Slender Man is a horror film based on the internet sensation which is now old enough for a fair amount of people not to remember how it came to be. The character itself was created by a man called Eric Knudsen on a creepypasta thread on Something Awful forums back in 2009. Following that, Slender Man was the subject of a YouTube web series called Marble Hornets, and several video games have been based around the phenomenon. Slender Man has even cropped up in a real-life Manslaughter case in which two Wisconsin teenagers stabbed a schoolmate to, in their own words, “appease Slender Man.”
The film has been the subject of a lot of ire, after the father of one of those teenagers called the movie out as “distasteful,” and “popularizing a tragedy.” The film itself is only loosely based on those murders (the protagonists are all teenage girls, but the similarities end there). No matter how you may feel about all those things, the Slender Man mythos is something that has practically demanded to be turned into a film for years. It was only a matter of time before it actually happened. There’s a built-in fan base of people who’d happily watch a film like it, even if it is a niche phenomenon.
Updating the myth
There are some similarities between Slender Man in the film and what Slender Man traditionally is. In this rendition, he’s a kind of blank-faced boogeyman who mostly resides in the woods (just like the original monster) and there are echoes between it and old German fairy-tale characters like The Pied Piper (who is alluded to at one point in the film.) But the creators of the film, Sylvain White and David Birke, have updated it to make it more in line with the teen-horror aesthetic they were going for.
The curse of Slender Man is brought on by watching a video that’s passed around online, which is shown in a Ringu-style montage of disturbing (a term which should be used very lightly here) imagery, and that’s where the problems with this film started for me. The video is a series of Rorschach-test style images interspliced with Illuminati references and what could either be gray-scaled stills from Begotten or an obscure Lynch short, but those images don’t quite have the effect the creators intended.
Creativity gone wild
The strangest thing about this film is that the budget was fairly high for a low-key horror (between 10 and 20 million, according to Wikipedia), and all I can surmise is that in terms of the scares and cinematography, a lot of creative freedom was given.
Later in the film, there are scenes which look like bad trips. In one of them, a character sees the corridor between two library stacks stretch and compress, and in another section, a character has a vision in which they’re still alive despite their limbs having been chopped off, and tentacle-like objects protrude from her eyes and mouth in a close-up shot.
They’re ideas that could be effective in a James Wan kind of way, but I don’t think anyone involved in the production of Slender Man had the same knack for creepy imagery as he and Leigh Whannell do.
On top of that, the story in Slender Man is largely incoherent. They watch the video, one of their friends go missing, and from there onwards I’m not entirely sure what happened—and this is coming from someone who’s seen it. The plot is so thin on the ground that it gets to a point where the end of the film doesn’t feel like an ending. It’s as if the writers were backed into a corner, so they just cut it short and included a scene which involves a message about the dangers of social media, which feels as old-hat and meaningless as the film itself.
Slender Man has been released during a period in which the film market isn’t oversaturated with horror films, as it would be in October, and there’s a reason for that. The fact of the matter is that there just isn’t much substance to the film. It doesn’t add much to the Slender Man canon, and I don’t think it will connect with people who have any kind of investment in the Slender Man mythos, nor with the average cinema-going audience who have no stake in that game either way.
Slender Man: Conclusion
Having said that, I will commend the creators of this film on one thing. The film could have been a lazy cash-grab, but it never feels like that, really. Slender Man is the work of people who were trying to make an interesting and innovative film. I’m not sure if there was studio interference because of the controversy surrounding the film, but I am certain that the people behind it didn’t have the creative mettle to achieve what they were trying to pull off.
If what you’re after is a mainstream horror film with scares that come thick and fast, save your money and bide your time: in a week or so, The Nun is out.
What are your thoughts on Slender Man?
Slender Man was released in the United States on August 10, 2018.
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