Loss in Finality: the Vanishing of the Known

I find that a fairly good test of the quality of a horror film is if I wake up the next morning thinking about it.  Even better is if it still sits with me several days later.  Perhaps more difficult is trying to uncover what it is exactly that makes the film stay.  What is it that makes me look across the table at my wife and think of the film, and sense danger.  In my experience, I have seen that the most unsettling and therefor most enduring horror experiences are those which are unknown.  Our minds are far more adept at creating fear than any film ever could.  Jean-paul Sartre in his piece Why Write indicates that there is a dialectical tension between the reader and the writer.  The writer creates and imperative (the words on the page) and the reader then uses those imperative to construct meaning, becoming a writer in their own right.  This wrestling back and forth between the reader and the writer creates a space that can be filled.  The best writing intentionally leaves space for the reader to then use creatively.  In this sense great horror leaves space for the viewer to fill with their worst fears, that which personally scares them, instead of a generic fear represented broadly.  This is why so many films fail upon the reveal of the monster.  It can never live up to the pictures in our head.

The Vanishing is a remarkable film on two counts: it leaves plenty of space for the audience to create, and it discusses the power of the unknown.  Throughout the course of the film there is ample space for us to create meaning, to fill the space.  While some of these moments do not represent any real departure from standard horror tropes (e.g. initially we do not see where she went or how she was captured) the sheer endurance of that empty space becomes the individuation of this film.  We are introduced to the murderer early on.  We see him plotting the murder going into the minutest detail of the act.  Even after we see the moment of capture, we never are shown what happened to her.  Our protagonist, Rex, agrees to take the sleeping pill and then wakes up in a coffin, being buried alive.  The empty space left by the director between the falling asleep and the waking up has to be filled by us as an audience.  We don’t just connect dots, we fill space.  This leaves us also with a more chilling vacancy.  The murder does not reveal what happened to Saskia.  He simply says that he will show what happened.  When the protagonist asks if he raped her, his response is mildly rebukive.  He is not to tell, he is to show.  When Rex awakens in the coffin it also leaves a space for us to fill regarding Saskia.  Yes, we realize that he buried her alive.  That is clear.  But what is empty for us to fill is how she responded when she awoke.  The terror she felt, the anguish, the regret, the thrashing, crying, pounding. Her last words.  Her last thoughts are all left silent.  That silence is our to fill.  And we fill it with the worst that our imagination has to offer.  The worst that can happen is not death, it is the horrific anticipation of death.  Since that is hidden, then we are free to fill that space with our own anxious anticipation.

The film also comments on the nature of the unknown.  Rex is left with nothing but the stories in his head about the final hours of Saskia’s life.  He is obsessed.  He cannot live, or go on living without knowing what happened.  His final plea is know.  He knows that getting her back alive is impossible, but he can have something of her back if he just knows what happened.  It is likely that he knows that his own life is forfeit.  He likely knows that his knowledge will result in his own death.  That is the risk that he is willing to take, he will face death for the sake of knowing.  Yet for all he comes to know, he can’t know everything.  He can’t know her last moments.  His sacrifice becomes a mockery, a simulation, which reflects an absence rather than a thing.  It shows that he really can’t know what happened because he can’t ask her, and neither can we.

That is why The Vanishing works so well.  It uses the unknown to instill in us our own greatest fears.  We know not what the day may bring.  So when I look at my wife or children and I think of this film, that fear that I sense is in knowing what I don’t know.  That fear that, more than losing them, I could lose my last moments.  The thought that those moments could be filled with horror and pain and aloneness are the grandest fears that I have.  That is why it sticks, and it always will.