What Happened To Slender Man? Tracing The Internet’s Most Famous Bogeyman

Last week, a new documentary called Beware the Slenderman opened at SXSW, the Texan arts and music festival.

The HBO film follows the origins of Slender Man, and story of the two 12-year-old-girls who stabbed a friend because the internet’s most famous fictional bogeyman “told them to do it”.

To some, he has become an instantly identifiable presence – a tall, thin, ghostly figure, usually pictured in black suit – but who exactly is Slender Man?

The headlines
Like many memes, Slender Man has become a part of everyday parlance for those who live their lives by the internet, and strangely esoteric to those who don’t.

For most people, the first time they became aware of the name was following the attempted murder of a 12-year-old girl in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Her classmates, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, both also 12 (see below), had lured her into the woods, stabbed her 19 times, and then set out on a journey to meet the Slender Man, who they believed wanted them to do it. Miraculously, the victim, left for dead, survived and has since made a strong recovery.

The film concerns itself with the stories of Geyser and Weier, the origins of Slender Man, and the wider influence the web’s darkest corners are having on the minds of its young users.

Slender Man’s origins
The moral panic that followed after the incident will seem strange to anyone familiar to Slender Man’s origins. Created in 2009 on the Something Awful forums in a lighthearted “paranormal pictures” Photoshop competition, the character quickly took on a life of his own. Just days after Eric Knudsen (who posted as ‘Victor Surge’) coined the phrase and its haunting image – which has been fairly consistent – a YouTube channel (Marble Hornets) was set up to continue the story.

Eric Knudsen original Slender Man picture (Eric Knudsen)

Knudsen had attributed quotes to “unknown photographers” from the 1800s (“its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…”) to create the myth, and Marble Hornets (set up by Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage) continued this by using found footage, giving it a spooky realness.

Knudsen later told WNYC’s On The Media, he wanted to create “a creature that causes general unease and terror.” It was clever and genuinely eerie, and the character took off. Referenced in Minecraft, it also generated video games of his own in Slender: The Eight Pages and Slender: The Arrival (pictured above main). In these games, it truly found its format, providing a suitably terrifying, shadowy bad guy. He has even popped up on television, inspiring characters in Lost Girl and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is rumoured to be a major influence in the upcoming sixth series of American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy’s widely successful anthology horror series.

A still from the Marble Hornets videos (YouTube/Marble Hornets)

Slender Man comes to life
Somewhere along the way, however, some people began to believe Slender Man was real – despite its clearly fictional and easily traceable origins. Aaron Sagers, a TV personality and expert on paranormal culture, has described a “significantly increasing amount” of people believing in him, contributing to an idea that he had existed far before he appeared on a forum.

Of course, outside of anecdotal evidence, it’s almost impossible to gauge how many people actually believe in his existence, but it’s clear some young, impressionable teens do.

What’s curious is Slender Man is both a very modern and ancient phenomenon rolled into one. His image – the looming, shadowy presence, even the black suit – follow a long history of bogeyman creations (Knudsen stated he was influenced by legends of ‘shadow people’ and the writings of HP Lovecraft). Indeed, Slender Man isn’t a million miles from the Grim Reaper, the Tall Man from the Phantasm film series (which Knudsen says he was based on) or even the Child Catcher.

The Slender Man has become a feature of popular culture (Terry Robinson/Flickr)

A darker influence
It’s clear that the Slender Man has permeated popular culture in a way that would only possible in the internet era (appearing in several different formats very quickly). But the name has also become attached to several tragedies. On top of the Wisconsin case, a woman from Cincinnati, Ohio is reported to have been attacked by her 13-year-old daughter who had been writing fiction about Slender Man, while a 14-year-old girl in Port Richey, Florida, allegedly set her family’s house on fire while her mother and nine-year-old brother were inside after being influenced by the character.

A number of suicides, too, have been linked, particular those at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. At least one of four teenagers who committed suicide there between 2014 and 2015 was influenced by the tale, although, as the New York Times points out, some Native Americans believe in a “suicide spirit”, which is somewhat similar to Slender Man.

But, in that sense, Slender Man is no different to any other sub-culture obsession that has been brought into the mainstream after being blamed for a violent crime and used a scapegoat. Director of Beware The Slenderman, Irene Taylor Brodsky, has said her film is not there to point the finger at the internet, which “is not the enemy,” but to look at how easy it is to fall down the web’s rabbit hole.

“What is happening is it’s this perfect storm of the developing brain and this visceral, dynamic impression that everything we find on the internet has on us,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s the combination of their age and the fact that Slender Man is a really good idea. But it’s not just children — how many times have you f***** around on Facebook or wherever and then you feel gross afterwards? ‘I can’t believe I just wasted an hour on that.’

“I don’t think that we can enact laws but there are sensibilities that we can develop that will help us deflect these negative things in the future,” she said.

One of the most bizarre features of the entire story, which is touched upon in the film, is that Weier and Geyser have themselves become ‘memes’, the subjects of endless fascination and speculation on the internet. There’s even been fan fiction written about them. In a sense, it proves this to be a very modern – and circular – tale.

(Main credit: still from Slender: The Eight Pages)

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