Slender Man Movie Review

Blog cover pic unceremoniously stolen from the Slender Man wiki site. Pic was drawn by jimmygibbsjr.

Welcome to my new blog site! I tried to keep the colors somewhat similar to my old site on Blogger, but more spruced up. Went with a more pink and maroon tone this time around though. If I don't like it I'll just change it. Whatever. Moving on, I thought I'd pop this cherry with a review.

I just finished watching the Slender Man movie and it was extremely great at being very meh. There really wasn't very many things that I liked about it at all. I used to be a huge Slender Man fan. I used to keep up with so many ARG/RP style blogs and YouTube channels. I read every creepypasta I could that had anything to do with extending the mythos. Of course I would get excited when I heard there was going to be a movie made about it. So considering how much I like this particular creepypasta cryptid, let's proceed to take a gigantic shit all over it. Moderate to heavy spoilers abound.

This movie is about a group of girls who hear about the Slender Man story from the internet and decide to summon him because why not. He's like a tentacled Bloody Mary. As a spooky chick, I get it. Later one of them goes missing and in their attempt to get her back from the Man of Slender spookiness abounds, rocks fall, everybody dies. Well one, maybe two people don't. I'm going to be honest with you I actually had a hard time paying attention, the movie was boring.

So after that riveting recap, here's some specific things that I didn't like about the movie.

• Characters were too gullible - They do a ritual to summon an entity, a week later their friend goes missing on a field trip and because she drew some weird drawings and there were videos on her computer showing Slender Man (which could have been faked, obviously) this means he's real? I mean, yes, in the universe where the movie takes place he is real but they see a video she took of herself in the dark being scared and then it cuts off after she screams and one of the girls goes, "It's him!" How did they know that for sure? I think only one of them didn't believe until weird stuff started happening to her.
  

• Pacing was too fast - While I don't want a super slow paced movie because this movie was already kind of meh, to me the characters learned things too quickly and it took away from the story. Its like the creators wanted to get through the movie as quickly as I did. Towards the end, Wren confesses to Hallie that she tried to sacrifice Hallie's sister to him to get him to leave them alone but he wants them regardless. This is all spilled out in a panic before his tentacles of doom crash through the window and take her away leaving Hallie to decide to give herself up as the last sacrifice to save her sister. Everything was just info dump after info dump. I honestly thought it would have been better if Wren didn't have the change of heart at the end and, instead, was just excitedly telling Hallie about how she fixed their problem. After more frantic research while her sister was in the hospital, Hallie could have come across something that would explain how her and Wren were marked for death by Slender Man and would die either way. Then the last sacrifice could have still happened with Hallie tricking Wren to go to the forest to kill them both.
  

• Didn't stick to the original mythos - I really don't want to be 'that guy' in this sense. I try not to rant about how so and so "ruined" the movie by not sticking to the comics or whatever analogy fits best. However, the Slender Man of the movie just seemed like some generic horror movie monster that happens to be tall and wear a suit with no face. Everything about how he works was oddly easy to find at your local library. No terminology from any of the stories was used that I can remember. I know they hit on the psychosis that he's supposed to spread in the movie, but that was about it I think. No questioning of what Slender Man actually is, no run ins with proxies of him, nothing. I do think that maybe the Alleekat person that was IM chatting with one of the girls and being all cryptic about contacting him was maybe supposed to be that, I don't know. It amounted to nothing in the movie though, and honestly the movie probably wouldn't have changed at all if they hadn't included those scenes. I did think it would have at least been a little interesting if any of the canon proxies' names were used for the person instead. Like a nice little shout out. Slender Man originated from creepy stories told on the internet on forums after a couple of the photoshopped pictures were made in a contest and took off from there. Some people think he's a tulpa, some a demon, others a bad hentai joke. It would have been better to have them learn about stuff through scary stories told on the internet and whispered facts by people that have dealt with him somehow and lived through it that they had tracked down. Make the characters question whether or not he's actually real; or maybe it's some screwed up ARG that they're being targeting by. Maybe they go with the tulpa idea and try not to think about him for a week only to find that it won't work. I think it's actually good sometimes when movies or other creators go a different route and create a new story based on existing stuff. Just make it interesting. Don't water it down.
  

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Now that we've talked about how much I disliked the movie, I did like a few things from it. Mainly visual effects.

There was a part in the library where he just appears from a shadow on the wall that widens quickly and he's standing there in front of one of the characters. I actually didn't expect it. It was pretty creepy and cool at the same time.

The whole sequence of events from the point where Hallie has some sort of vision in her bathroom mirror of tentacles coming out of her belly, which is distended all of a sudden, to the end of the hospital sequence with her sister. I liked all the hallucinations she was seeing. Some of them were quite abstract which was a welcome treat. There was a part where her sister grabs her and she has a vision of a woman in a bathtub she had seen earlier while walking down the hallway. The woman looks over her shoulder at her and has, what can only be described as, a scoop of her face missing. It was one of the things from the movie that made me audibly say 'what the fuck' but in a good way.

There were also some plays on light and shadow during the movie that I particularly liked. There's a scene where Wren is talking to Hallie after the library incident. She's trying to get her to read about how Slender Man can make people go insane and it goes from a closeup of their faces talking to just the silhouettes their faces make on the wall. I do think I might have liked the movie more if it went a more abstract or artistic way the whole film.

So there you have it. I give it two shadow people out of five. Watch it with the lights off it won't make a difference because it's just not scary.