He’s tall, thin, faceless, and wears a dark suit.
Once he’s in your life—you’re doomed.
If you try to learn more about him or even think about him, it only makes it easier for
him to find you.
He’s the notorious Internet monster—Slender Man.
This 21st-century monster gained popularity as more and more content was created and shared
about him, enough so that he jumped the digital border and began to infiltrate other media.
Video games, comic books, and movies show him stalking humans.
People also dress up like him and hunt for him in the woods.
Then...there’s the tragic attempted murder of a 12-year-old girl in 2014 that made him
a household name.
Unlike so many other monsters we know exactly when this one was created and by whom, a rarity
made possible by the Internet.
His obscurity is what makes him scary, but the real impact of this monster is how he
changed folklore forever.
[Monstrum intro.]
On June 8, 2009 the online forum Something Awful posted a photoshop challenge: “turn
ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images through digital manipulation.”
User Victor Surge, whose real name is Eric Knudsen, responded on June 10
with two black and white photographs.
The first photograph shows a group of teenagers walking towards the camera.
Behind them, you can barely make out a tall, blurry figure lurking in the background.
The teens seem unaware of his presence.
The second photograph depicts a more clear image of Slender Man.
It shows children happily playing in a playground, but in the background under a tree, a shadowy
fig-yur looms.
In this photo, it appears that Slender Man also has tentacles, almost overnight, Slender
Man became an internet sensation.
As his mythos evolved, some common traits emerged.
Slender Man is described as noticeably taller than the average human with an oddly proportioned
body.
He’s very thin with long arms and legs, and in some accounts, he can sprout tentacles
from his back.
He wears a suit and has no facial features or hair and his skin is unnaturally pale.
Anyone who sees Slender Man is then stalked by him.
So it becomes a sort of creepy loop; the more he is seen, the more commonly he appears.
So the fact that I’m making this video means I’m already doomed.
What made Victor Surge’s post stand out more than other submissions was that it was
the first to create a narrative that accompanied the images.
He posted the photos with the following text: “One of two recovered photographs from the
Stirling City Library blaze Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished
and for what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man.’
Deformities cited as film defects by officials.
Fire at library occurred one week later.
Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.
1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.”
Slenderman was born from those words.
The context crafted the myth.
Something Awful users instantly latched on to the mysterious monster’s story.
The Slender Man post sparked enthusiastic comments, with many noting how it would make
for a great tv show or a book.
Others quickly jumped on to the Slender Man bandwagon by posting their own accounts of
the creature.
Within days, the thread became almost exclusively made up of “real” Slender Man legends.
One notable post from a user with the screen name ce gars, mentions his own investigation
into a film project that caused his friend to become increasingly disturbed.
A few days later, the film project in question was uploaded to YouTube, under the title Marble
Hornets.
It features a story, inspired by Slender Man, about a boogeyman figure capable of distorting
audio and video recordings causing the film’s creator to be driven insane.
It turned out that ce gars was Troy Wagner, who crafted the series with his friends.
Marble Hornets became a huge part of the monster’s mythos and was incredibly successful, totaling
more than 90 found-footage episodes.
It even helped inspire two Slender Man video games.
Slender Man made his Creepypasta debut on January 14, 2010.
Creepypasta developed as a place to collect spooky stories.
Users would“copy” and “paste” “creepy” texts from other web sites such as 4chan.
Some people argue that Creepypasta and others such as the /nosleep subreddit obscure the
truth.
They are veiled behind a faux authenticity—fictional stories, often accompanied by seemingly authentic
images—that are treated as real.
But as a scholar of the Gothic, I can tell you that treating mythical stories as actual
accounts is nothing new at all.
Some original Gothic novels were published and falsely advertised as “translations”
of “newly discovered” manuscripts by real authors, or alongside claims that they were
true accounts from some anonymous writer.
But, in reality they were completely fabricated.
