The Slender Man
The Internet's Monster...
You should have known this one was coming. The Slender Man holds a very special place in my heart. I mean, he holds a special place in my degrees, and in my brain. He’s one of the most fascinating monsters to pop up in the last two decades, and today we’ll poke only a tiny bit into the why.
This month, we’re doing a monster study in honour of Spooky Season. Our first post was a review of the meaning of monsters, and today marks the first of the analysis of a specific monster. I thought it would be a travesty to let a whole month on the subject go and not ever touch on the Slender Man - my perfect little monster.
So, without further ado, let’s get into just why this monster is so wonderful, and what the Slender Man actually means.
The Something Awful Forums - The Origins of a Monster
The Slender Man is a uniquely online monster, the kind of creature that could only come to being in the contemporary world of digital discourse and virtual lives. He appeared, first, on the Something Awful Forums, a website which used to hold a big spot in the early online world, right alongside 4chan. In 2009, a thread appeared asking for advice or discussions on how to create paranormal images. What started as a discussion thread on how to properly distort jpgs and what kinds of compositions to look for, started to take a turn when a user with the tag Victor Surge posted two images of a creature he called “the Slender Man”.
The thread spun out of control, the posts all starting to be about the Slender Man, various posters and creators throwing together images or stories which, now, are a struggle to even find - digital relics lost to the sea of virtual time. Soon, the forum thread became a digital campfire where users swapped harrowing tales and eerie images of the Slender man.
The stories all had a certain level of truth claim to them. The beginning of the thread’s intentions to be about creating fool-able paranormal images kept true to the stories which began to spread. Images kept popping up of an ominous dark figure lingering in the background, or German woodcuts where his strange form was there.
There were also written accounts. Personal tales were users recounted their horrific encounters. But also documents, news reports, snippets from academic texts, copies of classified emails, and other formats began to pop up. These stories used their forms to mimic the same idea of the photoshopped images: stories written in a way which utilised a formatting of proof.
Beyond the Something Awful forums, the story spread throughout the internet. The YouTube series Marble Hornets took a Blair Witch-style pseudo-documentary approach. Simultaneously, a blog series called Just Another Fool also played on the Slender Man’s fear. A video game, called Slender: the Eight Pages, appeared after a few years. It was a short game in which the player had to collect eight pages scrawled with strange writing echoing a similar style of writing of victims in Marble Hornets.
The Slender Man
The Slender Man is, arguable, one of the most popular creepypastas - horror stories online which are written with the intention of being shared. The Slender man’s prolific nature is somewhat due to his malleable nature. He has become an icon of creepypasta and horror storytelling in the digital age.
From a distance, he appears as a very thin, very tall man wearing a suit. When you get closer, though, things start to change. His height is inhumanly extraordinary. His suit sometimes stretches strangely, as if it isn’t a suit, but rather a second skin. At times, he has appendages which sprout from his back - appendages which sometimes appear as branches, sometimes like insect legs, and sometimes like strange black tentacles. His face shifts as well, sometimes lacking all features, and other times just a glowing pair of white eyes.
He is a menace, particularly to children. He often makes them disappear, though violence here is rarely directly mentioned. When violence is displayed, it’s reserved for adults. His methods of attach shifts as much as his appearance. In some narratives, he attacks by impaling people on tree branches, while others show his victims disembowelled. Sometimes, the Slender man is able to change a person’s mind to work for him, as an almost mindless actor called a proxy.
If there is anything specific and clear about the Slender Man, it’s that there is nothing specific or clear about the Slender Man. The multitude of “ifs” and “sometimes” necessary for any description demonstrates the sheer multitude of narrative which surrounds his creation and continued re-tellings. The monster spun out of the control of the audience while also staying firmly in their hands. He both refuses ownership while also allowing many to own him at once. Each contribution was just one drop in the larger horrific bucket of the Slender Man. It’s one story in an expanded mythos.
As Something Awful forum user “rinski” wrote:
But there is no person – not the people making photoshops, not his original creator, and not the guys making the Marble Hornets videos – who is solely in charge of his story anymore. He’s growing organically from our combined feedback and contributions. He’s the larger organism and we are his cells. We’re simultaneously in control and not in control. For all intents and purposes, the Slender Man is a living entity.
The Slender Man’s Meaning
This shows just how much the Slender Man was born through mass communal storytelling. His form, his nature, his actions, these were all constructed through many people all spinning their own creativity into a variety of tales all the same time. Like many creepypastas and memes - particularly in the earlier days of the internet before being an influencer was even a thing - authorship was granted to a collective rather than an individual. This meant that the inconsistencies was marked as canon, no one writer or creator was presented as more authoritative or somehow above the others. Creativity was king, crowned through an encouragement to share and be shared. By allowing each writer or artist’s view of the Slender Man to stand as authoritative and accurate, the Slender man himself shifted in understanding to one which is, in effect, constantly changing. The result is a monster whose shifting nature becomes a consistency. As another Something Awful forum user wrote: “You don’t understand. You don’t understand! He’s not transforming or coming out of his shell. What we see is changing as we’re exposed to something we should never see.”
In a lot of horror storytelling online, both on the Something Awful forums and where the narrative spread, in-character storytelling became an important part of the Slender Man. It extends far beyond him - writers and posters engaging in a kind of horror kayfabe. Users would assert a truth and veracity to their narratives which everyone involved knew wasn’t the case. This has continued to more contemporary forms of this online, for example the subreddit No Sleep, where a rule for posting and commenting is that “everything is true here even if it isn’t.”
These types of in-character storytelling followed Marble Hornets’ Blair Witch style in the form of writing. Like an epistolary novel, writers used their various documents - emails, photographs, court filings, newspaper reports - and shared these finds with the community. Others would interact with these in a similar fashion, reacting and writing about these stories with feigned belief in truth in narrative. The kayfabe, the play with belief, is all so important.
And this is where the Slender Man really shines. He exists in the questions, the lingering changes, the constant alterations to a narrative. He thrives in the place where the real meets the fictional, where the boundary between these two worlds both collapses and thrives at the same time. It’s where there is no author, and yet there are so many authors.
He likes complication. He likes highlighting the community over the individual. He likes living in the grey, the strange, the uncomfortable. He plays with authority and reality. He questions what is real, on a platform which always leaves us questioning. His form signals all the authority he has stripped from us.
In many ways, the Slender Man is the Internet. And maybe that’s what’s so terrifying.