Right after watching the Twilight Zone panel to which I just alluded, I stuck around for a panel about the direction of horror. One of the panelists, Dr. Rebekah McKentry, talked about how the horror genre has, throughout history, alternated through three phases over and over: slasher, supernatural, monster. She added that we’ve just been through a particularly long supernatural phase and are due for some monsters.
I can only think of one true horror film that fits into none of those categories. Maybe that’s why it’s the scariest movie of all-time. I’ll share the spiel I’ve often gone on over the years: “Many people will tell you they like being scared but there are two kinds of fear. There’s the good kind of fear, which you get if you go to Knott’s Scary Farm, and there’s the bad kind of fear, which you get if you go out alone at night and someone jumps out at you with a knife. The Vanishing is the only movie I’ve seen which delivers the bad kind of fear.”
I suppose that’s because The Vanishing (known in its native Netherlands as Spoorloos, which a former friend who was Swiss told me translates to “Without a Trace”) preys on legitimate fear. Supernatural and monster movies have plots that by definition can’t happen in our world, whereas slasher movies are so over the top by their nature I doubt anyone walks around in fear of that happening to them, as scary as the films themselves might be.
The Vanishing is, literally and figuratively, a completely different story. So many people simply disappear every year and their loves ones never find out what happened to them. I was once classmates with such a person. My first quarter at UCLA my fellow freshman Michael Negrete logged off a computer game he was playing with someone on his dorm floor in the wee hours of a morning and then….well nobody knows. Here are some thoughts.
I’ve long been intensely fascinated with people who vanish, partly because it hit that close to home and partly because a few years later, at my next school Berkeley, I rented The Vanishing. It was from that same store I discussed here.
Early in 2003 I had started posting some “User Comments” at IMDB. I got out of the habit after that year but one of my reviews is, to this day, one of the most beloved comments the film has ever gotten. It is the one for The Vanishing and I’ll share that now.
An absolutely chilling, deeply unsettling horror masterpiece
The Vanishing is a movie only those with ice in their veins can ever forget. The direction is absolutely brilliant, from the opening frames until the very end. I felt Saskia’s fright when she thought she lost Rex initially, and her description of her dream made me feel chills. When she disappeared, Rex’s combination of rage, frustration, anxiety, and grief was torture to watch. A particularly powerful moment was when he slammed the car door shut so hard the window crumbled into pieces.
Watching Rex become consumed in every way by his quest to find Saskia was also extremely difficult to watch, although it was certainly inevitable. I found the professor’s description of his actions appalling in many cases, the most notable one being when he fixates on Saskia and we see his POV. Seeing Saskia warmly respond to him was devastating, knowing what would happen. Throughout the film there was an overwhelming sense of doom and isolation, like this was a cruel world where even in the most idyllic settings evil lurked everywhere and attempting to fight it was futile. Rex undergoes one of the most harrowing emotional ordeals of any movie character ever, and when he is at the end of his rope his crucial decision would seem so insane out of context but viewers understand that it really is his only choice. The shock ending, especially the way it was done, almost made me scream, and I will never forget the final shot. The Vanishing could be shown in any film class on direction, as an example of perfection. Material that could have been turned into just a mediocre thriller with would have seemed like a lame twist was turned by George Sluizer into an utterly harrowing filmgoing experience. And that is the right word, because a movie like The Vanishing is not just watched-it is experienced.
I estimate I have seen around 700 movies in my life, and horror is my favorite genre. I have only seen two films that left me so scared that after they ended I couldn’t even move. One was Psycho, which I saw 10 years ago when I was only 12. The other one was just this year-The Vanishing.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Okay that was a lame joke. I expressed myself perfectly in 2003 though. Now I’ll just add this – eat your heart out Us and every other horror movie in history.
Final Verdict: Scariest movie ever. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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