Golden Eggs Flying Through Space: The Horrific Dream Logic at the Heart of The Vanishing

Saskia stands outside of a highway tunnel with a green mountain in the distance.

|Sophie Durbin| My first encounter with George Sluizer’s The Vanishing was on a lazy evening in February of 2023. The Criterion Channel description promised a “truly unsettling” ending, which drew me in since I love being upset by fictional peoples’ problems… Continue reading

Gothic, Dull and Sharp: George Sluizer’s The Vanishing

A close-up image of a missing person poster showing a black-and-white image of Saskia. The poster is glued to a tree on a city street

|MH Rowe| You might say The Vanishing (1988) tells the tale of two creepy men. One is a fretful, controlling boyfriend, the other a methodical murderer. With a different emphasis, the director George Sluizer might have smoothed out the boyfriend and signaled to the audience that we aren’t supposed to understand Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) as a creep… Continue reading

Dude, Where’s My Car? Car Culture Examined in The Cars That Ate Paris

A man is attacked by a grey-black car (oh no!) and has some silver mechanical thin on his head. Gang, I'm sorry...I don't know what that thing is.

|Matthew Lambert| There’s a quintessential moment of madness in the 1974 low-budget horror film The Cars That Ate Paris that is seared into my brain. It’s Charlie (played by the ultimate Australian character actor Bruce Spence) standing outside his fortress of wrecked cars, blood… Continue reading