Bleak, Cruel, & Perfect

This week, I'm thinking about George Sluizer's bleak, cruel, and perfect The Vanishing, complaining about the new Final Destination movie, and recommending a goopy, wild Argentinian possession story (major spoilers for The Vanishing, no real spoilers for the rest) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ The Vanishing, dir. George Sluizer, 1988.

1. Knowledge. The Vanishing is a movie about, by its own terms, curiosity. The murderer Raymond tells the search-obsessed Rex, as he lures him to his doom, “. . . I’m banking on your curiosity.” Rex needs to know what happened to Saskia, his missing girlfriend. Viewers aren't completely sure what happened until the movie's bleak, cruel conclusion. The Vanishing draws much of its energy, though, not from what we don’t know, but from the way it lets its audience in on much more than either Rex or Raymond ever get. We identify the perpetrator early on, and we know all about Rex—something Raymond’s keenly interested in. After the shocking live burial, we’ve had a taste of something Raymond never really has: We’ve been inside the grave. And when we see him with his family in the yard—the same yard the bodies are buried in—we have more perspective on Raymond than Rex ever will.
2. In public, in danger. Are public spaces safe? Not really—something I’ve written about before. The rest area in The Vanishing is one of horror’s great, malevolent spaces. Spaces like these are not only teeming with strangers, they’re also places you might gravitate toward if you wanted to encounter people anonymously, outside the protective boundaries of their worlds. By the time we return again to the rest area at the film’s end, its taken on an overwhelmingly sinister atmosphere. This place is nothing if not mundane—but anything could happen here.
3. Underneath. In The Vanishing’s last scene, we see Raymond with his family at his country house, and the gliding camera’s tilted down, lingering over the earth—earth we now know contains two buried bodies. It’s an overlap of the wholesome and the dreadful that makes a fitting, thematic end, but it’s also an expansion of cinematic space. The ground characters tread in cinema is generally just stage floor. Our angle down emphasizes the final resting place of Saskia and Rex, but it also opens up the spatial boundaries of the cinematic world. This world has found new depths—metaphorically yes, but spatially too.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

◆ Final Destination Bloodlines, dir. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, 2025.

4. Cheating death. Like other Final Destination movies, Bloodlines centers on physics—on its complex, Rube Goldberg machines of death. These intricate, even fascinating, set pieces insist on the world as a weighty, material thing. And yet, though Bloodlines is a perfectly fun movie, its computer-generated imagery, like most CGI, conveys unreality and immateriality, not the weight or physicality of the real. Simpler set pieces, of less complexity and less bizarre detail, might’ve still had more impact than those here, if they had relied more on practical effects and the real world, rather than on computers.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

◆ When Evil Lurks, dir. by Demián Rugna, 2023.

5. Chaos. If we’re seeking the weight and physicality of the real, we could do much worse than When Evil Lurks, where possession functions as contagion in the Argentinian countryside. An intense and dangerous depiction of chaos, this is a tough watch (morally gray even), but its energetic engagement with the edges of the genre make it essential viewing in new horror.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday.

In 2025, ICE's spending on weapons rose from $16 million to $76 million. The time to resist fascism is now.