The origin of culturally recognized monsters vary. Some are the result of ignorance of the world around those that invented them, constructed as a means to explain things that science at the time had no explanation for. Others were made up to create boogiemen to scare people into preferred behavior, warning people (many of them children) that they will be eaten or kidnapped if they don’t change their ways. Some are made as representations of people or cultures in a racist or classist attempts to other them and instigate fear, and potentially violence, against those deemed “unworthy”.
Slender Man is a tall, faceless creature who wears a slick business suit and abducts people, primarily children, and has large, writhing tentacles that protrudes from its body. Slender Man’s canon is sprawling and almost all of it is unofficial, having been shaped by multiple independent creations around the same time. Entire blogs and forums are dedicated to adding to the Slender Man lore, and memes involving the creature have even gained traction (such as the idea that giving Slender Man a $20 bill will make it leave you alone). A movie came out in 2018 featuring the monster 9 years after its inception, thus confirming that executives in Hollywood were officially aware of its existence and had decided to capitalize on it. At this point in time, it seems the buzz around Slender Man’s has reached its peak, but how did the creature reach this particular zenith?
The site Something Awful features articles, animations, as well as any other manner of original content. It’s been a point of origin of a number of trends that would break the bonds of the Internet, like the video game Dropsy or the animation Golan the Insatiable, as well as a number of scandals. The site’s creator at one point, after posting several critical reviews of his films, accepted an invite to fight in a boxing match with infamous director Uwe Boll, who is responsible for a number of so-bad-they’re-bad movie adaptations of video games. The forums themselves were notable for the fact that users had to pay a fee of $10 to access them, which served to both help fund site improvements as well as to keep some of the riffraff out.
Every Friday, the Something Awful forums would host a Photoshop Friday, which brings us to Slender Man. With the topic title “Create Paranormal Images”, a user by the name of “Victor Surge” (their real-life name being Eric Knudsen) posted two images just three thread pages in of black-and-white photos of groups of children with a tall creature with unnatural proportions subtly visible in the background. Following that post, Victor Surge posted a few follow-ups with additional “testimonials” and images from supposed encounters with Slender Man. After that, it didn’t take long for other users in the thread to become infatuated with the creature. The whole thread is 46 pages long. Slender Man was posted June 10th, 2009 on page 3, and by page 6 most of the posts in the thread had become users discussing their excitement at the concept of Slender Man, what mediums they would love to see incarnations of it in, and posting their own stories, input on the concept, or images. Unfortunately, the images aren’t able to be viewed anymore as the host sites either no longer exist or are no longer hosting those particular images.
The original post
The original Photoshop entry images
It didn’t take long at all for Slender Man to catch on in the forum thread it was originally posted in, and just 10 days later, its influence would spread in new avenues, namely as a found footage YouTube series titled Marble Hornets. The series follows Jay as he attempts to find out what happened to his friend Alex, portrayed by series creators Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage, respectively, after Alex had quit working on a student film and disappeared a few months after starting production. The videos are purported to be posted by Jay as an attempt to document what has happened to Alex, and eventually himself, as they are stalked by something referred to in the series as “The Operator”. The series’ creators have stated that The Operator is in fact not Slender Man despite its visual similarities, but both creatures have heavily influenced the mythology of each other, and at this point Marble Hornets is synonymous with helping to popularize the concept of Slender Man. The creators have stated that they were inspired by Slender Man in their creation of The Operator, hence why the distinction is so murky. The YouTube channel has 92 videos, most of them numbered simply “Entry #[number]”, with a second channel posting an additional 39 videos as a character in the Marble Hornets universe providing additional context for events that happen in the main series. The series officially concluded with Entry #87, posted June 20th, 2014, exactly 5 years after the series had begun.
Marble Hornets was not the only YouTube channel to influence the Slender Man folklore, though was the first. EverymanHYBRID launched in March of 2010, a series of videos featuring Slender Man as well as other prominent Internet “creepypastas”. This series is notable for incorporating interactive games, interactions with viewers, ideas and stories from users posting on Twitter, blogs devoted to expanding the Slender Man mythos, live streams, and even meetings with fan of the series. Another YouTube series that originally started as an homage to Marble Hornets before evolving into its own thing, titled TribeTwelve, took the form of an ARG or “alternate-reality game”, a type of game usually constantly evolving in nature where players have to piece together clues that usually lead to a new set of clues to piece together. This series is notable for its special effects, as well as for pioneering the imagery of Slender Man’s writhing tentacles. Marble Hornets, EverymanHYBRID, and TribeTwelve are considered “The Big Three” when it comes to video series originators of the Slender Man mythos, though there are several other series that started around this time that were also influential in shaping the lore around the monster.
