Author: Andy L. Kubai / Source: ScreenRant
Urban legends don’t always translate well to the big screen, but Sony is betting on the rich, albeit brief, history of the contemporary horror meme, The Slender Man. The movie, produced by imprint Screen Gems will be the first major studio release to directly adapt a “creepypasta,” or stripped-down, digital scary story.
One of the best known and most controversial of the online tales, the Slender Man wound its tendrils into the deepest, insomniac message boards on the web, before expanding across our collective consciousness. The Slender Man mythology has now surpassed its humble origins, popularizing a new breed of online horror, and influencing mainstream film, TV, and video games. It has also impacted contemporary culture in some very painful ways.
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Now it’s getting the proper big screen treatment, it’s time to take a look back at how it all began. Turn off the lights, close the curtains, and learn the history and origins of Slender Man.
- This Page: How The Internet Created Slender Man
‘Creepypasta’ Gets Up Close and Personal
Much like the oral storytelling tradition or an urban legend, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of creepypastas – adaptable, sometimes collaborative horror fiction that gets its name from a verbal mashup of ‘creepy’ and ‘copypasta’ (which refers to viral, copy-and-pasted text blurbs). Aja Romano notes in The Daily Dot that the modern terror tales are derived from early, anonymous writers whose tales were dutifully plastered across the Usenet and in emails during the 1990s.
One of the recognized first creepypastas was “Ted the Caver” – which debuted in 2001 on an Angelfire site. The story consisted of a barebones narrative told from the perspective of a caver named Ted as he heads deeper into a cavern that grows progressively more disturbing.Since then, numerous, sometimes faceless storytellers have crafted fictions, often told as anecdotes from the first person and relating somewhat viable experiences in an easily reblogged or memed format. Their accounts usually reflect contemporary fears about inexplicable forces or technology gone awry. Much was the case for the Slender Man, although this particular creepypasta began life with a visual twist.
Enter the Slender Man
The lanky, malevolent force first reared its ugly head on the Something Awful forum in 2009. During a horror-based Photoshop contest, a user named “Victor Surge,” the pseudonym of Eric Knudsen, posted two otherwise innocuous pictures of kids with a creepy, faceless man in a suit-and-tie hovering in the background. He also added a text-based twist, captioning the first photo (see above):
“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.”
Knudsen claims he was inspired by Stephen King’s “The Mist,” H.P. Lovecraft, the video game Silent Hill, and the Tall Man from Don Coscarelli’s cult film, Phantasm (1979), with other possible influences stretching back to an eerie German folklore about Der Grossman (loosely, the Tall Man), among others. Knudsen’s fiction and photos caught the imagination of the forum readers, who added their own ideas and aspects to the eerie, child-kidnapping nightmare-fueling figure that dwells in desolate places.
And from there, the Slender Man only grew.
The Influence of The Slender Man
The Slender Man slowly became a folklore phenomenon, inspiring numerous retellings and other creepypastas. The pliant horror format also took hold in idea cauldrons like 4chan and Reddit, spreading across the web through forums, YouTube channels, websites, and wikis and encouraging countless adaptations of creepypastas across numerous media formats.
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