slenderman - The Spooky Stuff by Alex Matsuo

Don’t go into the woods at night.

Actually, don’t even look at the woods.

Slenderman just might be there waiting for you behind the trees…waiting to take you away into oblivion.

When it comes to myths and legends, Slenderman is a modern-day urban legend. Bloody Mary, the Woman in White, The Man with the Hook, Crybaby Bridge are all urban legends that are made of nightmares. Slenderman has good company. He has even made an appearance in media and art, If you play Minecraft, you might be familiar with the Enderman characters, which are long, tall, block characters. People assume Slenderman was their inspiration because of how they look.

Even though he’s fictional, the stories about him are so realistic that many think he’s a god. Slenderman has even become one of the most popular characters for Halloween. In 2018, the movie, “Slender Man” came out. A documentary was created in 2016 called, “Beware the Slenderman”. Movies and documentaries have been made with Slenderman in the starring role. Throughout this time, Slenderman has truly garnered a cult following.

In order to fully understand the Slenderman legend, we have to understand exactly where it all started.

From Art to Reality

Slenderman is a modern urban legend that has been creeping us all out since 2009. He became popular on the online forum, Something Awful. The original artist’s name is Eric Knudson, who created Slenderman while competing in an online contest. The contest was issued by Something Awful. The rules were that participants had to create a photo that looked paranormal. Participants had to use an average, everyday photo. Using the pen name Victor Surge, Eric took two black and white photos of children and inserted Slenderman into the background. From there, a legend was born.

The Great Creator

Eric Knudsen is a pretty normal guy. He lives with his wife in Florida and he’s a family man. He found inspiration from HP Lovecraft and Stephen King while creating Slenderman.

Slenderman’s tall, thin, faceless look came from by “The Mist”, written by Stephen King. There are tentacles that sprout out of Slenderman’s back, he is known to stalk the woods at night, and he can cause amnesia. What is even more interesting is that it seems that Knudsen just planted the seed and then left the story up for others to adapt as they saw fit.

He hasn’t been involved much when it comes to the art and video game incarnations of his creepy character. Why? He says he’s too busy with real-life stuff. It’s also possible that the crimes that were inspired by Slenderman might have made Eric want to stay behind the scenes and to back off his involvement with the character.

It can be said that because Slenderman really has no official creator, he doesn’t have an official canon. There are hundreds of people who have written their own stories about Slenderman. You could say that his story is still being written as we speak. Parsec Productions created their own version of Slenderman for a video game where it plays a starring role.

Is There a Chance Slenderman Could Be Real?

Of course, Slenderman is fiction, right? And there is no way that he could ever be real. Well, that’s what we think.

But, there is also a theory that one can manifest an entity if enough brain power is engaged. Don’t believe us? Let us tell you about the Philip Experiment. In the 1970’s in Canada, a group of people managed to create their own ghost with his own back story and everything. Philip was able to think for himself and had his own free will. Philip became so strong that he was able to move tables around the room and eventually outgrew his creators. This has also been a practice for centuries by Buddhist monks, where they create entities called “tulpas.”

Could something like this happen with Slenderman? If enough people around the world have a specific image in mind, and they treat him like an existing being, they could very well bring him into this world.

Inspiring Crimes

While Slenderman is fictional, he has inspired not only art, comics, and movies, but also some real-life horror stories that have ruined many lives. Let’s just say we need to teach our children the difference between reality and pretend.

Crime #1

Two girls by the name of Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser thought Slenderman was real. They truly wanted to be his followers, like Slenderman was some sort of deity. The girls were just twelve years old at the time. Anissa and Morgan believed that they had to become servants of Slenderman, and had to appease him to protect their families. So they decided to attack their young friend, Payton Leutner. They stabbed her 19 times and left her severely wounded in the forest. Luckily, Peyton survived the attack.

Police arrested Anissa and Morgan, and they were put on trial. Morgan was sentenced to 40 years in a psychiatric facility. Anissa was sentenced to 25 years. Morgan was the one who allegedly did most of the dirty work while Annisa looked on, which is why she received a more severe punishment. Both girls were clearly mentally ill.

Crime #2

In the same year that Anissa and Morgan committed their crime, a thirteen-year-old Ohio girl also attacked her mother with a knife. According to the mother, her daughter was waiting for her in the kitchen with the knife. She was wearing a white mask. During the incident, the mother thought her daughter was acting like a completely different person. Luckily, mom survived the attack with minor injuries. The girl obsessed over Slenderman and even created a whole world for him in the video game Minecraft. She was tried as a juvenile and confessed that she had attacked her mom in an attempt to please Slenderman.

Crime #3

In 2014, a fourteen-year-old girl was inspired to set her house on fire. Yep. Slenderman inspired her to burn her house down. While the home was destroyed, the family survived.

In Conclusion

Slenderman is nothing more than a creative entity created by the human mind. Had Eric Knudson lived centuries ago and came up with this idea, there’s a good chance that Slenderman would have become a mainstream legend. Considering he has inspired crimes and heinous acts, maybe it’s better that we’ve only all become acquainted with Slenderman today and not decades ago.

All it takes is for a seed of inspiration to be planted, and the story will grow by itself. Slenderman was truly a collaborative effort from thousands, if not millions of people.

