Hundreds of thousands click on YouTube videos based on the character. He crops up on blogs in graphic art and fan fiction. Every depiction riffs on the central characteristic of the black suit and blank face.
And the thinness. The Slender Man meme began in June when a competition on the comedy web forum Something Awful asked for ideas for a modern myth with which to terrify people. One contributor, Eric Knudsen, using the pseudonym Victor Surge, responded by posting two faked photographs, purportedly from the mids, showing a tall, sinister figure lurking behind groups of children.
Knudsen attached some vague text suggesting 14 young people and the photographer had gone missing. From the very beginning it was intended to be a meme - in the original sense of a replicating idea. Knudsen's fragmented post prompted a creative outburst. Eventually thousands of people were making drawings and writing stories.
Slender Man has appeared in video games, while Marble Hornets, the YouTube series featuring stories about him, is followed by more than half a million people. One academic has described his development as an "open-sourcing of storytelling".
It became a phenomenon that I don't think anybody could have predicted," says Jeff Tolbert, a folklorist from Indiana University, who has written about Slender Man. The character almost seems to be an amalgam of knowing winks to both internet and pre-internet culture.
Like folk villains over the centuries, from the Big Bad Wolf to the Headless Horseman, Slender Man is often depicted standing in the woods. His tentacles conjure up fleeting hints of HP Lovecraft's world of interdimensional monsters in ordinary settings.
But all those could of course be coincidental. Fans of the character can hold strong views about the way it should be used. Other users didn't like that idea. It was too obvious. It lacked subtlety. They were simple black-and-white photos of children playing. But in the background, something was something off: there was a long figure in a black suit.
In some, you could see tentacles. Almost immediately, the idea of what was called the Slender Man took on a life of its own. People began creating images and stories.
At first, it was just anecdotes about children disappearing and creepy black-and-white photos. Then, the meme exploded. Others began contributing stories, making up historical and sometimes ancient sightings, and attempting their own photos. Launched in a thread about creepy Photoshops, Slender Man quickly became the star of the thread.
His popularity soon grew too big for the one forum, so fans moved to YouTube. Marble Hornets , a web series and the most well-known of early Slender Man fan contributions, posted its first video 10 days after Knudsen posted the first Slender Man images on Something Awful, and it ran for the next five years on YouTube. To this day, the channel still has almost , subscribers, up from the roughly , it had in Other creators followed suit. Plenty of memes and Creepypastas have survived past the initial obsession phase — the SCP Foundation , Search and Rescue Woods , and Candle Cove , to name a few — capturing the imaginations of readers in a major way.
At its peak, Slender Man was popular enough that anyone on the internet and under a certain age probably had some clue who the character was. Those who were around during the height of the Slender Man fandom, around , describe waiting on new ARG entries or blog posts like they were presents on Christmas morning.
Back on the original Something Awful thread, Slender Man was new and familiar but vague. Where did he come from? What were his motivations? What happened to the people in the photos who disappeared?
Why did he wear a suit? There were so many questions, so any contribution, narrative or visual, had the potential to expand the myth. The ideas fans spitballed in a forum were becoming part of the story, and people could watch it happen in real time. Each subsequent fan creator could use and build on what was already there. The Slender Man myth — his history, customs, most recent deeds, proxies — was quickly established.
He began as a couple Photoshopped images and a handful of sentences. The aspect I was most familiar with of The Slender Man was the circle with the x through it. My bud would draw circles with xs through them all over the place leaving them for other kids to bumble across.
He definitely did not truly believe in the legend, but he certainly loved hyping it up. If I recall correctly, the circle with the x through it was meant to conjure the mental image of The Slender Man, and when this occurred, he would supposedly manifest near you for the purpose of murder. There were some people who had techniques like eat sugary foods, get salt, and move your whole life to escape him.
Its interesting to me because I always thought slender man was an actual person but its more of a dark presence or demon. The internet does have a profound power over the lives of young children, and its become a unit for strengthening beliefs by connecting believers. I think the idea of Slender Man is kind of like any other horror story that is passed around in schools.
I remember that when people were into Slender Man, they thought it made them edgy or cool to worship him or to even like him. I remember a lot of girls even romanticized the idea of being with Slender Man which I think its odd.
I think teens are just more being influenced by being part of the hype to like whatever is popular at the moment. However, I do agree that children are more likely to believe these stories just like we talked about the Momo challenge in class.
This was an interesting topic for your blog post! Slender Man seemed to me like the BoogieMan or something of that sort. Because who he is changes so much depending on who is telling stories about him, it seems as if it is more of something you tell children. I think if you are a believer this character can be very scary. The evidence does not seem to back up his existence so I would hope people eventually can be calm about him not existing or harming them. I have never heard of him so I thought this was an interesting post to read!!
Hi, The first time I ever heard about Slender Man is from a animate music video. And then I know there are whole storyline center as the Slender Man, and more serial killers characters. I guess part of the reason why people would like this theme is to show their respect to the unknown? The fact that it gained such popularity and made it onto the big screen just this past year blows my mind.
The other thing that really caught my eye was when you described groupthink as possibly being a key component to why the myth of slender man has sustained thus far. I liked this addition to your post because I really do believe that groupthink has such a powerful affect on the human mind and our behavior. In my mind, I think the emotion of fear halts peoples actual stances on beliefs because they are afraid that if they DO in fact think differently, then they will somehow be banished from their group.
Thank you for your post! Slenderman is very interesting — it originated online, was hyped online, gained a mythos online, and then became so popular and entrenched that history was built around it to justify the belief that it existed in the past.
It reminds me somewhat of the marketing for the film The Blair Witch Project in late 90s — the internet was so young that the filmmakers were able to make a large quantity of people believe that the Blair Witch was a figure of folklore for decades prior to the film through a documentary that aired on television and that the film was real and essentially snuff. Had Slenderman occurred 20 or so years earlier, perhaps a similar amount of widespread fear and cultural apprehension could have resulted.
On the same token, Blair Witch likely would have failed in convincing consumers of its validity were it to debut today. One thing that I have always found interesting about slender man is his simplicity.
I think this is one of the things that makes him so scary. Because he is so simple there is a lot of room for imagination and people can craft him in a way that makes him extra scary to them. The first time I heard about Slender Man was when I was about 8 years-old and my cousins were having a bonfire. I was scared of it for the longest time and I truly was a follower in the theory behind it because I was so young. Is there something special about Slender Man that makes him particularly appealing to conspiracy theorists?
What do you think? Slender man to me is so spooky. My friend and I would play the slender man game in the dark on our laptops and we would always get so scared playing it.
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