(flatulence)
Welcome back to Things You Missed.
I know it’s been a while since you’ve seen me; I did not upload last week, so you’ve
probably forgotten who I am.
My name is CZ and it’s my job to analyse horror movies for any content you may have
missed.
Today I’m gonna be covering Slenderman… or I guess Slender Man is the actual title
of this movie, like there’s a space there for some reason.
Perhaps to foreshadow the fact that this movie would contain a lot of empty filler.
But despite Sony’s product placement of their Xperia phones being the highest level
of effort put into this movie, I do have a theory about the meaning of what we saw on
screen, or at least what they were going for.
And I do think this theory will be worth your time, more so than the film itself, so be
sure to stick around for that.
Let’s start by going back to 6 months ago, when the trailer for Slender Man first came
out, and I being CZsWorld, did a Things You Missed on it.
One of the Things I noticed was there didn’t seem to be any ties to the established lore
of Slenderman, from the original photos to Marble Hornets, to the symbology we’ve come
to associate with Slenderman.
This led me to believe that this could be drawing more inspiration from the real life
incident known as “The Slenderman Stabbing”, when two girls tried to kill their friend
with a knife, supposedly with the belief that they were making a sacrifice to Slenderman.
Slenderman, of course, does not exist, and these girls were mentally ill.
They allowed this viral creepypasta story to alter their perception of reality, and
an innocent girl almost paid the ultimate price for it.
I’m gonna go out of order here.
Let’s skip to the last line of the movie.
The voiceover compares the spreading of the Slender sickness to something going viral.
It also mentions that some take it too far and try to summon Slenderman.
The movie is comparing the mental illness of these girls to the viral takeover of a
popular creepypasta, and there are plenty of examples of evidence throughout the movie.
So let’s go through them.
Exhibit A.
The Slender sickness spreads quickly through the internet, just like the creepypasta.
The very first scene of the movie shows two of the girls watching a viral video of a breakdancing
cat on their phones.
One of them mentions that she’d like the video better if the cat were to explode.
Right off the bat, we are shown the influence of viral memes on their life, and how it can
make some of them take things too far.
Then, that night when they’re hanging out in Katie’s basement, they first find out
about Slenderman from a rumor that their guy friends are going to try to summon him, so
they decide to try it themselves.
They watch the video, it causes them to have some kind of vision, and they describe a weird
feeling coming over all of them.
I see that as them getting the virus, getting the mental illness in their head.
After Katie’s disappearance, the girls recover her laptop, and find that she’s been browsing
all of these Slenderman websites.
She had been on these forums with posts from users named Mchylr, Sabby99, Paulyyy with
three Ys and Aleekat93.
They would later find out that Aleekat93 is one of the last people that Katie spoke with
online before her disappearance, and towards the end of the movie they discover that Aleekat93
is actually a girl named Allison Riley, a mental patient.
This is enough to at least suspect that the mental illness, Slender sickness, whatever
you want to call it is literally passed from person to person online, and it’s later
confirmed when Wren decides to message Alliekat93 and it leads her to go insane; sounding like
a complete nutcase when trying to describe some bio-electric aura garbage to Hallie,
drawing a huge amount of pictures of Slenderman, and standing at the edge of her window contemplating
suicide.
If you’re not convinced, look back at the scene where Wren describes the nature of the
virus after first talking to Aleekat93.
I mean, don’t literally watch the movie again, that would be awful, but just think
back to that scene.
Wren describes the sickness as a virus that gets in your head, and uses the comparison
of a computer virus, but in your brain.
Why would she use a computer virus as a reference point, as opposed to an actual medical virus?
I’m pretty sure a computer virus is only called a virus, because it’s similar to
an actual virus you might contract.
So her wording is weird on that, but it makes sense going back to the comparison with the
real-life Slenderman stabbing girls, because they essentially made themselves mentally
ill by visiting these websites from a young age and convincing themselves that Slenderman
somehow exists.
So that brings me to Exhibit B. Once you have the disease, it causes destructive behaviour.
At the beginning of the movie they all have their own dreams, and by the end, they’ve
effectively sabotaged those dreams.
A question is posed to the group early on.
“OK Twitter poll.
If you could stay one age forever, what would it be?”
Each of their answers tells us something about that character.
Let’s start with Katie.
