#Original slender man movie

Slender Man was the subject of a 2009 webseries, a 2012 low-budget Kickstarter feature, and a 2016 HBO documentary. This film is not the first live-action treatment Slender Man has received. Crowdsourced fiction about Slender Man was written, DeviantArt depictions were drawn, “sightings” of the creature increased, and there was even a “ Trender Man ” parody meme.

The original thread about Slender Man on Something Awful grew so large that it is now contained in a 194-page PDF. Add in the foundational element of the myth, that he only targets children, and a viral legend was born.įrom there, as things on the internet often do, Slender Man took on a life of its own. It’s not hard to see why the images of Slender Man, created for a “paranormal pictures” contest, stuck out from the pack: the eerily tall, slim, faceless figure is at once familiar and horrifying, the perfect combination for a campfire legend. In addition to immortal Twitter accounts like and Something Awful also gave birth to Slender Man. The site is remembered as a shitposting pioneer: SA produced many of the stars of what is today known as Weird Twitter. Slender Man was the result of a 2009 photoshop contest on the web forum Something Awful. This is painful to watch on film: Slender Man spends lots of time showing the audience text from bootleg Wikipedia pages. The New York Times ’ Farhad Manjoo called Slender Man a “horror figure for the selfie age.” Instead of an urban legend spread through word of mouth and campfire tales, the story of Slender Man was popularized through message boards and social media posts.

Though most adults first found about Slender Man as a result of this story, the uniquely internet-based urban legend goes back years earlier, not to some tragedy, but to an obscure web forum. They claimed they were inspired by Slender Man. If you aren’t extremely online, you likely first heard of Slender Man in 2014, when two Wisconsin girls were charged with trying to kill a third, stabbing her repeatedly with a butcher knife. It turns out that the same things that make the myth of Slender Man so attractive to the internet render the story unadaptable on film. Sylvain White’s ( Stomp the Yard) horror film debuted with a paltry $11.3 million at the box office, capping a strange journey that the internet urban legend took from web forums to real-life tragedy to the silver screen.

#Original slender man movie

And judging by the spurts of confused laughter in the movie theater this weekend, fans and critics are in lockstep on this one. Sitting at a porous 15 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Slender Man may well be the worst major theatrical release of the year. Rarely has a film so bad had so much source material behind it.