Culture

Slender Man (2018) Trailer – Do Creepypasta and Cinema Mix?

A Slender Man movie is on the way, and reception is pretty lukewarm, to say the least. Hey, let’s check out the synopsis:

“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.”

Correction: A movie loosely based on the Slender Man, with a bunch of random things happening. Oh no, maggots! Again!

Aside from the look of Slender Man himself (who you only see for maybe two seconds), it’s actually hard to tell from this trailer just what the movie has to do with the original creepypasta character.

As I saw one YouTube commenter put it, “If you remove the notes and Slender himself, you couldn’t even tell this is Slender.” Well, that’s the sort of high-quaity attention to detail I’ve come to expect from Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The film has also hit some controversy, given the brutal events that happened in Wisconsin a few years ago. In 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin attacked a fellow classmate, later claiming they did so to “impress” the mythical Slender Man. The father of one of the attackers has since called the new horror film “extremely distasteful.” Put that on the back of the VHS release.

Truth be told, the Slender Man was never much of a story. It’s more an idea, one that creeped out a whole lot of people back when Victor Surge first shared those pictures in 2009. There’s a way to translate that to film, the same way it’s been translated to video games, I think, but Sony has instead opted for Generic Horror Movie #4571.

Slender Man is directed by Sylvain White, and stars Jaz Sinclair, Joey King, Julia Goldani-Telles, and Annalise Basso. Javier Botet plays the titular Slender Man, ripped right from Something Awful circa 2009 and heading to a theater near you on August 24, 2018.

Rob Schwarz

Writer, blogger, and part-time peddler of mysterious tales. Editor-in-chief of Stranger Dimensions.