{"id":105391,"date":"2020-10-27T18:03:14","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T18:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gamerant.com\/slender-man-slenderman-origins-real\/"},"modified":"2020-10-27T18:03:14","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T18:03:14","slug":"the-origins-and-history-of-a-modern-myth-the-slender-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itteacheritfreelance.hk\/wordpress\/index.php\/2020\/10\/27\/the-origins-and-history-of-a-modern-myth-the-slender-man\/","title":{"rendered":"The Origins and History of a Modern Myth: The Slender Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The origin of culturally recognized monsters<\/a>\u00a0vary.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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”.<\/p>\n

Slender Man is a tall, faceless creature who wears a slick business suit<\/a> and abducts people, primarily children, and has large, writhing tentacles that protrudes from its body.\u00a0 Slender Man’s canon is sprawling and almost all of it is unofficial, having been shaped by multiple independent creations around the same time.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

RELATED: Science Can’t Make Up Its Mind, Picks Some More Scariest Movies<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The site Something Awful features articles, animations, as well as any other manner of original content.\u00a0 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<\/em><\/a> or the animation Golan the Insatiable<\/em>, as well as a number of scandals.\u00a0 The site’s creator at one point,\u00a0after 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Every Friday, the Something Awful forums would host a Photoshop Friday, which brings us to Slender Man.\u00a0 With the topic title “Create Paranormal Images”<\/a>, 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.\u00a0 Following that post, Victor Surge posted a few follow-ups with additional “testimonials” and images from supposed encounters with Slender Man.\u00a0 After that, it didn’t take long for other users in the thread to become infatuated with the creature.\u00a0 The whole thread is 46 pages long.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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The original post<\/p>\n

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The original Photoshop entry images<\/p>\n

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<\/em>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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”<\/a>.\u00a0 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 <\/em>is synonymous with helping to popularize the concept of Slender Man.\u00a0 The creators have stated that they were inspired by Slender Man in their creation of The Operator, hence why the distinction is so murky.\u00a0 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<\/em> universe providing additional context for events that happen in the main series.\u00a0 The series officially concluded with Entry #87, posted June 20th, 2014, exactly 5 years after the series had begun.<\/p>\n

Marble Hornets<\/em> was not the only YouTube channel to influence the Slender Man folklore, though was the first.\u00a0 EverymanHYBRID<\/em> launched in March of 2010, a series of videos featuring Slender Man as well as other prominent Internet “creepypastas”.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Another YouTube series that originally started<\/a> as an homage to Marble Hornets<\/em> before evolving into its own thing, titled TribeTwelve<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 This series is notable for its special effects, as well as for pioneering the imagery of Slender Man’s writhing tentacles.\u00a0 Marble Hornets<\/em>, EverymanHYBRID<\/em>, and TribeTwelve<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Another way Slender Man gained popularity was through independent games released on the Internet.\u00a0 A first-person puzzle game submitted for a horror game competition in 2011 featured the creature as the primary villain.\u00a0 In June of 2012, a game developed with Unity software titled Slender: The Eight Pages<\/em> was released for free.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 PC Gamer and Kotaku would provide links to download mirrors the following day.\u00a0 At the risk of a jump-scare death, players were tasked with collecting 8 notes<\/a> scattered around a forest at night, all while being haunted by the Slender Man.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The game received a full commercial version that was released a little under a year later in March of 2013, titled Slender: The Arrival<\/em>.\u00a0 Slender Man’s creator Eric Knudsen\/Victor Surge had the role of one of the game’s producers, and the creators of Marble Hornets<\/em> helped write the game’s script.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 In 2011, Slender Man was the source of inspiration for Minecraft<\/em>‘s<\/a> enemy The Enderman.\u00a0 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)<\/em>, that one song with the audio clip of somebody screaming “Call 911 now!” before the bass gets all dubsteppy.\u00a0 It’s not made 100% clear in the video if it is indeed Slender Man, however, so it could be speculation.\u00a0 Bit.Trip Presents… Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien,<\/em> 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.\u00a0 In early 2014, Goat<\/em> Simulator<\/em> was released and featured an unlockable goat one could play as called Slender Goat.\u00a0 Another early 2014 game Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare<\/em> 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.\u00a0 Long-running CW show Supernatural<\/em> 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. \u00a0Family Guy<\/em> has referenced Slender Man on two separate occasions.<\/p>\n

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Picture left-to-right:Possibly Slender Man (Skrillex), The Enderman (Minecraft<\/em>), Bit.Trip Runner 2<\/em>, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare<\/em>, Slender Goat (Goat Simulator<\/em>)<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Her attackers were sentenced to 25 and 40 years in mental health institutions<\/a>.\u00a0 Thankfully, Payton Leutner lived and is doing fine, having said in recent interviews that she intends to pursue a career in medicine.<\/p>\n

As a result of this attack, parents and anyone who were just not hip to Internet culture or things such as Skrillex, Minecraft<\/em>, or Goat Simulator <\/em>were now aware of Slender Man, though with a definite negative connotation.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 In their usual “ripped from the headlines” format, Law & Order: SVU<\/em> had an episode loosely-based on the Waukesha incident that aired half a year after it.\u00a0 In 2016, a documentary was made about the Waukesha attack titled\u00a0 _beware the slenderman<\/em> that premiered at South by Southwest and was broadcast on HBO<\/a>.\u00a0 On March 31, 2019, Netflix would release on their streaming platform a movie titled Mercy Black.\u00a0 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> the mythical beast got a movie.\u00a0 Thus, in 2018, Slender Man<\/em> was released.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Instead, the movie involves characters trying to summon Slender Man through a non-violent ritual, and follows the consequences of their actions.\u00a0 The movie was panned by critics, and it earned back a little under double its budget.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.\u00a0 There’s something thrilling about watching something meant to be ephemeral become so widely appreciated by the world at large.\u00a0 Perhaps there’s more Slender Man in store for the world with people look for ways they can keep the myth alive and fresh.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

MORE: Culprit in Slenderman Stabbing Sentenced to 40 Years in Mental Institution<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

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