The Vanishing: The Clumsy Abductor

The film The Vanishing the main character Raymond seems to the world to be an ordinary guy, he is a professor at a university and has a lovely family to whom he is devoted to. The audience knows his true identity as an abductor and killer. The way this film represents the abductor or sociopath is not the traditional way these types of characters are represented in horror films, which to me is why this film is not a horror film. In a traditional horror film you have a sociopath character who is usually abducting and murdering people throughout the film and strikes fear into the audience as well as other characters in this film. Raymond does not do this in this film, because the audience sees him "practicing" and actually failing a few times trying to abduct women before he is successful of abducting Saskia. The audience sees him clumsily practicing alone of what he will say and do when trying to lure one of his victims into his car. The audience also sees him attempt and fail multiple times at trying to lure women, once is when the women recognizes who he is because she coached his daughters volleyball team. Another example is when he tries to have to women help him reconnect his trailer and her husband comes up and confronts him. The last example is in the same location where he ends up abducting Saskia, he has a women finally in his cars passenger seat and as he walks around the car to get in the drivers seat, he sneezes in the chloroform rag and he has to abandoned his quest and run to the restroom. All of these examples to me were extremely comedic because the sociopath is unable to lure his victims into his car and they escape, not understanding how truly lucky they just were. I compare this to a more traditional horror film like Halloween and Michael Myers who strikes fear into everyone (including me) because of his brutal and insane actions and how his intimidation would diminish if he clumsily let victims escape one after the other. Although I did find the end of this film to have some extremely scary moments associated with a more traditional horror film, like Saskia when she is attacked by Raymond and the final scene when Rex is buried alive. This being said, I do not believe this film is a horror film because the amount of victims that are able to get away from Raymond make him look more comedic than intimidating which is a trait necessary for villain in horror films.