Five years ago, the internet urban legend and indie horror game star Slender Man received a movie adaptation. Unfortunately, it was a low point for the tall tale created by Eric Knudsen.
The movie version tells a particular version of the myth. In a small town in Massachusetts, four high school girls perform a ritual in an attempt to debunk the lore of Slender Man. When one of the girls goes mysteriously missing, they begin to suspect that she is — in fact — his latest victim.
The film has some decent modern horror chops in its cast. Joey King had featured in The Conjuring and [REC] remake Quarantine before this. In an interesting coincidence, Javier Botet, who plays the titular character, had featured in The Conjuring 2 as the Crooked Man and in [REC] and its sequels. Botet’s roster of nasty monsters goes well beyond that though as he’s been ghastly things in IT, Mama, Crimson Peak, and Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark. More recently he’s portrayed Dracula in The Last Voyage of the Demeter.
A Slim Chance of Success
On paper, the premise for Slender Man doesn’t sound too bad an idea. Digging into the whole ‘is the legend real?’ nature of something created in a digital space should be fascinating. The Blair Witch Project is perhaps the internet’s earliest example of that, and probably still one of the strongest bridging attempts between online spaces and horror movies.
But Slender Man’s execution was not up to the premise. It could be argued the film suffered from too many cuts and changes in development, and there’s ample evidence for that in the incoherent final film. It may not excuse the boring, uneventful end result but it’s a factor. The trailers for Slender Man clearly showed some significant changes had been made by the time the finished film went out.
It also didn’t help that before release, controversy struck the film. In 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin — Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser — lured their friend Payton Leutner into a forest. They then stabbed her 19 times in a tribute to the character. Letner’s father was a vocal critic of the film due to his daughter’s attack. (She later made a full recovery.)
Combined with general negative reactions in the media and from test screenings, Sony Pictures and Screen Gems pushed the film out with zero promotion and didn’t let critics have screenings of it.
A Modern Internet Horror (For the Wrong Reasons)
The result was a Metacritic score of 30 and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 8%. At least it had the blessing that it would be forgotten pretty quickly. Director Sylvian White was probably left cursing the circumstances that led to this unfortunate reception. The director had already helmed another maligned misfire in the form of I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer.
There’s something more interesting to be made out of internet creepypasta myths (we’ve already got a bunch of interesting urban myth movies), but this wasn’t it. The closest I think we’ve come in the modern era is Jane Schoenbrun’s superb We’re All Going to The World’s Fair. It’s a very meta film — one that understands the culture behind the creation of things such as Slender Man.
