Rex and Saskia, a young couple in love, are on vacation. They stop at a busy service station and Saskia is abducted. After three years and no sign of Saskia, Rex begins receiving letters from the abductor.
A married couple grieving the recent death of their little daughter are in Venice when they encounter two elderly sisters, one of whom is psychic and brings a warning from beyond.
Director:
Nicolas Roeg
Stars:
Julie Christie,
Donald Sutherland,
Hilary Mason
A woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.
Director:
Andrzej Zulawski
Stars:
Isabelle Adjani,
Sam Neill,
Margit Carstensen
In Spain, the sports journalist Juan has a perfect life with his wife Sonia: they have just had a baby and moved to an old house that needs to be repaired in a fancy neighborhood. When ... See full summary »
Directors:
Álex de la Iglesia,
James Phillips
Stars:
Javier Gutiérrez,
Leonor Watling,
Sancho Gracia
Five campers arrive in the mountains to examine some property they have bought, but are warned by the forest ranger Roy McLean that a huge machete-wielding maniac has been terrorising the ... See full summary »
Young co-eds are being cut up by a chainsaw killer on a college campus. The killer is attempting to put together a human jigsaw puzzle made from body parts.
Director:
Juan Piquer Simón
Stars:
Christopher George,
Lynda Day George,
Frank Braña
A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the school is a front for something far more sinister and supernatural amidst a series of grisly murders.
Rex and Saskia are on holiday, a young couple in love. They stop at a busy service station and Saskia disappears. Rex dedicates the next three years trying to find her. Then he receives some postcards from her abductor, who promises to reveal what has happened to Saskia. The abductor, Raymond Lemorne, is a chilling character to whom Rex is drawn by his intense desire to learn the truth behind his lovers disappearance. The truth is more sinister than he dared imagine. Written by
Matthew Stanfield <mattst@cogs.susx.ac.uk>
The production ran short on money for feeding the cast and crew during filming. According to George Sluizer, he went to some local French underworld figures who lent him money, but also threatened him, in case he wouldn't pay back. See more »
Goofs
Raymond tells Rex that when he was a teenager, he jumped from a balcony and lost two of his fingers. However, the adult Raymond clearly has 10 fingers for the duration of the movie. See more »
Quotes
Rex Hofman:
Sometimes I imagine she's alive. Somewhere far away. She's very happy. And then, I have to make a choice. Either I let her go on living and never know, or I let her die and find out what happened. So... I let her die.
See more »
"The Vanishing" is one of my favorite movies, probably in my top ten. I first saw it in 1990 in San Francisco. Without giving anything away, the end of this Dutch/French film contains an extraordinarily diabolical twist, and at the theater at which I saw it, the projector crapped out with about 15 minutes left. Everyone was issued a free pass to come back, which I did the next day, having barely been able to get the creepy story out of my head. I couldn't wait to see what happened at the film's conclusion. Fifteen years later, it still makes me shudder sometimes. The American remake with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland should, in my opinion, be avoided at all cost; the ending was changed, no doubt to suit the bottom-line aspirations of some brain-dead producer. But the European original is full of great acting (particularly from the villain, Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a tight storyline, and, of course, a wickedly brilliant ending. It's a film worthy of Hitchcock.
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"The Vanishing" is one of my favorite movies, probably in my top ten. I first saw it in 1990 in San Francisco. Without giving anything away, the end of this Dutch/French film contains an extraordinarily diabolical twist, and at the theater at which I saw it, the projector crapped out with about 15 minutes left. Everyone was issued a free pass to come back, which I did the next day, having barely been able to get the creepy story out of my head. I couldn't wait to see what happened at the film's conclusion. Fifteen years later, it still makes me shudder sometimes. The American remake with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland should, in my opinion, be avoided at all cost; the ending was changed, no doubt to suit the bottom-line aspirations of some brain-dead producer. But the European original is full of great acting (particularly from the villain, Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a tight storyline, and, of course, a wickedly brilliant ending. It's a film worthy of Hitchcock.