Thinking About the Officially Happening ‘Slender Man’ Movie Only Makes It More Powerful
We’ve seen an odd spike recently in the entertainment industry’s mining of popular online creepypastas — strange, scary stories shared on sites like Reddit where young people congregate to try to frighten each other out of their wits. Syfy’s show Channel Zero is currently running its first season based on the popular creepypasta Candle Cove, which features, among other things, a monster made entirely from human teeth. Slender Man is probably the most popular of these stories: it’s gotten a video game, an HBO series, and now a movie, which will be directed by Sylvain White.
Deadline reports that Screen Gems will be producing the movie which has just signed White on to direct. White made his feature debut with the company with 2007’s Stomp the Yard about college step dancing (no, not that kind, the other kind). There’s no word about the plot yet, but it’d be safe to assume the Slender Man movie will revolve around a tall, scary-looking being with a white head that a bunch of kids encounter and can’t get away from. Screen Gems’ Slender Man is being planned as a “multi-platform” property, so we might expect to see a TV show or a new video game in the mix sometime soon.
The thing that makes Slender Man terrifying is that he or it is a tulpa, a being that derives its power from people thinking about it. If the thought of Slender Man enters your brain, just for a moment, he’s made real. And of course the things that scare us are the most difficult things to stop thinking about. Oddly, this is a detail that’s already been co-opted by this month’s The Bye Bye Man, another film about a tall, dark figure that shouldn’t be thought about. That probably won’t hurt Slender Man’s chances though, as he’s a figure much more ingrained into the millennial collective consciousness than some weird-looking dude in a hoodie. What will hurt it, maybe, is the fact that this movie comes about 6 or 7 years too late. Is Slender Man still as big a deal as it was in the early 2010s? Maybe we shouldn’t think about it too much.