Another way Slender Man gained popularity was through independent games released on the Internet. A first-person puzzle game submitted for a horror game competition in 2011 featured the creature as the primary villain. In June of 2012, a game developed with Unity software titled Slender: The Eight Pages was released for free. The game took the Internet by storm, and the developer’s website crashed the day it was released from the amount of people trying to get the game. PC Gamer and Kotaku would provide links to download mirrors the following day. At the risk of a jump-scare death, players were tasked with collecting 8 notes scattered around a forest at night, all while being haunted by the Slender Man. The player would fail the game if they spent too long looking for the notes, if they came into contact with the monster, or if they stared at the creature for too long. The game received a full commercial version that was released a little under a year later in March of 2013, titled Slender: The Arrival. Slender Man’s creator Eric Knudsen/Victor Surge had the role of one of the game’s producers, and the creators of Marble Hornets helped write the game’s script.
By this point, Slender Man was firmly entrenched cultural knowledge with more Internet-savvy people, and it was starting to show up in all sorts of media. In 2011, Slender Man was the source of inspiration for Minecraft‘s enemy The Enderman. Slender Man is also said to have made an appearance that year in the music video for Skrillex’s song First of the Year (Equinox), that one song with the audio clip of somebody screaming “Call 911 now!” before the bass gets all dubsteppy. It’s not made 100% clear in the video if it is indeed Slender Man, however, so it could be speculation. Bit.Trip Presents… Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, released in 2013, has a stage where players have the chance of Slender Man appearing in the background, though it can be hard to catch since players are supposed to be focusing on the dodging, dipping, ducking, diving, and dodging rather than looking for creatures in the background. In early 2014, Goat Simulator was released and featured an unlockable goat one could play as called Slender Goat. Another early 2014 game Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare also had a map where eagle-eyed players could find Slender Man standing in a forest in one of the game maps’ backgrounds, with a later game update altering this slightly so that it is being eaten by one of the games carnivorous plants. Long-running CW show Supernatural had an episode in early 2014 where they fight a creature called “Thin Man”, a faceless creature wearing a button-up shirt whose characteristics are very parallel to those of Slender Man, including hiding in forests, collective hallucinations, and abductions of children. Family Guy has referenced Slender Man on two separate occasions.
Picture left-to-right:Possibly Slender Man (Skrillex), The Enderman (Minecraft), Bit.Trip Runner 2, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, Slender Goat (Goat Simulator)
Unfortunately, something that can’t be excluded from discussing the history of Slender Man is the story from Waukesha, Wisconsin, where two 12-year old girls stabbed Payton Leutner 19 times, supposedly in an effort to appease Slender Man. Her attackers were sentenced to 25 and 40 years in mental health institutions. Thankfully, Payton Leutner lived and is doing fine, having said in recent interviews that she intends to pursue a career in medicine.
As a result of this attack, parents and anyone who were just not hip to Internet culture or things such as Skrillex, Minecraft, or Goat Simulator were now aware of Slender Man, though with a definite negative connotation. The attack, along with another attack with a knife that was tied to Slender Man as well as an epidemic of suicides, caused a bit of a panic among those who had become worried about how Internet culture was affecting young people. In their usual “ripped from the headlines” format, Law & Order: SVU had an episode loosely-based on the Waukesha incident that aired half a year after it. In 2016, a documentary was made about the Waukesha attack titled _beware the slenderman that premiered at South by Southwest and was broadcast on HBO. On March 31, 2019, Netflix would release on their streaming platform a movie titled Mercy Black. Inspired by the incident in Waukesha, it imagines life for those involved in a very similar incident 15 years after the fact, with the protagonist being one of the perpetrators of the attack as she comes to terms with her past.
With a good amount of people of varying levels of involvement in pop culture now reliably aware of the existence of the Slender Man myth, Sony Pictures had decided that it was time the mythical beast got a movie. Thus, in 2018, Slender Man was released. While the trailer made it seem like it would directly reference the Waukesha stabbing (and its possible that it was originally an element in the film, as unspecified scenes had apparently been cut due to fear of public backlash), no such attack happens in the film. Instead, the movie involves characters trying to summon Slender Man through a non-violent ritual, and follows the consequences of their actions. The movie was panned by critics, and it earned back a little under double its budget.
No announcements have been made about any plans for additional Slender Man movies, and curiosity in the creature has waned, though Slender Man is still close to the hearts and minds of many who got to enjoy the seemingly impossible rise into the cultural pantheon. There’s something thrilling about watching something meant to be ephemeral become so widely appreciated by the world at large. Perhaps there’s more Slender Man in store for the world with people look for ways they can keep the myth alive and fresh. Perhaps the world is looking for a new monster to fill its Slender Man-shaped hole, maybe in the form of Siren Head or Momo.
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