‘He gets in your head like a virus...’
Like so many creepy and unusual things, the concept of a creepypasta, a short and spooky story spread around the internet, originated on the online image board, 4chan. Along with the Russian Sleep Experiment, and Marble Hornets, the Slender Man myth is perhaps the most infamous creepypasta out there. The difference is that this myth left the confines of the internet and oozed out into the real world in the form of the Slender Man stabbing – an incident in which two young girls lured a third girl into the woods and stabbed her 19 times to ‘appease’ the Slender Man (the victim somehow survived). It is inevitable then, that some unscrupulous film studio and a hack director would combine to shit out a generic teen horror movie and slap the Slender Man on the cover. And here we are…
A group of teenagers, led by the cynical and jaded (sigh), Wren (Joey King), summon the Slender Man by watching a cursed video and are then surprised when his slender ass appears and starts murdering them all or making them go mad. Nonsense ensues.
As this film was directed by Sylvain White, the man responsible for I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, it is no surprise that there isn’t a shred of originality here. White (along with writer David Burke) have basically combined A Nightmare on Elm Street with The Ring to create something that brings absolutely nothing new to the table. It’s a shame because the concept and aestheticof the Slender Man, as originally created by Eric Knudsen, is actually pretty damn creepy, and in this film’s best moments, White stumbles on some visual moments that inch towards originality. Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between, and it is only a solid performance from King in the main role, and some occasionally interesting lore, that save the film from being a total catastrophe.
Slender Man has probably killed the prospect of this character ever becoming a big screen mainstay and so he will forever be consigned to dark and forgotten corners of the internet. It’s where he does his best work to be fair to the lad. Slender bastard.
