When it comes to Urban Legends, or creepypastas in this case, none are as infamous as the Slender Man. Created by Victor Surge, Slender Man is this thin tall faceless creature, who lures and influences the minds of his victims, particularly children, into his bidding and possibly dying. Slender Man was one of the most popular horror trends going around at the time, so much so that he got several indie games based on him, with the more common example being Slender: The Eight Pages, where you roam the woods looking for pages while running from Slender Man. Simple, but it was effective for most people...I am not one of them.
I’m not so much scared of creepypastas, as I am fascinated. The best way I can describe my enjoyment is that it’s like reading Goosebumps; whether they be stories about “haunted game that kills” or “person on the internet summons ghost,” it’s not so much the fear, but rather the creativity and tone that keeps me going back to read some of these haunted conspiracies. With Slender Man though, my introduction to him came through Little Kuriboh’s Concrete Giraffes video:
Regardless of time fading this character into obscurity, in 2014, tragedy came toward a young girl, who was nearly stabbed to death by two other girls that claim to be influenced by Slender Man; if you want to learn more about it, check out the HBO Documentary Beware the Slenderman, as it goes into detail about the case and how dangerous these times are with the internet.
So as you can imagine, when the trailer for this movie popped at the beginning of this year, Sony got a lot of heat for making it, while the incident is still fresh in people’s memory; considering it featured Jaz Sinclair’s character supposedly stabbing herself in the eye in a classroom, and a traumatized girl walking out of the woods, I can imagine why someone would be upset dearly. Hell, it got so bad, that they ended up delaying the film from May to August, because they were trying to sell it to Netflix and Amazon, since the movie was barely being marketed. Only when the film was about to come out, did they put out another trailer, so you can imagine they made some major changes to the film.
Slender Man focuses on four teenage girls (Julia Telles, Joey King, Jaz Sinclair, and Annalise Basso), who while during a night of booze and porn, decide to summon the entity, and soon get picked off one by one. It’s as generic and boring as you’d expect, but I will admit there are some aspects I did like.
For starters, the film in the first half doesn’t dwell too heavy on the jumpscares, so that’s at least one thing. I also liked our main leads; while they were cliched teen girls, it never felt like they weren’t trying to make this work. When they take the time to focus on the Slender Man, building up on who or what it, there are some really tense moments; sometimes a shadow grow bigger in the background or you see just the slightest glimpse of Slender Man just out of focus or blocked by something in the foreground, it did get to me in those parts. And Javier Botet’s work under costume as the Slender Man definitely adds onto that unsettling feel someone of that body shape should do; much like Doug Jones, this man deserves his credit.
However, most of the good things that I have said, they’re easily outmatched by how bad things turn by the second half of the movie. It cranks up the jumpscares, it makes the characters go from tolerant to annoying, it gets too dark to see at times, and Slender Man gets less scary the more he’s on screen. Not to mention, the movie doesn’t have an ending; it just stops after the main girl is killed, and then narration over a picture. Hell, looking over the whole film, you can tell that Sony did some major censoring. The parts in the trailer I talked about earlier? Those scenes aren’t in the movie. In fact, Jaz Sinclair doesn’t even have a death scene at all in the movie; she just gets possessed by Slendy, stares out her window like a heroin addict, and is never heard from again. And considering they had to censor the blood in that scene for the trailer, it makes you wonder how far this movie was actually willing to go with this. Or better yet, maybe it’s best to be forgotten.
With this being David Birke’s first major screenplay credit, I don’t have much to comment on; maybe with all that chopping Sony did, there was probably a good film in there somewhere. Had this film put more focus on the idea behind the Slender Man, like it was the phenomenon that brought him to life and he lives off of the mention of him (similar to Freddy Krueger), we could have had something interesting; but when your script is helmed by Sylvian White (I Always Know What You Did Last Summer), you might as well kiss your chances of a clever idea, as it’s helmed by a music video artist who wants to showcases crazy addict editing.
Overall, Slender Man is just another generic bad horror movie; is it the worst film of the year though? No, I’ve seen far worse this year. However, that doesn’t excuse some of the flimsy writing, the poor editing, and either not going all out with one idea or completely missing the point of the creepypasta to begin with. There’s better material made with the Slender Man, so go check out one of those; but stay away from this junk.
Rating: D
