Steve Buscemi names one of his favourite horror movies
American actor Steve Buscemi has successfully balanced a career that involves both high-budget Hollywood productions and smaller, independent projects. Since arriving on the scene in the 1980s, Buscemi has racked up several hundred acting credits, making his debut in 1985 with The Way It Is.
However, after landing a role in Parting Glances, a 1986 drama about the AIDs crisis, Buscemi rose to prominence. Subsequently, the actor appeared in several movies that have since become cult classics, like Mystery Train, Miller’s Crossing and King of New York. Yet, he broke through into the mainstream with a prominent part in Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature, Reservoir Dogs, which took the industry by storm.
Since then, Buscemi has appeared in countless movies and television shows, often playing unique side characters, from The Big Lebowski to Ghost World, Fargo, Big Fish and The Death of Stalin. He is also a prominent voice actor, appearing in the Hotel Transylvania series, Monsters Inc., G-Force, Igor and Monster House.
You only have to look at Buscemi’s varied filmography to see that he has an eclectic taste in movies. However, Buscemi hasn’t often worked within the horror genre, with most of the ‘scary movies’ he can be found in also serving as comedies, such as Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.
That doesn’t mean that Buscemi isn’t partial to watching horror movies in his spare time, though, revealing his go-to pick in an interview with Criterion. Selecting some of his favourite films, Buscemi reserved time to talk about The Vanishing by George Sluizer, released in 1988. Adapted from Tim Krabbé’s novella The Golden Egg, the Dutch movie centres around a man’s quest to find his missing girlfriend.
While some people categorise The Vanishing as a thriller rather than an outright horror, the terror that it inflicts on the audience suggests otherwise – even Stanley Kubrick believed it to be the scariest movie he’d ever seen. The film captures the mental state of a serial killer, played by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, terrifyingly well. It’s one of the most chilling movies of its kind, undoubtedly leaving an indelible mark on the viewer.
A few years after its release, Sluizer remade the film in English using an American cast, including Kiefer Sutherland, Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock. However, Buscemi much prefers the original. He said: “This Dutch director George Sluizer is actually a Frenchman, or born in France anyway. This creepy 1988 thriller about a woman abducted and the torment her kidnapper puts her boyfriend through was remade by the director as an American film in 1993. But check out this original and see if you don’t have nightmares.”
Watch the trailer below.
