PART TWO: THE LOWER TIER

The Vanishing (1988)
While driving through France on a holiday trip, a young Dutch couple pulls into a roadside rest area. The woman (Johanna ter Steege) goes off to buy drinks and, apparently, disappears from the face of the earth. Her lover (Gene Bervoets) spends years trying to find out what happened to her, driving himself to the verge of bankruptcy and madness, until one day he is approached by a respectable looking but vaguely creepy man (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) offering to tell him everything he wants to know, but only if he agrees to go immediately on a car trip with an unknown destination. Like the human monster at the center of its story, The Vanishing works by giving us just enough information to keep us spellbound, and though we have every reason to expect that this car trip will not end happily, the conclusion nevertheless arrives as a bone-jellying shocker. Adapted by George Sluizer from Tim Krabbe's inferior novel, The Vanishing is a story about horrifying danger lurking in bright, sunlit places — by the time it's over, even the most benign and harmless settings seem deeply sinister. (In a twist of fate almost as cruel as the film's story, Sluizer agreed to direct a vapid Americanized remake, released in 1993, that systematically trashed everything that was gripping and original about the first version. Needless to say, the original is the one to go with.)

Near Dark (1987)
F.W. Murnau meets Sam Peckinpah, and the result is one of the most original vampire stories ever set to film. A young man (Adrian Pasdar) takes a shine to an intriguing young lady (Jenny Wright) and finds himself being initiated into a wandering clan of bloodsuckers led by Jesse (Lance Henriksen), who answers questions about his age by saying, "Let me put it this way: I fought for the South. We lost." Bill Pullman is alternately hilarious and frightening as the exuberantly bloodthirsty Severen, who takes on the task of initiating the young convert. In her second film as a director, Kathryn Bigelow has her glossy style down cold, and she orchestrates a pair of masterful set-pieces: a spectacularly gory massacre at a Southwest roadhouse, followed by a gun fight with police in which every bullet hole exposes the besieged vampires to scorching sunlight. A real find.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)
So, which do you prefer — slow zombies or fast ones? The original Dawn of the Dead, George Romero's first sequel to his groundbreaking 1968 cult hit Night of the Living Dead, gives us the slow ones. The 2004 remake, which Romero did not direct, gives us fleet-footed ghouls that can chase people down. The fast ones can inspire fear, but the thing about the 1978 edition is that their slowness inspires dread. You can outrun any one of them, even dodge your way through a zombified crowd, and they look pretty stupid stumbling around after their prey. But the thing is, there are so goddamned many of them and they just keep coming. If you trip, or become inattentive, or let yourself get boxed in, they descend on you in a slow-moving swarm, and their lack of speed gives you plenty of time to contemplate your imminent, agonizing demise.