More recently, found footage horror films [Blair Witch, etc.] are another example of
how the lines of fiction and truth are intentionally blurred.
Victor Surge admits Slender Man was made up.
An idea he crafted from all the things that scare him with a name he says he “thought
up on the fly”
He does admit he used the Tall Man from the Phantasm films as the source material for
the first Slender Man images.
But by keeping the details vague, he allowed others to fill in the gaps of his creation
with their own fears.
Slender Man shares similarities to a lot of other pre-existing characters.
He’s been compared to the Pied Piper, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s the Gentlemen, The
Silence from Dr. Who, the Men in Black, and Jack Skellington.
Tales about him contain some elements of the Blair Witch Project and H.P.
Lovecraft stories.
There’s even a pre-existing Japanese yokai that appears human but has no facial features,
just like Slender Man.
You may have heard that Slender Man sightings have been happening for hundreds of years,
that he appears in old texts and art, from Germanic mythology to Canadian folklore, Norse
mythology, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
It’s enticing to think that we can discover a monster that’s been secretly haunting
us for years.
That’s a cool story.
But none of that is true.
He didn’t exist before 2009.
Take this image for example.
Some people claim this is an image of Slender Man dating back to the 16th century, but in
reality it’s a photoshopped image based on existing prints from that time period.
The original comes from a series of danse macabre images
meant to show that death is universal.
This one?
Another photoshop of an image taken from the same artist.
Similar to other monsters, such as Windigo and Tokoloshe, Slender Man has been used as
a scapegoat for deviant behavior.
In 2014, two girls attempted to murder their friend because they allegedly thought it would
attract the attention of Slender Man.
Such a dramatic and violent crime drew the attention of the media, and the once notorious
Internet monster became a familiar story offline as well, causing moral panic and fear.
Slender Man’s faceless features allow us to transcribe pretty much any of our fears
onto him.
He’s uncanny.
His human silhouette and common clothing makes him familiar.
But something is off.
His dark suit is unsettling.
There could be a couple of reasons why:
It shows him polished and put together, and intentional in what he does.
He is self aware, patiently waiting and watching his victims.
There’s also the association of black suits with death, something we see commonly at funerals.
And then there’s the idea that the suit symbolizes power and authority.
It’s anonymous and timeless.
The idea that Slender Man specifically targets children feeds into our fear that there are
evil strangers ready to kidnap our kids.
Slender Man’s the new version of “don’t take candy from a stranger,” a lesson that
keeps kids safe by instilling a healthy wariness for adults they don’t know.
Slender Man is always watching you, even if you don’t know it.
This parallels our more legitimate fears of being constantly watched by cameras and other
technologies that monitor our day to day actions.
Heck, even the Internet where Slender Man was first created constantly logs so much
of what we do.
Slender Man takes the fear of something that seems abstract, like a story on the Internet,
to something more concrete like a man outside your window at night.
Slender Man could have been nothing more than a scary, made up story.
But when people misread it, treat it as real, the lines between what is authentic and what
is false blur to dangerous levels.
Technology allows anyone to make fake things appear real.
Photoshopped images, computer edited video footage, and falsified documents can spread
quickly and are seen as legitimate.
And anyone can contribute.
Slender Man represents an important shift in folklore where myths are crafted at a blistering
pace across social, cultural, and physical boundaries.
It’s a kind of digital Gothic where the haunted house becomes the haunted everything.
Slender Man and other digital folklore succeeds because of the Internet.
These myths spread like wildfire through social media.
The time stamps of online folklore allow us to examine real-time discussions, responses,
and reactions to mythology as it’s created.
It gives us an exact account of how the story developed in real time—something that doesn’t
didn’t exist in traditional folklore studies before.
I think this is part of what makes Slender Man so popular, what gives him life—he can
be made by anyone for anyone.
Slender Man unintentionally revolutionized how horror stories are told.
He opened up the doors for anyone with an internet connection to help create a legend.