10 Real Life Happy Endings That Became Disturbing Movies

10. The Vanishing (1988)

Adapted by director George Sluizer and Tim Krabbé from Krabbé’s own 1984 novella The Golden Egg, the original Dutch version of The Vanishing sees an obsessed man confronted with the sociopath who kidnapped his girlfriend three years earlier, determined to find out what happened to her.

In Sluizer’s 1988 original, the kidnapper tells the bereaved man that the only way to find out what happened to his lady is to experience it for himself. Damaged beyond repair by his obsession, he agrees, is drugged and wakes to find himself buried alive...

Krabbé’s idea came from reading a newspaper article about a tourist who vanished from a coach trip after disembarking at a rest stop. The police had searched for two nights, but she seemed to have disappeared without a trace. It became the jumping off point for his story about two lovers reunited in death, and the madman who stood between them.

A decade later, curious to find out what had happened in the real life version of the story, Krabbé did some digging and discovered that the girl had been found. In fact, she’d been found hours after the newspaper article he’d read had been published: she’d just got back on the wrong bus and become lost.

Of course, Sluizer notoriously remade his own movie in 1993 for an American audience, starring Keifer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges, in which the protagonist is rescued and kills the villain with a shovel. It’s difficult to know which alternate ending is more of an anti-climax...