One of the original photos of the Slender Man, created on the Something Awful forums.

The Slender Man (also known as Slender Man or Slenderman) is a fictional character that originated as an Internet meme created by user Victor Surge on the Something Awful forums in 2009. It is depicted as resembling a thin, unnaturally tall man with a blank and featureless face, and wearing a black suit. The Slender Man is commonly said to stalk, abduct, or traumatize people, particularly children.^[1]

Origin

The Slender Man was created in a contest launched on the Something Awful forums on June 8, 2009, with the goal of editing photographs to contain supernatural entities. On June 10, a forum poster with the user name "Victor Surge" contributed two black and white images of groups of children, to which he added a tall, thin spectral figure wearing a black suit.^[2][3] Previous entries had consisted solely of photographs; however, Surge supplemented his submission with snatches of text, supposedly from witnesses, describing the abductions of the groups of children, and giving the character the name, "The Slender Man":

We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time… 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.

One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. 1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.^[3]

These additions effectively transformed the photographs into a work of fiction. Subsequent posters expanded upon the character, adding their own visual or textual contributions.^[3][2]

Development

The Slender Man soon went viral, spawning numerous works of fanart, cosplay and online fiction known as "creepypasta"; scary stories told in short snatches of easily copyable text that spread from site to site.^[4] The first video series involving the Slender Man evolved from a post on the Something Awful thread by user "ce gars". It tells of a fictional film school friend named Alex Kralie, who had stumbled upon something troubling while shooting his first feature-length project, Marble Hornets. The video series, published in found footage style on YouTube, forms an alternate reality game describing the filmers' fictional experiences with the Slender Man.^[1][5] Marble Hornets is now one of the most popular Slender Man creations, with over 250,000 followers around the world, and 55 million views.^[6] The creator of the sandbox indie game Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson, added a new hostile mob to the game in 2011, which was named the "Enderman" when multiple users on Reddit and Google+ commented on the similarity to the Slender Man.^[7] In 2012, the Slender Man was adapted into a video game titled Slender: The Eight Pages; as of August, 2012, the game has been downloaded over 2 million times.^[8] Several popular variants of the game followed, including Slenderman's Shadow^[9] and Slender Man for iOS, which became the second most-popular app download.^[10] Several independent films about the Slender Man have been released or are in development, including Entity^[11] and The Slender Man, released free online after a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign.^[12] In 2013, it was announced that Marble Hornets would become a theatrical film.^[6]

Description

The Slender Man is described as very tall and thin with unnaturally long arms, often ending in tentacles. It has a pale featureless head and appears to be wearing a dark suit. The Slender Man is associated with the forest and has the ability to teleport.^[13][14]

Reaction

The Slender Man was called "the first great myth of the web" by BBC.^[13] The success of the Slender Man legend has been ascribed to the connective nature of the Internet. While nearly everyone involved understands that the Slender Man is not real, the Internet allows others to build on the established tropes, and thus lend an air of authenticity to the character.^[3] Victor Surge has commented that many people, despite understanding that the Slender Man was created on the Something Awful forums, still entertain the possibility that it might be real.^[13] Professor Tom Peddit of the University of Southern Denmark has described Slender Man as being an exemplar of the modern age's closing of the "Gutenberg Parenthesis"; the time period from the invention of the printing press to the spread of the web in which stories and information were codified in discrete media, to a return to the older, more primal forms of storytelling, exemplified by oral tradition and campfire tales, in which the same story can be retold, reinterpreted and recast by different tellers, expanding and evolving with time.^[13] Shira Chess has noted that the Slender Man exemplifies the similarities between traditional folklore and the open source ethos of the Internet, and that, unlike those of traditional monsters such as vampires and werewolves, the Slender Man's mythos can be tracked and signposted, giving a powerful insight into how myth and folklore form.^[2] Tye Van Horn, a writer for The Elm, has suggested that the Slender Man represents modern fear of the unknown; in an age flooded with information people have become so inured to ignorance that they now fear what they cannot understand.^[15] Troy Wagner, the creator of Marble Hornets, ascribes the terror of the Slender Man to its malleability; people can shape it into whatever frightens them most.^[13]

See also

• Urban legend
• Fakelore
• Bogeyman
• Men in Black
• Silence, a fictional "religious order or movement" of an unnamed alien race in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who
• "Hush," an episode of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

References

External links

• Something Awful forum thread where the Slender Man was created