The Horror of Not Knowing - Why The Vanishing Is Scarier Than The Shining

I always thought my worst nightmare was being chased by an axe-wielding maniac. Turns out it’s being left at a service station, holding two Cokes, wondering where my partner went.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has long reigned as the gold standard of psychological horror. With its ominous hotel corridors, creeping camerawork, and Jack Nicholson’s gleeful descent into madness, it’s the stuff of pop culture legend.

However, there’s another film that, though quieter and far less flashy, drills far deeper into the psyche. George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988) is a Dutch thriller so unsettling that even Kubrick himself found it one of the most terrifying films he’d ever seen.

A couple stops at a gas station. She goes inside. She never comes back. Three years later, he's still trying to find out why.

The Vanishing is the most chilling, methodical descent into obsession (and evil) you’ll ever watch. No jump scares. Just existential dread and the creepiest picnic invite in cinema history. It taps into the primal fear of uncertainty, sudden disappearance, and being in a place where no one knows you or helps you. Where The Shining is a gothic opera of horror, The Vanishing is a quiet scream. And the latter is the more terrifying of the two. Here’s why.

Unlike The Shining, where the horror unfolds in the protagonist’s own country (and possibly his own mind), The Vanishing hinges on the creeping anxiety of being out of place. The central couple, Rex and Saskia, are Dutch tourists traveling through France. They’re driving across scenic countryside, speaking in a foreign language, and stopping at gas stations and roadside cafés that look friendly but are, ultimately, indifferent to their presence.

In horror films, a sense of displacement is a powerful thing. Think An American Werewolf in London (1981), Hostel (2005) or Midsommar (2019); in each, an alien setting contributes to the characters’ sense of vulnerability. In The Vanishing, Saskia and Rex’s cultural dislocation is subtle, but crucial in building tension. When Saskia vanishes at a French gas station, Rex’s initial attempts to find help are marked by confusion and inefficiency. The police are polite but unmotivated to act. Language barriers persist. Local customs feel cold. There’s no immediate urgency because, in this foreign place, they simply don’t know who Saskia is - or why they should care.

This is a quiet kind of terror: not only has your loved one disappeared, but no one around you shares your panic.

In The Shining, Kubrick relies heavily on classic horror iconography: snowstorms, candlelit halls, dim corridors. He manipulates darkness and isolation expertly whilst building a very cinematic fear: one that keeps you watching the shadows.

One of the most brilliant and unnerving choices Sluizer makes is to stage much of the film’s horror in broad daylight. There are no haunted hallways or midnight chases. The abduction happens under the bright, blinding sun of a busy afternoon. The rest stop is bustling with people, birds chirp, families wander. It’s a setting so mundane and familiar it becomes terrifying. That contradiction, of feeling completely vulnerable under a sunny sky, is one of the most disorienting things about the film. The horror isn’t lurking in the dark; it’s out in the open. That’s what makes it feel inescapable.

You know that horrible itch you get when someone says, “I guess we’ll never know”? The Vanishing takes that feeling and stretches it across 107 minutes until you’re crawling out of your skin. The question "what happened to Saskia" becomes Rex’s obsession. Over the next three years, he searches restlessly, putting up posters, making TV appearances, and refusing to move on. His life is consumed by the unanswered.

There are plenty of fears experienced in a relationship - infidelity, distance, illness - but one of the most primal is sudden loss. Not a breakup. Not even death. But something unexplained. A person simply gone. No answers. No closure. No peace. The Vanishing preys on that exact nightmare. Saskia walks into a gas station and never walks out. She doesn’t scream. She isn’t chased. She doesn’t leave a trail. She just ceases to exist. That kind of horror isn’t supernatural, it’s possible. That’s what makes it so unbearable, and scarier than The Shining's haunted hotel.

Jack Torrance transforms into a deranged axe-wielding maniac. His madness is exaggerated to mythic proportions: entertaining, theatrical, and intentionally over-the-top. But The Vanishing offers up an evil that’s much harder to compartmentalise. The man responsible for Saskia’s disappearance, Raymond, isn’t a monster in the traditional sense. He’s a quiet, intelligent family man with a house, a job, and two daughters. He methodically (even comically) rehearses his crime - not out of rage or necessity, but to prove to himself that he’s capable of committing the ultimate evil.

It’s Raymond’s calm rationality that chills you. He’s not ‘insane’. He’s not haunted. He’s not angry. He’s just curious. The casual way he discusses kidnapping and murder is more disturbing than any possession scene in The Shining. You can’t reason with evil that doesn’t need a reason. This kind of villain doesn’t feel fictional. He feels frighteningly real.

Without spoiling too much, The Vanishing ends in a way that’s so quietly horrifying, it leaves you feeling hollow. There are no final chases, no redemptive rescues, no grand confrontations. Instead, the film delivers on its exploration of obsession. It leads Rex (and the audience) to the answer he’s been seeking, but at a devastating cost.

The Shining ends with a more traditional horror climax: chase scenes, death, and a neatly frozen body. It’s satisfying in a cinematic sense. The Vanishing gives you no such release. It offers a conclusion that’s perfectly logical and profoundly chilling.

Sometimes, the scariest thing isn't being chased by an axe. It’s getting just what you asked for.