If you’ve been keeping tabs on the stabbing that occurred last month in Wisconsin, the more tenuously connected stabbing in Ohio, or the double homicide in Las Vegas—both of which took place during the first weekend of June—and find yourself confused about all of this “Slender Man” business, count yourself in good company.
After reading the news, many members of DigBoston were left scratching their heads at such senseless violence, and wondering whom exactly this Slender Man character is. So we took it upon ourselves to study up on Internet lore, urban legends, and Slender Man meme culture in order to better educate the masses. Just be warned—this shit isn’t for the faint of heart, so if you’re looking for a heartwarming story about a duckling rescue or Batkid’s most recent adventure (remember Batkid?), you’ve come to the wrong place.
Slender Man (also known as Slenderman, The Tall Man, The Thin Man, and to those weird enough to want to give a terrifying paranormal entity a cutesy nickname, “Slendy”) was incubated and born in the forums of Something Awful, a popular comedy/meme site, in 2009. The brainchild of Victor Surge, real name Eric Knudsen, Slender Man first appeared in two images submitted for a “paranormal picture” photoshop contest on the site. Surge submitted two black and white photos of children at play with a mysterious figure hovering ominously in the background. Straight out of a Lovecraft-ian nightmare, the creature is abnormally tall, faceless, adorned in a black suit, and, in one image, appears to have tentacles extending from its sides. The only context Surge provided for his creation was two fabricated quotes that suggest the creature is responsible for the disappearances of children.
Not long after its first appearance on Something Awful, Slender Man went viral. Wannabe horror writers from around the world took on the challenge of creating a backstory for the monster, thus inventing a rich and varied history for the creature in its many forms. Such stories, featured on sites like creepypasta, 4chan, and Slenderman Mythos, have given the 21st century bogeyman newfangled paranormal powers such a possession and teleportation.
On June 20, 2009, Slender Man made the jump from the written word to film with the development of Marble Hornets, a “found footage” YouTube series started by Something Awful user “ce gars” (real name Troy Wagner), and Joseph DeLage. The series, which to date consists of 87 entries, tells the story of three young men who encounter Slender Man—known in the series as “The Operator”—while working on a film school project. Any fan of the series (yours truly included) can attest that it’s pants-shittingly scary and definitely not for kids. Marble Hornets went on to inspire other similar series such as TribleTwelve and EverymanHYBRID; collectively, these YouTube accounts boast over 460,000 subscribers. In February 2013 it was announced that Slender Man would appear on the big screen in a film adaptation of Marble Hornets. The story of Slender Man has become so pervasive in popular culture that it has even spawned video games like I and has allegedly served as the inspiration for the design of a race of aliens on Doctor Who known as “The Silence”.
Although new to some, the Slender Man mythos is just another in a long history of stories we make up to scare the crap out of each other. It’s really no different from other popular urban legends such as “Humans Can Lick, Too” and “Aren’t You Glad You Didn’t Turn On the Light?”, or from campfire stories about hook-handed serial killers. In fact, those who have put the time and effort into studying the Slender Man mythos have found its roots in folktales from around the world, from the pre-Columbian “hupia” or “op’a”, a humanoid being that paralyzes its victims and drives them insane, to the Japanese noppera-bō, a type of yōkai, or faceless ghost.
If anything, Slender Man should be recognized as a promising recent addition to the canon of invented things that go bump in the night, and as an exciting development in the evolution of folktales and modern storytelling. The stories that your mommy and daddy used to tell you to scare you straight still exist, only now they’re on the Internet. Despite its creep factor, at the end of the day Slender Man is nothing more than a meme; attempting to commit murder in its name is as foolish and pathetic as doing the same in the name of Grumpy Cat. We wouldn’t (and didn’t, as a culture) hold The Beatles responsible for inadvertently inspiring Charles Manson’s insane Helter Skelter scheme, so it makes little sense to point a finger at Victor Surge or others who propagate Slender Man fan arts and fiction.
The public has nothing to fear from Slender Man or Slender fans. The stabbing in Wisconsin was not the work of some paranormal entity, but instead two deeply disturbed little girls who couldn’t distinguish fantasy from reality. We should be more concerned with how the media sensationalized their story, making it internationally newsworthy. We should also be concerned by how the media, knowing a good thing when they saw it, loosely connected Slender Man to other crimes around the country for the sake of making headlines. If anything, Slender Man gave us yet another wake-up call to the fact that we should be more mindful of what news outlets we go to and the legitimacy of the information they are feeding us.
