The First Trailer For 'Slender Man' Snuck Up On Us This Morning
See what I did there with that headline? “SNUCK UP”? Do you get it? It’s because Slender Man sneaks up on you.
If you don’t remember what Slender Man is, let me refresh your memory real quick. He started as a Creepypasta character, which is basically a horror fanfic website, and he’s a guy with no face, long arms, long legs, sometimes a billion tentacle-like arms, and he abducts children and kills them. A horror video game was quickly created featuring Slender Man, and became WILDLY popular despite it’s simplicity due to reaction videos of people getting scared shitless from it.
At the height of Slender Man’s popularity, two 12-year-old girls held down another 12-year-old girl and stabbed her 19 times and left her for dead, attempting to murder her “to become proxies for Slender Man”. The victim crawled out of the woods they left her in and wound up surviving, and HBO did a documentary on the incident that’s a fucked up watch (obviously), but well made.
Now, four years removed from Slendermania, we’ve got this trailer for a movie coming out about the creep on May 18th (a week before ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’, ouch), and uhhhh…it’s certainly…edgy? I guess? On one hand, I thought the shot with Slender Man appearing while the girl was hiding behind the tree was really cool. On the other hand, I think everything else in the trailer was really try hard-y and a bit cringeworthy. They probably should’ve just released that 10 second clip as the teaser and everyone would’ve been more excited. This…
…is haunting!
The best part of the video game was how minimalistic it was. That’s what made it so terrifying. You’d hear nothing, then you’d hear a little static, then you turn around and he’s there. Game over, poop in your diaper.
Everyone’s pretty much in agreement that this movie should’ve copy/pasted ‘The Witch’, or even the ‘Blair Witch Project’ in tone/style. It should be a psychological thriller (possibly found footage) set during a camping trip among a few teenagers, not a commercial jump-scare-every-two-seconds throwaway flick. From the random girl stabbing herself in the face, the exorcism, and all of the “CLANG”-ing sound cues, my hopes aren’t necessarily the highest, but I’m still intrigued about the source material.
P.S. I will note that the closing shot of the trailer definitely feels like it’s going to be the ending of the movie, and if it is, I think that’ll be hilarious. The one thing this trailer really has going for it is not giving away any true plot details, so if it turns out they included a long, multi-angle clip of the final escape from Slender, that’ll be great.