![]() Much of Beware the Slenderman’s most affecting scenes are taken directly from interrogation videos the day of the crime, in which the two girls confess to the crime without hesitation in the same breath as discussing Slender Man with all the certainty of a person looking outside and describing the weather. The attachment of her friend only reinforced the reality of the illusion for them both. When Anissa introduced the unstable and suggestible Morgan to the Slender Man story, her delusions were given a shape-dark and faceless and violent. Lonely and friendless at a new school, Anissa’s more or less sole companion was Morgan, who was suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia inherited from a father frightened to tell his daughter of the fate he thought awaited her far into the future. ![]() In paring away the question of the external figure at fault for Slender Man’s infection of Morgan and Anissa’s minds, Brodsky is able to focus on the factors unique to the girls themselves. The Marble Hornets filmmakers in particular, whose aesthetic and actual work alike are utilized quite liberally throughout the film, get especially short shrift.īut the choice may well have been deliberate. Brodsky’s history of Slender Man is painted in broad strokes indeed, citing Knudsen’s creation of the character but then largely treating its subsequent development as authorless. This paradox is central to Beware the Slenderman, filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky’s HBO documentary about the girls, the crime, and the creature. But at root, Slender Man exists independently of all of them, spreading as an internet meme the way myths and folktales spread by word of mouth. The individual contributors to the Slender Man legend can, and should, receive credit for their labor. Each shared certain elements-the basic look and feel of the character, its tendency to both prey on and attract children, its liminal status on the border between fact and fiction, a la the videotape from The Ring or cryptids like Mothman and Bigfoot.īut there’s no one author who told his story, no one artist who depicted every aspect of his myth. As Dave Gonzales demonstrates in his excellent Thrillist article on the history of the character, you can point to individual standouts amid this vast sea of Slender Man media: Knudsen’s original photoshops and their follow-ups the genuinely frightening and innovative web series Marble Hornets from student filmmakers Joseph DeLage and Troy Wagner the jump-scare video game Slender: The Eight Pages by programmer Mark Hadley the spinoff character Ticci-Toby, a human “proxy” for Slender Man in the vein of Renfield’s relationship to Count Dracula, created by a pseudonymous DeviantArt user called Kastoway. The evocative images Knudsen created spawned an entire industry of fan art, fiction, and films across a host of websites and social networks: YouTube, Tumblr, DeviantArt, the Creepypasta Wiki (a user-generated database of modern-day scary stories to tell in the dark), a wide variety of Something Awful–style forums and message boards. ![]() Initially created by Eric Knudsen as part of a photoshop contest to craft realistic-looking paranormal images on the Something Awful internet forum, Slender Man slipped from the grasp of his originator as easily as he can allegedly travel between his dimension and our own. But the slipperiness of motive is appropriate. Their reasoning behind this was fuzzy and overlapping: Payton’s death would prove their worthiness to serve as Slender Man’s human “proxies,” it would prove the existence of Slender Man himself, it would protect their families from being killed in Payton’s stead. ![]() Fascinated by the fictional stories, pictures, and videos of the creature they encountered online, the girls-immersed in a folie à deux reminiscent of the true crime behind Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures and any number of other lethal pairings-decided to murder their friend. They were inspired to kill by a creature called Slender Man-a tall, faceless entity in a black suit and tie who’s part urban legend, part modern fairy-tale monster, part J-horror/David Lynch knockoff. The pair, who were 12 years old themselves at the time of the stabbing, currently await trial as adults for the crime.Īsk the girls themselves, however, and they’d cite an imaginary being as an unindicted co-conspirator. The Wisconsin 12-year-old was stabbed 19 times by her friend Morgan Geyser, in collusion with her other friend Anissa Weier. Who’s to blame for the horrible thing that happened Payton Leutner? On one level at least, the question is easy to answer, and that answer is not in dispute.
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