I am not convinced that Sylvain White, the director of Slender Man, actually knows what Slender Man is. Or maybe he knows more about the Slender Man than I do. A Slender Man is a tree, right? Or maybe the Pied Piper of Hamelin? I thought he was just a mysterious shadowy boogeyman, but apparently the tall, pale gentleman comes with a complex mythos. It might have been covered in a crucial piece of creepypasta I was unaware of.
White, though, has seen The Ring, because that’s what this movie is. We follow a teen girl squad who, as a joke, decided that it’s would be funny to summon internet sensation, the Slender Man, because they hear that they boys are going to try it. What does this involve? Logging into a website and watching what looks like a Flash movie full of Illuminati symbols. While seemingly an innocent teen good times shenanigans, the activity proves deadly. Slender Man invades their brains. Like The Ring, words like “mental virus” are used. It’s like a computer virus, except it spreads through your brain. So… a virus? (The coda blames Slender Man’s villainy on photo sharing sites. Damn you, Flickr!)
While on as school field trip, one of the girls (Annalise Basso) disappears. What happened? Was she kidnapped? Was she trying to run away from her alcoholic dad? An examination of her notebooks and sketches of a thin shadowy figure suggest something else.
Or was she whisked away to the land of wind and ghosts by … The Slender Man? (Incidentally, White probably has also seen Stranger Things.)
The movie begins following slasher movie logic with ol’ Slendy targeting the remaining girls one by one and … well, I wish I could say he kills them. More accurately, he puts them on a bad acid trip. We see one girl (Jaz Sinclair) get strangled by Slender Man’s long thing fingers, for example. In a following scene, though, we discover that she’s still alive. She stares at her friends out the window without a hint of recognition. I expected her to bang her head against the glass for a fright moment. It would have been cheap, but effective. The movie can’t even give us that. Mostly she looks like she’s strung out on heroin.
Slender Man: a parable for the dangers of substance abuse.
My guess is that, on the internet, Slender Man is a reliable source of eerie, low-key, atmospheric scares. Perhaps the movie would be closer to The Blair Witch Project tonally, where perhaps our boogeyman is never seen. Our movie is not deft enough to replicate even the imaginations of internet commenters and instead reaches for the most baffling of jump scares. The track plays a scary sting when Joey King is in the library and there’s movement behind her and… oh my God … A LIBRARIAN! You never expect to see that in a library! Between this and Wish Upon, King is now two for two in movies that are both incompetent horror and laughable approximations of teen culture. She may be the closest our current generation has to a scream queen.
Worse, when we do see Slender Man up close, he looks very silly. This may be why the most effective Slender Man fan art doesn’t show a close-up of his face. It looks like a piece of chewed up bubble gum. This might be why then gave him giant spider legs… which only make the dapperly dressed fellow look even more like a minor Undertale character. Meanwhile, his frightening dream sequences come across as comical. Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles) has a quick cut dream sequence within a dream sequence within a quick-cut dream sequence reminiscent of a Nine Inch Nails video where she sees a long haired faceless woman, body parts, and her own face oozing black goo. At one point, a tall figure approaching her in slow motion who… turns out wasn’t the Slender Man but is a doctor.
My derivative snorting was off the charts.
The movie does get one scare right. Three girls go deep into the woods in the dead of night to try to contact the Slender Man so that they can bargain for the life of their friend. They have to wear blindfolds or gaze upon the Slender Man and be driven mad. When the girls sit in the dark with the blindfolds on as they hear twigs snap and steps come their way, I felt a twinge of anxiety. Because, honestly, for three young women alone in the darkness, Slender Man might be the best case scenario.
Rating: 1/5 stars.