She says 21.
That could be because she sees her alcoholic father and thinks drinking away her sorrows
is the only way to deal with her miserable life.
She’s always going on about being stuck in this town she hates.
And it’s on her computer that the video is originally watched.
I think she actually kind of wants to summon Slenderman and wants to be taken away by him
because she’s depressed.
So she’s the first one to become mentally ill, and she’s basically the one to pass
it onto the other girls.
You could also argue that it starts with her father.
I don’t know if being an alcoholic counts, but he does seem disturbed when he breaks
into Hallie’s house, where he mentions that Katie was never into this occult stuff before
she disappeared.
How would he even know about that without knowing about the whole Slenderman ritual?
Also, when the girls sneak into Katie’s room to recover the laptop, the dad can be
seen watching TV with his usual bottle of alcohol, but he also now has pill bottles,
which leads me to believe that at this point in the movie, he too has the Slender sickness.
But going back to Katie, they look through her computer and if you look at her desktop
icons there are folders labeled, homework (pretty self-explanatory), project hometown
(which I’m guessing is part of her plan to get out of her hometown as mentioned near
the beginning of the movie), and a folder called ideas looks (which I’m not sure what
that is, but the ideas portion could have something to do with the fact that Slenderman
gets in your head, much like an idea.)
There are also two files seen on her desktop, one called “founder of the…” dot dot
dot, and the other named bucket list.
I don’t know too many 16 year olds who already have a bucket list, and I’m guessing that
is not there for positive reasons.
So looking at all of this, it seems like Katie wants escape town and her alcoholic dad, but
the contraction of the illness leads her to a more destructive path towards getting out
of her current life.
Chloe’s response to the “what age would you want to be?”
question is nine years old.
This is probably because her dad died in the military when she was nine.
It’s kind of implied, because when they go to make a sacrifice in the woods to try
get Katie back, she sacrifices the last picture of her and her Dad.
And later on when we are seeing Slenderman’s POV through Chloe’s house, you can spot
of picture of her Dad wearing military gear.
We don’t really know what she does to sabotage her dream, because she kind of stops being
in the movie for the most part after seeing Slenderman.
You may have figured this out by now but this is not a perfect movie, but I’m just going
to try to give you as much information as I can, and you can always let me know your
own thoughts in the comments.
Moving on to Wren, she said she would want to remain 30 years old, and she specifically
cites that 30 is the age when you’re most mentally stable.
Wren ends up being the one who is the least mentally stable, having crazy delusions in
the library and really just sounding like a complete crazy person in her speech and
being pushed to the brink of suicide.
So that just leaves the main girl, Hallie, who says she’d like to remain the same age
that she is right now.
She has a good life.
She loves her sister and she’s a track star at her school.
You can see some of her trophies above her bed.
Early on, her sister brings up the fact that one of her teammates quit the track team after
getting pregnant, and this establishes Hallie’s fear of growing up and taking on those adult
responsibilities.
So what does the Slenderman sickness do to her?
It gives her a vision of herself getting pregnant and the sickness then spreads to her sister,
and she has to give up the life that she loves in order to try to protect Lizzie.
Like the Slenderman Stabbing girls from 2014, the girls in this movie engage in some destructive
behaviors once Slenderman gets in their head.
Exhibit C. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
This line basically tells us that there is no cure for the Slender sickness.
And once the characters have the virus, they start seeing the symbols of facelessness and
eyelessness everywhere.
The original idea for the logo of Slenderman, which I don't think appears in this movie
anywhere, is that it's a head with the face crossed out because Slenderman has no face.
So it looks like that idea is kind of kept in fact, only in this movie it's specifically
no eyes as opposed to no face.
The legend that they read before watching the video tells them to keep their eyes closed
and their minds open.
A bunch of images flash on the screen, some of which look like Illuminati symbols, but
I'm guessing they’re just supposed to be like eye symbols.
There are also some letters and numbers that are briefly flashed on screen.
It looks kind of like programming language, and further ties into the comparison between
Slender sickness and a computer virus.
After watching the video when they have their visions of the forest or whatever is going
on there, there are some jump cuts of a girl with a melting face.
After recovering Katie's laptop and browsing the Slenderman websites, for some reason you
can see the HTML code of the sites, and the words “You see him” are hidden periodically
throughout the HTML, which didn't really make much sense, but it does fit in with the eye
or lack of eyes motif.
