Stanley Kubrick Called This Crime Horror Movie the Most Terrifying Movie He'd Ever Seen

Riley Presnell is a Features Writer for Collider. Her specialties are Horror and Reality TV. She's had an obsession with horror, specifically slashers and meta-horror, since she can remember and her comfort movie is the 1996 Scream. Her other favorites include Bride Of Chucky, Evil Dead (2013), and Nightmare On Elm Street II. She believes that everyone can be a horror fan, they just have to find the right subgenre for them. Each horror film has a deeper meaning if you can look beyond the bloody surface. Aside from writing horror, Riley seeks out new knowledge regarding LGBTQ and women in horror via books and articles online. Horror is what helped her understand her power as a woman (or final girl) and discover her sexuality. She is currently based in Chicago where she lives with her girlfriend and two needy dogs. Riley is a strong advocate for the LGBTQ community and is passionate about making everyone feel welcome, exactly as they are. She's also likely to be creating never-ending to-do lists to appease her inner worker-bee. Violent deaths, spewing blood, and killers in masks are terrifying and incredibly important niches in the horror genre. When you think about horror, these explicit motifs are usually the first to come to mind. However, there is a more harrowing topic of terror that everyone can relate to, and everyone can agree that it is horrifying, and that is existential dread. In 1988, director George Sluizer released the widely influential horror film The Vanishing, which tackles the topics of existential dread, kidnapping, and living with the trauma of loss.How do you carry on when the one you love is missing and presumed dead? That's the viewpoint that The Vanishing takes, and it is a doozy. The Vanishing doesn't feature any gore or gross-out scenes to make you uncomfortable and scared. Instead, Sluizer creates a devastating story that has the viewer questioning what they would do if their loved one suddenly disappeared one day. How far would you go to know what happened to them? How long would the loss haunt you and pull at the seams of all aspects of your life? If you have trouble being vulnerable, watching The Vanishing will give you more reason to keep that part of you locked away to protect your heart. And if that wasn't enough to get you interested in the film — it had such an impact on legendary director Stanley Kubrick that he immediately rang up Sluizer to tell him it was the most terrifying film he had ever seen. What Is 'The Vanishing' About? The Vanishing is a Dutch film that originally went by Spoorloos, which translates into "without a trace." In the film, Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) travel through France while on vacation. When their car runs out of gas, the two stop off to refuel. While there, Rex and Saskia are talking about being abandoned, and Saskia shares that she is nervous that Rex will leave her and their love will die. He swears to Saskia he will never abandon her, and the two bury coins near a tree to symbolize their togetherness. Saskia then enters the gas station to grab a drink — but shenever returns. Unlike many abduction films, we see who the abductor is before the finale. After Saskia's disappearance, we witness Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) buying an empty house, purchasing chloroform, and planning to get women into the car with him. In Saskia's case, he pretends to be injured to lure her into his snare. Three years after Saskia's disappearance, there are no leads or traces of her, and Rex has silently dealt with that loss. He goes on television and expresses his desperation for wanting to know what happened to her, which prompts Raymond to come forward. Raymond will divulge what happened to her if Rex suffers the same fate. Rex obliges after digging up the coins he and Saskia buried, then drinks a drugged coffee from Raymond. The next thing he knows, Rex wakes up and realizes he is buried alive. The film ends with Raymond and his wife and kids enjoying the beautiful outdoors and reading a newspaper about the double disappearance of Rex and Saskia as he sits right above where he buried them. What Makes 'The Vanishing' So Terrifying? The Vanishing features one of the most disturbing endings to a film, so much so that Stanley Kubrick spoke with Sluizer and named it one of the most terrifying films he's seen. In the interview with the Criterion, Sluizer mentions that Kubrick was a huge fan of the film and saw it about 10 times. The two all-star directors spoke on the phone and broke down The Vanishing shot for shot and Kubrick ended the call by saying how he felt it was the most terrifying film he had ever seen in his life. Sluizer wanted to be tongue-in-cheek, so he asked Kubrick if he had ever seen The Shining. Kubrick told Sluizer that The Shining, one of the most influential horror films in history, was child's play compared to The Vanishing. It's quite the full-circle moment since Sluizer recounted in the same interview that he could not get international attention to the film as no English-speaking distributor wanted to handle it. It wasn't until a last-minute entry into the Sydney Film Festival that English-speaking audiences started to take notice of Sluizer's film. COLLIDER Collider · Quiz Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival QuizWhich Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving?Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you're not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one. 🏕️Jason 🔪Michael 💤Freddy 🎈Pennywise 🪆Chucky QUESTION 1 / 8INSTINCT 01 Something feels wrong. You can't explain it — you just know. What do you do?First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty. QUESTION 2 / 8ENVIRONMENT 02 Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong?Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply. QUESTION 3 / 8STRENGTH 03 What is your most reliable survival asset?Every survivor has a quality the villain didn't account for. What's yours? QUESTION 4 / 8FEAR 04 What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through?Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it. QUESTION 5 / 8GROUP 05 You're with a group when things start going wrong. What's your role?Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn't. QUESTION 6 / 8MISTAKE 06 What's the horror movie mistake you're most likely to make?Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not. QUESTION 7 / 8ADVANTAGE 07 What's your best weapon against something that can't be stopped by conventional means?Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it. QUESTION 8 / 8FINAL SCENE 08 It's the final scene. You're the last one standing. How did you make it?The final survivor always has a reason. What's yours? Your Survival Odds Have Been CalculatedYour Best Chance Is Against… Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck. Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th Jason Voorhees Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit. He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn't strategise, doesn't adapt, doesn't outsmart. He simply pursues. Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge. The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance. You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected. Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween Michael Myers Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it's too late for anyone who isn't paying close enough attention. But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound. Michael's power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is. Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had. You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it. Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street Freddy Krueger Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised. You are harder to destabilise than most. You've faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven't looked away. The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it. Freddy's greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on. Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here. Derry, Maine · It Pennywise Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it. The Losers Club didn't survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly. You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away. That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise's worst nightmare. It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all. Chicago · Child's Play Chucky Chucky's greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it's already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is. You don't have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance. Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone. Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing. Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing. There is no resolve, peace, or happy ending in The Vanishing; only sad emptiness exists. What makes the film so scary is what typically makes another horror film less scary, and that is its lack of mystery. There is no guessing who the killer is or what will happen because we are shown who Raymond is from very early on, yet tension is still high from trying to figure out what exactly happened. Rex is obsessed with finding out what happened to Saskia, and the fact that he is willing to forgo the justice of turning in her killer and instead seek knowledge of what happened to her shows the level of obsession trauma can hold over us. Another aspect of The Vanishing that is both astonishing and bone-chilling is how normal and mundane Raymond seems. He seamlessly blends in as a perfect husband, father, and teacher, but beneath his collected exterior is an incredibly calculated and devoid-of-emotion psychopath. Raymond doesn't harm anyone because he is compelled to or full of rage; rather, he just wants to prove he can. Sluizer's film allows us to see every agonizing step of Raymond's evil process, and the only thing we can do is wait for what he will do next. We get to see Raymond pull off the mask that he uses for his wife, kids, and the public to reveal his true self, holding chloroform, stalking his prey, and his inability to feel any remorse for what he is doing. The Vanishing is a peep-hole view of how casually some of the most evil people can blend in and make themselves appear normal. If you didn't wonder about the true identity of strangers around you before, you will every time you lock eyes with them after watching this film. How Did 'The Vanishing' Influence Other Horror Films? The Vanishing is truly one of a kind, which is why the 1993 remake of the same name fell flat with audiences. Starring Sandra Bullock, Jeff Bridges, and Kiefer Sutherland, the 1993 remake decided to forgo the bleak and hopeless ending and substitute it for one with more closure and a happy ending. While the beginning and middle of the story mimic each other almost scene by scene, the ending features Jeff (Sutherland) climbing out of his grave, killing Barney (Bridges), and accepting Diane's (Bullock) death. One film that shares quite a few similarities to The Vanishing is Prisoners. While Prisoners take the viewpoint of abducted children, the focus is on the chase of finding out what happened and what a loved one would do in distress to find the answers they crave. Towards the end of Prisoners, Keller (Hugh Jackman) comes face to face with his daughter's killer and is forced to suffer the same fate as his daughter. Keller ends up being placed in a deep hole on the killer's property, seemingly without the possibility of being found. Both films focus on the anguish that loss can cause us and that sometimes, we will go to death for our loved ones. Stanley Kubrick was known for having a meticulous eye for detail, so when he commends and praises a film, it holds a lot of weight. The Vanishing and The Shining share an eerily similar opening scene where we get a bird's eye view of cars on the freeway, so maybe Kubrick was drawn in by a beloved style and stayed for the horrors that humanity can bring. Either way, we trust horror in the hands of Kubrick, so if you weren't convinced to check out The Vanishing before, you should be now!