Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer, the man behind psychological horror The Vanishing, has died. He was 82.
Sluizer cut his teeth with an award-winning short called The Low Lands in 1961, before graduating to the longer form with 1972’s João And The Knife, a haunting drama set in the Amazon basin, and Twice A Woman seven years later. But it was The Vanishing, a landmark horror in 1988, that made his name.
The film, which was released under the title ‘Spoorloos’ (‘Without A Trace’) in Sluizer’s native tongue, was adapted from Tim Krabbé’s novella The Golden Egg and charts the efforts of a man to uncover his fiancée’s fate after she disappears at a motorway service station. No lesser a figure than Stanley Kubrick was moved to describe it as, “the most horrifying film I’ve ever seen”. As a portrayal of obsession, it boasts shades of Hitchcock; as a record of a man’s descent into a personal hell, it remains uniquely unsettling.
The Vanishing’s Hollywood remake represented a similar spiral for Sluizer – with Sandra Bullock and Kiefer Sutherland in the lead roles and a soft-soap ending, it dismantled the original’s creepy architecture almost entirely – and the director had to cope with even greater turmoil when River Phoenix died during the 1993 shoot for Dark Blood. The film was eventually completed two decades later with Sluizer claiming that finishing it had been the single ambition that had kept him alive in the face of increasing ill-health.
Sluizer’s other feature films include Twice A Woman (1979), **Crimetime **(1996), **The Commissioner **(1998), **The Stone Raft **(2002) and 2008’s The Chosen One. He is survived by his wife.