killers. She even poses as a hitchhiker herself to capture them.
• Halfway through the miniseries The Deliberate Stranger, Ted Bundy picks up a pretty girl hitchhiking. Given that by this point in the film, Bundy has been well established as a misogynistic Serial Killer, it's safe to say he has nefarious intentions.
• Unsolved Mysteries again. Two college kids entered a rest stop and called the police, having just learned that the guy they were riding with had stolen the truck he was driving. While he never explicitly threatened them, they were clearly fearful that he had done something to the truck's owner and refused to ride with him anymore. Given that the man had indeed murdered the truck's owner, their instincts probably saved their lives.
• Ghosts (UK): While trying to find a ride home, Alison encounters a young woman who she initially mistakes for living. The woman asking if she too were murdered while hitchhiking makes her realize she's talking to a ghost.

Music

• Like in real life, Macabre's "Edmund Kemper has a Horrible Temper" tells how the titular killer would pick up hitchhiking Co-Ed’s to abduct and murder them.

Video Games

• Rides With Strangers was created based on this trope; the player has to hitchhike their way to a meeting they are late for and must avoid being killed by the driver.
• A Grand Theft Auto V player can do this while playing as Trevor. If he encounters someone lost in the wild, he can deliver them to the Altruist cult to be eaten.

Web Animation

• RWBY Chibi:
  • Episode One of Season 3 has Cinder driving around picking up people for "nefarious reasons" (and being pretty Obviously Evil about her intentions once she stops by them). Having already done so several times already, she picks up Jaune and Ren, who save themselves by means of Jaune singing the opening theme of Camp Camp until she can't take it.
    Cinder: [brakes angrily] STOP! Nothing nefarious is worth this! Get Out!!!!
  • A later skit has both sides of the trope appearing as two Grimm in a Paper-Thin Disguise, aiming to devour any driver that picks them up, get into Cinder's car. And she only realizes what they are once the duo indulges in an Evil Laugh.

Web Videos

• 7-Second Riddles: There's a riddle involving a hitchhiker that got murdered by a man who gave him a ride.
• The Weather: "Hey Girl" involves a woman alone at a bridal shower being repeatedly called by her friends. Over the course of the story, her friend's party bus breaks down, and they're picked up by some seemingly kind men with a dog... only to be taken to a weird house and murdered.

Real Life

• On September 15, 1978, 15-year-old Mary Vincent was hitchhiking through Berkeley, California when she was picked up by Lawrence Singleton, who raped and sodomized her, then chopped off her arms and flung her, naked and bleeding into a ditch. Amazingly, she survived.
• In a story that straddles this and the harmful hitchhiker variant, Paul Teodo told a story at The Moth about a time he was hitchhiking and picked up by John Wayne Gacy. Paul was a violently unstable young man at the time and believes he survived the encounter because of his own violent attitude — others picked up by Gacy were not so lucky, and even two who survived were still subjected to hours of rape and torture.
• Edmund Kemper, the "Co-ed Killer" made famous by the book and Netflix show Mindhunter, might well be the Trope Codifier for the real-life decline of hitchhiking. He specifically targeted female hitchhikers in the '70s in California, typifying the psychopathic killer targeting young, innocent girls in the public mind.
• Jeffrey Dahmer's first victim was a young hitchhiker named Steven Hicks, whom he lured in with promises of alcohol before bludgeoning him to death.
• Hitchhiking was popular in the 1960s and 70s in the USA... until it became apparent that many girls and women who hitchhiked were frequently turning up dead. As were male ones.