When they’re taken, it means next to nothing, because they were never anything but the sum of their fears. But like the victims in Freddy’s movies, the characters in “Slender Man” have a way of being tremulously emotional and, in that very desperation, entirely disposable. The actresses make their presence felt, especially Joey King as Wren, a soulful waif in a punk choker, and Jaz Sinclair as Chloe, who beams with life until she calls up a video of Slender Man, only to watch in frozen horror as he films himself entering her house and coming up the stairs (which lends one more layer to the film’s borrowings - a whisper of “Halloween”). But where do they go when they’re taken? There’s no answer to that other than “away,” and that’s why the film has a murky, vague, grasping-at-straws-of-evil quality. The girls try to protect each other, which means that each abduction into the great dark beyond is also a sacrifice, a way of shielding the next girl.
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But “Slender Man” is the kind of movie in which images come before logic, because there really isn’t much logic. He’s also pictured standing in front of bare-limbed trees at night, because he’s like a tree himself, and there’s imagery of twiggy black foliage erupting out of victims’ mouths, mostly because that looks sort of cool. The movie, written by David Birke and directed by Sylvain White, lifts a great deal from “Ringu” and its American remake and sequels, notably the merging of paranormal horror and staticky technology - which means, in this case, that Slender Man turns out to be a “bioelectric” force, so that when he shows up we often hear crackling voltage on the soundtrack. The more it tries to sketch in the rules of who Slender Man is and what he means and how he operates, the more you realize that the film is just winging it, stitching together old tropes and hoping that they blossom into something coherent. Yet apart from its occasionally spooky images, “Slender Man” is a fundamentally derivative and empty-headed horror film. “Slender Man” takes off from a “creepypasta” Internet meme that originated in 2009, and it’s the character’s abstract quality that results in a handful of shivery moments, especially when the four high-school girls who are the film’s main characters call up underground video files in which he lurks like an outlaw with a smudged face. He’s the walking-dead spirit of formula teen horror - the monster who, no matter how many times you kill him, never goes away. He’s coming to get you, but who he is remains a mystery. In this case, though, when you glimpse the character of Slender Man (Javier Botet) in the background of photographs or amateur videos, or even when you see him up close, he remains an oblique phantom: tall and spindly, like Ichabod Crane, in a black suit and parson’s tie, with long arms like tree branches and a blank blob of a face. He’s like Candy Man, in that he’s a historical ghost with a two-word name ending in “Man,” or Pennywise from “It,” in that he targets a close-knit group of friends, knocking them off one by one.
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He’s like the force from “ Ringu,” in that the trouble all starts when you watch an evil black-and-white digital file full of flickering imagery that looks like “Un Chien Andalou” crossed with a Tool video. He’s like Freddy Krueger, in that he targets teenagers and spirits them away the moment they let their defenses down. Joey King and Annalise Basso are going to be big stars.
According to the lore of the film, if you see him, you're a goner.Īfter one of the girls goes missing, the other three begin to suspect their Friday night lark may have drastic implications for them all.įrom The Ring-evoking, generically creepy internet video onwards, a strong sense of boredom-inducing familiarity permeates Slender Man despite its best efforts to texture the central characters' friendships and infuse relevance via a clumsy emphasis on social media and cellphone culture.In “ Slender Man,” the title demon is one of those spectral showbiz creeps from another dimension who’s coming to get you. Things I Learnt From This Movie: Slender Man mythology is fantastic but really inconsistent, no wonder they get it so wrong with adaptations. The fictional Slender Man film follows four sassy teenage girlfriends who dare themselves into watching a creepy internet video that supposedly brings forth the titular spectre, a tall, faceless figure with the silhouette of a man-sized matchstick. Setting aside the tastelessness of centring a teenage horror film around an internet meme primarily associated with a real-life teenager-on-teenager stabbing, (as explored in the 2016 documentary Beware The Slenderman), this highly derivative would-be franchise-starter fails to distinguish itself in any significant way.
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