The Vanishing

George Sluizer's masterpiece of patient horror inverts the genre by giving the killer screen time equal to the searcher. The result is the closest cinema has come to capturing what obsession actually feels like — and an ending that Stanley Kubrick once called too disturbing to watch twice.

• Sluizer himself remade it in Hollywood with a happier ending and disowned the remake.
• Stanley Kubrick called it the most terrifying film he had ever seen.
• The villain is given a meticulous origin story unusual for the genre.
• The Dutch original runs 19 minutes shorter than the American remake.
• Inspired the Netflix series "The Vanishing" without permission.

• "I would like to do something. Something predestined."
• "It must be evil."
• "He is a good father."
• "What happened to her?"
• "I had to know."