Whether you believe Slenderman to be pure fiction, or if you believe in the possibility that he could manifest thanks to the power of the mind, let’s hope it stays in a fictional place. It seems that once Slenderman crosses over to the real world, that is when true chaos ensues.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27776894

The Story Of Slenderman, The Internet’s Own Monster

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/06/03/the-complete-terrifying-history-of-slender-man-the-internet-meme-that-compelled-two-12-year-olds-to-stab-their-friend/

The newest “Slender Man” (2018) movie was released last night. I don’t normally write reviews unless I feel inspired to do so. Sometimes this is a good thing. In this case, it wasn’t. I have been fascinated by the Slenderman (Slender Man?) phenomenon for quite a while. I’m not even talking about the subsequent crimes that took place by mentally ill teenagers. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of how legends can be created so quickly and go viral thanks to the innovation of the internet.

One of my side jobs is being a writer for TheRichest. I had the awesome chance to write a script about Slenderman before the new movie came out. You can check it out here. I recommend watching this before or after you see the movie, because frankly, the real story is more interesting than what the movie portrayed:

Now that we’re on the same page, here are my thoughts on the new “Slender Man” movie.

It was a huge disappointment. It had amazing source material to draw from, and it failed on epic levels. If you don’t want spoilers, then I recommend you stop reading now.

My first major issue with it was the movie dragged. There wasn’t a lot of meat to this movie at all, and it seemed like the writers didn’t have a lot to work with. The result was every mediocre action was dragged out much longer than it should have. There were moments where the pace picked up, usually with when SM made an appearance or attacked, which didn’t happen often. The movie felt like 3 hours when it was about an hour and thirty minutes.

My second issue is how the world was built. It started okay, but then it went downhill from there. First off, you summon Slender Man by watching a video on the Internet. Once I saw this, I immediately thought of “The Ring”, but this concept wasn’t as well executed. But an online video? Sure. I suppose one could argue that since SM was born from the internet, then it would make sense. But, there is a plot hole that derails this theory later on in the movie. One of the characters, named Wren, goes to the library to do more research on SM and finds that his origins and child-stealing activities could even date back to him being the Pied Piper. If you can only summon SM from an online video, how does that explain his child-stealing activities before we had the internet?

After the first girl , Katie, disappeared, there was some scratching the surface on potentially having the father involved, or at least aware of some occult activities. But that is never revisited again.

The mystery girl who the characters chatted with online was never fully explored besides a follow-up news article that she went nuts. How did she know so much about SM? Was her mind being controlled by SM? Why didn’t the character speak to her more since she was so knowledgeable? Another plot hole that wasn’t further explored.

The biggest thing that bothered me was that the main character were incredibly whiny and weak. When Katie first disappears, all they can question is whether it was SM. At first, they are proactive in trying to find their friend as they deal with their own nightmares and hallucinations. Then, that drive wanes off for two of the characters. When Wren tries to do more research, she comes across a theory that SM is bioelectric, and he is using that bioelectric energy to break down the minds of his victim. Again, this was interesting, but once again, unexplored. There was no attempt to really try to STOP Slenderman from his ghastly agenda. Hallie (with the last name Knudsen in honor of the creator of SM, Eric Knudsen/Victor Surge), doesn’t seemed to be bothered trying to figure out what’s going on despite having her own SM sightings. All the while denying things were going on and trying to explain everything. If her sightings were trivial and debunkable in the movie, that would be one thing, but she was having full-out sightings and intense nightmares. And yet, that didn’t drive her to do more? Her love interest, Tom, also ends up watching the video. All we see is that he’s shaken up coming into class sometime after with bruises on his arm. Again, this plot point is not revisited.

Given that Slenderman has no real canon besides what people on the internet have conjured up, this movie had the potential to bring something new and fresh to the legend. Unfortunately, this fell incredibly short. As mentioned in my video, it would have been cool to explore the idea that is was US who created Slenderman through collective thought. Then, the girls go into this whole thing of trying to get people to STOP thinking about Slenderman, which of course, would never happen. It seemed that the girls were doomed from the beginning because they didn’t do anything to try to stop him. The movie dragged on and on with questions on what SM was, their boring nightmares, and trying to brush it off as if it were nothing.

There was also no violent crimes mentioned or even performed in this movie. I assume it was for the respect and sensitivity to the crimes that Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser committed in 2014. There were a few other SM crimes that year as well. However, the movie could have done something…like a desperate attempt by one of the girls to try to save herself?

Why do I have “false advertising” in the title of the review? Let’s get into that.

Also, if we look at the original trailer, there were plot points brought up in the trailer that didn’t make the cut in the movie:

The part where Chloe stabs herself in the eye doesn’t make the cut. Instead, she gets visited and choked by Slender Man and becomes catatonic. The girl writing, “Can you see him?” seems to be the mystery chatter from the beginning of the film. But this is a scene we never see. Also, we never see a girl walking out of the woods, to be greeted by police cars. It looks like the mystery chatter again. AGAIN. Why wasn’t this plot point explored? We also never see the guy taking his own life by jumping off the roof. It looks like they had planned for maybe a more violent movie and then postponed the release from May to August to completely change the movie? It would make sense as to why we got this final product. However, the movie that the official trailer sold to us was not the final product that we received in the theater.

Screen-Shot-2018-01-03-at-10.16.09-AM — See this scene? You won’t see it in the movie.

At the end, SM is the winning champion of the movie, as the girls (predictably) falter and join him in the other world. The most interesting part of the movie is the last 10 minutes. But even the last shot of the movie was mediocre and boring as it showed a school hallway. It definitely left you feeling a void of wasting 90 minutes of your life on wasted potential.

Tag: slenderman

Beware Of Slender Man: The History & Crimes It Inspired