When I saw the preview for Slender Man, I immediately knew that I would not see it in theaters. Considering that I was around when the digital folklore was created, I knew that my suspension of disbelief would be challenged going in. Then there is the issue of good taste. When the protagonists are teenage girls, and they don’t have to be, it feels as if the movie was trying to exploit prurient interest now that the trial against two teenage girls who stabbed their friend for the urban legend has ended. I hate sounding like the NRA, but it is too soon to exploit that tragedy. Also if you’re going to be distasteful, be good. It is the least that you owe your audience.
Unfortunately Slender Man takes the horror route of using the scare as a metaphor for multiple real life issues thus diluting it of any genuine impact that it could have on the audience. Are you scared of premarital sex or teenage pregnancy? We’ve got you. Like you’re growing apart from your friends, and they will leave you all alone as they move on to bigger and better things so you make new dangerous friends online? Come on down. Is your single parent dad a complete alcoholic and you’re looking for a better father figure who is closer to Satan? Step right up. Are you a black girl who knows better than to do what these fools are doing but you have known these girls from childhood so you didn’t ditch them early enough, and we didn’t really give you a storyline so we’re going to drive you insane? Pull up a chair.
Slender Man is basically a weak mash up of Candy Man, The Ring and Stephen King’s It with a sprinkling of Evil Dead and a visual nod to The Craft. This film is at its best when it briefly alludes to a better, broader story happening in the real world. Have you noticed that if you’re doing research in a horror film, you have to use a desktop computer, preferably in a library, and not your smartphone? Also you know that you’re too old to watch this movie when a character finds an obscure book in a library, and you think appreciatively, “That is a good library.” The movie wants to have its cake and eat it too by suggesting that there is no monster, and the experience is subjective, but the images that these girls see are hallucinations generated by their damaged bioelectric systems.
If the filmmakers chose a route and stuck to it, we could have at least had a mediocre to decent movie, but it could not let go of the idea that Slender Man was an actual supernatural phenomenon that the eagle-eyed audience could see when the four girls couldn’t. Pick a side or if you don’t, explore each side so fully and reconcile it that I’m impressed. Or not. Do mental patients have access to the Internet? Make the catfish into the titular character and then you could make both work by explaining that he travels through electric currents or whatever! The movie already set that up as a possibility by irritating me and calling it a symbiotic relationship when they meant parasitic. Side note: did the movie name the insane asylum after a famous attempted assassin? That was a nice touch.
Slender Man was frustrating because it was so dark that I could not see what was going on in the movie. The characters were annoying, and I kept getting two of them confused because they look so similar. When one disappeared, I thought, “Good. You said something bad about cats. Bye!” Also I hate when we hear characters talk about and the news reporting that police are questioning everyone, but we never see them do that. They are just wallpaper in the background. Two of the four girls never have an adult around. Someone is paying for those big houses that they live in. One character is left catatonic in her home where apparently no one else lives. Even her friends don’t report it to anyone so presumably long after the movie is over, she is still standing at the window staring into space.
Also Slender Man keeps setting up classic horror movie moments then abandoning them. In the dissection class, no student goes crazy and starts mutilating oneself or others. The little sister foreboding eventually does go somewhere, but my version was way more merciless and brutal. What made this viewing experience particularly frustrating was that I have seen better movies with fewer resources explore similar themes. I would not recommend it, but Megan Is Missing does a better job of having a teen deal with the ambiguous loss of her friend, and there are no supernatural elements. The director, Sylvain White, is best known for his feature film, Stomp the Yard, and usually directs episodes in television series. Maybe horror isn’t his genre, but that doesn’t explain the writing.
There was also a YouTube movie, The Slender Man (2013), directed by AJ Meadows, which has passable acting and dreadful production quality, particularly audio, but a far more intricate and textured storyline that linked the characters in multiple clever ways than this dreckitude. It actually improves upon repeat viewings. I rewatched it immediately after the Hollywood take, and it was no contest in terms of being actually scary. There are four main characters: adult siblings cleaning their recently deceased father’s home, a detective and the father of missing child. Many viewers may not like it because it is a found footage movie, but it even devotes a minimum amount of time to plausibly explain why the characters would film everything. Also this film actually had the guts to kill kids (not on screen), which I know will rule out parents of young children as viewers because of sensitivity issues, but it is a horror movie. It is supposed to be horrific. I didn’t catch it the first time, but the past and present connection between the titular character and the rest of the characters is really textured and powerful. It leaves the door open to prequels and sequels in a delightful way. Digital folklore works when it is tied into older legends and stories. The Hollywood version tried to do that by lazily dumping a montage of images then never exploring it again. There is also something to be said for having adult characters become vulnerable to the supernatural. I expect that a bunch of kids and teenagers are cannon fodder unless I’m watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but if Slender Man can mess with an adult, he enters the ranks of a Dracula type monster that has to be reckoned with and perhaps can’t be stopped.
Do not watch Slender Man. If you like found footage movies, then check out The Slender Man if you can watch YouTube on a big screen and prefer a solid story to production or acting quality, but if the quality is a stumbling block, don’t bother. It is more of a soul sister to Stephen King’s It and The Storm of the Century than Hollywood could hope to be.