Generic, awkwardly paced, laughably nonsensical, Slender Man fails to live up to the potential of creepypasta and the standard set by the Slender Man-centric YouTube web series Marble Hornets (2009-2014). It also doesn’t help that Slender Man isn’t a good movie. Still, these are sensitive times and backlash surrounding Slender Man should have been expected. Annabelle (2014), The Conjuring (2013), Open Water (2003), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) are just a few horror films inspired by actual events. Of course, Slender Man isn’t the only horror film to have a stake in real events. While Slender Man isn’t based on what happened in Waukesha, some parents are fearful that the PG-13 film will inspire similar violence. Screen Gems’ decision to move forward with a film after the Waukesha stabbing has generated its share of controversy, with the father of one of the girls sentenced for the incident calling the film distasteful, leading to a petition calling for a boycott of the film. Though the victim lived, and the incident was covered in the HBO documentary Beware the Slender Man (2016), the online creature quickly lost the spotlight. The incident, in which two 12-year old girls stabbed a 12-year-old friend 19 times as part a planned ritualistic killing in the name of Slender Man, soured the response to the character. The 2014 Slender Man-driven stabbing in Waukesha, Wisconsin, certainly didn’t help matters.
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While rumors of a Slender Man movie circulated for years, the project never got off the ground - after its window had passed. The result was a horror icon that could have emerged on film as the millennial Freddy Krueger, at least for a time. Most of the lore built up around the character centers on his abduction of children and young adults, and his ability to create madness and paranoia, known as the “Slender Sickness.” Because he is a figure whose story is shared by the internet, there are few fixed rules associated with the character. Slender Man, created in a Photoshop competition by Victor Surge on the Something Awful Forums, is depicted as a tall, thin humanoid without facial features and dressed in a black suit. But like so many modern phenomena born of the internet, Slender Man’s popularity was short-lived, replaced by new fears. (For those who may not know, creepypastas are horror-related images circulated around the internet, inspiring urban legends, YouTube videos and various forms of online media.) It’s a phenomenon distinctly belonging to the early 21st century, a viral form of campfire tales and cave drawings that speak as much to our willingness to seek out scares in any form as it does to the specificity of our contemporary fears. It’s a sad and surprising turn for the “creepypasta” internet sensation of 2009 that once held many a teen in its grip. Thursday night’s preview gross of $1 million is a sure sign that Slender Man is in store for a slim opening weekend before quickly disappearing from theaters. The film, distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing and directed by Sylvian White ( Stomp the Yard), was barely marketed, and its release date shuffle, the movie was originally set for a May 18 summer opening, didn’t promise good things to come. Screen Gems’ Slender Man quietly slinks into theaters this weekend with almost no buzz or fanfare. The cycles of popularity through which horror works are fascinating, though perhaps less fascinating to the studios that find themselves either ahead of the curve or behind the times. Found footage was the innovative jump-start the genre needed until audiences grew tired of a seeming gimmick. Paranormal Activity was horror’s hottest property until it wasn’t. The popularity of Saw and similar movies came and went in a blink. While there are certain trends in superhero movies, action, and children’s films that remain consistent for long stretches of time, horror is fickle, particularly due to the outpouring of films from both the big studio and indie circuits that have the power to change the game.
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