20 Best Cult Movies Of The 1980s
9. The Vanishing
There are few serial killer movies out there which truly get under your skin and stay there for days; most opt for cheap thrills or gross out gore, but fail to truly offer any insights into the mind of the killer and allow the audience to understand what might motivate someone to commit such awful crimes.
The Vanishing, a 1988 dark psychological thriller from Dutch director George Sluizer, is one of the clear exceptions. Following the disappearance of his girlfriend at a motorway rest area, a man becomes obsessed with tracking her down, or at least getting to the truth of what happened to her.
Featuring nothing in the way of gore or violence, this is a film which operates entirely on the level of psychology and sinks into the pit of the viewer's soul, eating away at it. The Vanishing might be one of the lesser known cult films released in the 1980s, but it's without a doubt one of the most accomplished psychological thrillers of the era and continues to garner new fans thanks to recent home media releases.
A word of warning: Sluizer remade The Vanishing for American audiences in the early 1990s, which horror fans would be advised to avoid like the plague. Stanley Kubrick considered the original to be the most terrifying film he'd ever seen, but the remake is sadly a laughable affair which fails to capture the thrills of the original.