![]() ![]() ![]() In the film, we don’t know anything about Slender Man, or what to fear, and the film doesn’t fill that in. The character was invented in a 2009 Photoshop contest by Eric Knudsen, alias Victor Surge, and crowdsourced stories and viral videos hunting for Slender Man have made up the lore. That’s the problem with a Slender Man horror movie - there are no rules, because there is no mythology. What’s he going to do once he gets them? We’re not exactly sure. Soon, the friend group is disappearing, and the girls are beset with heinous visions of Slender Man, a tall, faceless man in a black bespoke suit. The true crime story was covered in the excellent documentary Beware the Slenderman, but the horror adaptation takes a different tack, taking the character literally, as a malevolent force that can be summoned with a ritual that’s The Ring by way of a slumber party game.Ī group of small-town, lightly goth teenage girls stumble upon Slender Man during a sleepover - Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles) jokingly tells her mother “we’re going to drink vodka and meet guys on the internet,” in the film’s only winking line of dialogue, and that they do. They told police they were acting as proxies for Slender Man, a character they discovered on a website hosting “creepypasta” ghost stories copied and pasted from the internet. If you’ve heard of the internet phenomenon that is Slender Man, it’s likely from a 2014 attempted murder in Waukesha, Wis., where two 12-year-old girls stabbed a friend 19 times and left her for dead. Unfortunately, this profoundly not-scary horror film completely misses the mark about what makes its subject matter interesting. What darkness lies in the dreamy imaginative mind of young girls? The mystery has been a source of inspiration for horror classics from The Bad Seed to The Exorcist, and it could have been a fascinating theme to explore in the internet-inspired Slender Man, written by David Birke and directed by Sylvain White. ![]()
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