When Wren is researching in the library, she comes across this photo.
If you don't know what it is, it's the original photo from the Something Awful forums photoshop
contest that started the whole Slenderman phenomenon in 2009.
“IT’S 2009!”
This is where the character was born.
So it's cool to see the photo making a cameo in the movie, but when it appears in the movie,
all of the eyes of the human characters are crossed out.
It's probably for copyright reasons, but again it does kind of fit in with the eyeless motif.
In Hallie’s science class they are studying and dissecting corneas.
And when Hallie and Wren go to check up on Chloe at her some, she has this empty blank
look in her eyes.
Wren has some drawings of crossed out eyes in her room, and the hospital is filled with
eyeless and faceless characters, like some Grandma who's eyes disappear, a doctor with
no eyes and the lady getting her hair combed who had no face.
When Hallie’s little sister Lizzie has her… medical emergency that’s never really explained,
we see flashes of maggots, which are little fly larvae that often make their homes in
rotting flesh such as the eyes, and then Lizzie wakes up screaming “he had no face.”
And then in the final scene with Hallie, where she is chased by Slenderman doing his best
Doc Oc impersonation, she ends up at the tree from her original vision where the vines grow
over her entire body, and the last thing they cover is her eyes.
There are probably many more that you can catch, so let me know what you saw in the
comments.
That brings me to my last Exhibit: Exhibit D. Slenderman doesn’t actually exist.
Just like Slenderman was merely a delusion of the real life Slenderman Stabbing girls,
there's evidence in the movie to suggest that the girls are the only ones who see or even
know about Slenderman, with the possible exception of Katie’s dad.
At the beginning of the movie, the guys are stated to have some secret plans for the night.
Chloe later claims that they were planning on summoning Slenderman, which is where the
girls get the idea that they’re gonna do it too.
However, there isn't any evidence that the guys actually do it.
Nothing happens to anyone in town outside the four girls.
None of the guys make any mention of Slenderman throughout the movie.
When Hallie hangs out with Tom and brings up the video, he acts like he's never seen
it before.
The first supposed “Slenderman encounter scene turns out to just be Katie's dad breaking
into Hallie and Lizzie’s house.
When Slenderman supposedly breaks into Chloe’s house and attacks her, at the end of the scene
the camera pans to the mirror to reveal Chloe is choking herself and Slenderman isn't actually
even there.
When Tom is asking out Hallie after school, she keeps looking over to the woods where
she can see Slenderman, but Tom can't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary.
If I'm not mistaken, I think all the actual sightings of Slenderman are seen through the
perspective of the four girls who to try to summon him at the beginning of the movie,
at least until the sickness is passed off to Lizzie later in the movie.
So those are my four exhibits on how this movie is trying to compare the Slender sickness
to real mental illness.
There were a few other Things I Missed that I thought you might be interested in hearing
about.
There seem to be some link between Hallie and Slenderman.
The character they communicate with to learn more about Slenderman goes by Aleekat93, or
Alee.
It sounds very similar to the protagonist Hallie, which wouldn’t be significant if
not for the fact that Alee is never shown and seems to have all the information about
Slenderman.
Then the movie seems to suggest that Hallie is absorbed by Slenderman or something at
the end, because she gets engulfed by that tree, and shortly before that there’s a
shot where she walks behind a tree and briefly becomes Slenderman for a moment, before crossing
by another tree and returning to normal.
And then near the beginning of the movie when the girls are all hanging out in Katie’s
basement, when we come into the scene they are all talking about porn, as girls do, and
they are specifically talking about watching POV porn from the girl’s point of view…
and I guess that has something to do with those scenes later on where Slenderman video
calls them and we see him sneaking into their houses from his POV.
Not sure if that was necessary, but just thought I’d point out that comparison.
It really is quite ironic about Slenderman.
He started out as a contest entry on the Something Awful forums.
And now in 2018, they truly have made something awful.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m gonna go watch Eighth Grade a third time to cleanse
myself of this Slenderman movie, but before I go, please make sure you go ahead and drop
me a like if you actually made it to the end of Slenderman.
I want to see who made it.
And as always, remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring that deathbell
for notifications and I’ll see you in the next one.
Assuming we both survive.