Ask those who know best about what makes this legend so frightening and you’re likely to hear something like this: Slender Man is scary not because of what you know about him, but because of what you don’t know.
“He’s ambiguous,” said Vincent J. Caffarello, a creator of a web series focused on him, EverymanHYBRID. “It’s like the trifecta of unknowables,” said Adam Rosner, creator of TribeTwelve, another web series. “Unknown, uncanny and unintelligible.”
“The mystery which surrounds him is what rattles my soul,” said actor Doug Jones, who portrayed him in a 2015 film. The character is a blank canvas for our fears, but also for online storytelling. Now the namesake of a new horror film, Slender Man started to take shape in an online forum nearly a decade ago, at a time when daily life was shifting to social media and the border between the online world and the real one was starting to blur. Here’s a look at Slender Man’s evolution.
THE ORIGINS
In a forum of the comedy website Something Awful, a user known as Victor Surge (real name: Eric Knudsen) posts two doctored images and explains they were supposedly found in the library of a small town. In the images, a tall, dark figure is standing behind unaware children.
Through discussions, and more Photoshopped images and stories, other forum visitors solidified the features of the character known as Slender Man: his facelessness was nearly constant, he typically wore a black suit and he sometimes had tentacles growing out of his back.
There was some consensus that he abducted children, and that deaths, commonly involving mutilation, would follow. He completely dominated the discussion. Almost immediately, users began digitally inserting the character into history: they created Slender Man in hieroglyphs and faux 16th-century German woodcuts. They cooked up newspaper articles about him. At the time, Caffarello said, it seemed like “people were trying to find the best way to use the internet to tell a story.”
After reading the Something Awful thread, a film student at the University of Alabama, Troy Wagner, and his friend, Joseph DeLage, created the first Slender Man web series: Marble Hornets. Shot with a cheap home video camera around their state and published on YouTube, it begins with a film student abandoning a project for reasons unknown. As his friend goes through raw footage, it becomes evident that Slender Man was stalking the filmmaker. The simplicity of the character was perfect for low-budget, homemade interpretations.
“It was the fact that it was vague,” Wagner said recently. “I think that’s why people jumped on it.” Marble Hornets was a cult hit, gaining fans far beyond internet forums. That November, film critic Roger Ebert tweeted about it. In the year after Slender Man was introduced, there were more web series and an untold number of stories, blogs, poems and drawings. Also, there were discussions on websites like Unfiction, geared to gamers, and CreepyPasta Wiki (horror fans). Wherever the stories were told, authors put their own stamp on the character. Koval, Caffarello and Evan Jennings brought humour to EverymanHYBRID, which began as a satirical fitness show in their native New Jersey.
Rosner, after studying YouTube tutorials, added visual effects (such as tentacles) to TribeTwelve, initially set in Florida. Tulpa Effect, a web series initially set in Oakland, California, took a more psychological approach.
“What I was mostly trying to bring to the table was this idea of watching a romantic relationship break down under the stresses of something that’s horrific,” said Marissa Botelho, a creator. A bare-bones video game called Slender (later renamed Slender: The Eight Pages and expanded in a 2013 follow-up game) is released by a developer named Mark Hadley. Players walk around a dark forest collecting scattered pages. Every so often, they have a run-in with Slender Man. Felix Kjellberg, the YouTube star known as PewDiePie, posted a video of himself playing it.
The game went viral, and led to yet another popular way to experience Slender Man: reaction videos pairing in-game footage with video of the gamer. “Teens React to Slenderman,” a video published that October by Fine Brothers Entertainment (now called FBE), has more than 23 million views. Benny Fine, a founder of FBE, likened the appeal of these videos to “going to movie theatres and seeing scary movies with your friends. Because it’s fun to all be scared together.”
GRUESOME TURN
Two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls are accused of stabbing a classmate, an act they tell authorities was inspired by Slender Man stories. The girls are sentenced to 40 and 25 years in a psychiatric hospital.
Some Slender Man series either went dark or on hiatus after the attack. Though appalled by the crime, many creators feel it was sensationalised; Rosner said he turned down interview requests because it seemed as if “they were looking for a finger to point.”
- SYLVIAN WHITE | Director
“I think that the story genuinely blindsided the grown-ups,” said Shira Chess, an assistant professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia.
Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story, a low-budget feature based on the web series, is released in May 2015.
Slender Man was played by Jones, Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water. “I’ve played hauntingly quiet characters before, but this one goes beyond quiet with a stillness that is so understated,” Jones said by email, adding, “I had to trust that sometimes just standing there with a slight tilt of the head was enough to make my human victims come unglued.”
Cut to years later, in August 2018, when the trailer for the new film, Slender Man, was released, YouTube commenters were quick to note the character was a little long in the tooth. Sylvain White, director of the new movie, which was released this month, said in a phone interview that his first exposure to the character came through video games and a niece who once dressed as Slender Man for Halloween. One of the goals of the film, the director explained, was to go back to the original forum posts by Eric Knudsen, whom he spoke with, and develop a version of Slender Man from there. “I really wanted to stay true to the original idea,” White said.
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Slender Man is out in the UAE on August 30
