It, perhaps unsurprisingly, wasn’t long before the mainstream press started losing track of Slender Man’s background. The upcoming horror movies of 2018 (opens in new tab) Knudsen remains the official creator of the character (with a still-unknown third-party taking possession of the licensing rights), but the monster felt free to turn up anywhere. Now existing far beyond Something Awful, the Slender Man rapidly became the star of fan art, fiction, video games, short films, and even an early, first movie, which got a limited cinema release following its online launch in 2015. Nightmare he might be, but he was also our nightmare. For all of his terrifying countenance and mythology, there was also a strange, slightly warm attachment. There remained in his nature a deeply unusual element, in that where older monsters without clear point of origin are defined in their ‘realness’ by exactly that otherness - that sense that they exist, and always have, outside of the bounds of human civilisation - the Slender Man came with a sense of ownership. The internet just allowed it to happen much, much faster.Īnd so Slender Man was suddenly as close to a legitimate part of the folklore pantheon as a modern, artificially engineered creature could be. Everyone involved might have been entirely aware that that character was fabricated, but the means by which their alternative takes, tales, and distortions added to his legend perfectly parallel the creation of any number of more ‘real’ monsters throughout the ages, built by long-term hearsay and mythical word-of-mouth exaggeration. Although a brand new character, the creation and evolution of the Slender Man was an act of genuine folklore in accelerated form. It was the process of growing a character, story, and mythology through collective imagination, the shared fears, ideas, and narrative understanding of a vast group coming together via endless inter-inspiration in order to create something ultimately tangible. The evolution of the Slender Man wasn’t the usual internet process of flogging a joke from multiple angles until every last avenue of humour is expended. While the creature’s collaborative evolution followed the same model as an internet meme, with all the incremental adaptation, consolidation, and re-adaptation that makes any repeated online joke a living, changing entity, it also tapped into something more powerful. In fact the concept of folklore is key to the whole thing. The most powerful side-effect of this rapid, crowd-sourced evolution though, was that rather than diluting the character, these many, subtly different interpretations solidified his myth, and added power to it.īy evolving and changing the Slender Man, while continuing to build him via suitable variations on the original theme – and largely keeping the exact details of his nature ambiguous and unknowable – this swift extrapolation strengthened and consolidated the sense of the Slender Man as a folklore entity. Sometimes his face changed depending on the personality and fears of those who beheld him. Slightly different visual interpretations spun and stretched organically. The abstract narrative hints in the photo captions were spun to create knew facets of the character, his ability, and intent. Very quickly, the character was picked up by many SA users, swiftly developed, riffed on, expanded, and mythologised in ways far beyond the material included in Knudsen’s original post. When I say that he came to life in that thread, I don’t use the term lightly. The 25 best horror movies (opens in new tab)īut whatever the reasons for his instinctive, collective adoption, the Slender Man was here to stay. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. "One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Perhaps it was the fabricated historical quotations Knudsen added to the photos, which expertly combine conversational, mundane trappings with enigmatic abstraction and profoundly unsettling, unsaid details, in the tradition of much of the best literary horror. It’s hard to pin down exactly why the creature resonated so much harder than any of the thread’s other entries. The first sighting of Slender Man had occurred. Eric Knudsen (opens in new tab), posting under his account name of Victor Spurge, doctored a couple of black and white photos, adding a thin, distorted, unnaturally tall, pale figure into the background, indistinct of facial features, and wearing a black suit.
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