Mark Reviews Movies: SLENDER MAN

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 10, 2018

Slender Man offers empty characters whose primary defining feature is that they have names, a story in which nothing really develops after its inciting incident, and a tendency to aurally and visually bludgeon the audience instead of trying to scare us. It's a big nothing of a tale, based on the eponymous internet character created by Victor Surge in 2009. After spreading online, the character has inspired plenty of fake photos and videos, a couple of video games, and, because at least two teenage girls bought into the preponderance of "evidence" online, an attempted murder in 2014.

David Birke's screenplay avoids any direct or even indirect reference to that particular crime. This is probably smart in terms of civil law and basic decency, although the movie's final narration almost sounds like a simultaneous attempt to distance the fictional mythology from any real-world activity and to further convince people that the myth of Slender Man is true. It's a strange combination—the open invitation to buy into this fake thing and a defensive stance against taking responsibility if, after accepting that invitation, anyone does anything harmful.

Putting aside the ugly consequences of such online junk going too far, the movie itself is as toothless as its villain, who is, by the way, faceless, too. For those who don't know about the phony myth of Slender Man, he's supposed to be a supernatural entity who lives in the woods, lures children to him, and either takes them away to some other realm or makes them go insane. He has no face, but he does wear a suit and possess hidden tentacle-like extensions that make him look like a twisted tree. In other words, it's about as generic as an urban legend can be.

That's about all the information that Birke's script supplies and, apparently, that the movie thinks it needs to make this entity frightening. To his credit, director Sylvain White knows better, and he choreographs a series of lengthy sequences that tease the inevitable appearance of Slender Man.

To the filmmaker's detriment, he stages all of these sequences in interchangeable and overly dark locales, while repeating the same suspense-building and fake-out techniques with little alteration between them. As for the actual scare attempts, White mostly believes that the best way to make this monster frightening is to blare loud noises whenever it appears.

The non-existent story involves a quartet of friends in high school who decide to summon Slender Man by watching an online video. Since these characters are mostly interchangeable, here are their names: Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles), Wren (Joey King, who, of the bunch, does the best job of being scared out of her wits, especially in her big scene in a dark library), Chloe (Jaz Sinclair), and Katie (Annalise Basso).

Katie disappears while on a class field trip, leaving the remaining three to suspect that Slender Man is real. They try to get the supernatural thing to return their friend by going into the woods to summon it yet again.

From there, the story alternates between re-explaining the Slender Man myth and putting one of these characters in some dark space, as their understanding of reality is warped by the thin monster's presence. Most of the time, these scenes are nightmares or visions, and at one point, there's a dream—of a tour of a haunted hospital—within a dream—of a person being possessed by Slender Man or something like that. The scene immediately following that is yet another trip through a dark place, and we actually wonder if White is trying to trick us with an absurd dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream scenario. No, it's simply that the movie has run out of story ideas, leaving us only with scare attempt after scare attempt.

The movie is so oppressively dark that—once one stops wondering if the bulb in the projector is dying—it almost seems as if White is trying for some kind of Expressionistic atheistic here. Shadows are layered upon and emerge from bigger shadows. The clawed hands and crooked tentacles of Slender Man provide unnaturally sharp angles to certain imagery. The characters are left so entranced by the monster's snares that the actors' faces are akin to unchanging, macabre paintings of terror.

Maybe, though, such thinking is giving the movie too much credit. After all, it's entirely possible that, like its shell of a screenplay, Slender Man is just a hollow, exploitative horror movie that mistakes darkness for atmosphere, deafening screeches for scares, and a bland villain as the epitome of evil. Yes, let's go with that option.

Buy Related Products