“Slender Man”, the film directed by Sylvain White in 2018, has just landed on Netflix. The opportunity for us to tell you the terrible true story behind this contemporary myth.
Slender man the film
In 2019, Sylvain White, who notably staged Remember … last summer 3, The Losers and many episodes of series like CSI: Miami, Mentalist, Hawaii Five-0 or The lethal Weapon, embarks on the realization of Slender man. Worn by a young cast (Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalize Basso), the film is released directly on VOD on French territory. Slender man is then a huge critical failure and only reports $ 51 million at the box office (which is nevertheless enough to make his budget of 10 million dollars profitable).
If we are talking about it today, it is because the feature film has just landed on Netflix. And if Slender man is overall a turnip, the true story behind the myth is terrifying.
Rising popularity
Slender man is one of the most recent horror figures in pop culture. His origin only dates back to 2009, when Victor Surge creates the meme of a faceless man, tall, slender, slender, dressed in a suit, with excessively long arms. According to interpretations of the myth, the monster can cause memory loss, insomnia, paranoia and can teleport wherever it sees fit. Its purpose is to hypnotize children and his followers must kill someone to show their devotion.
Very quickly, the Slender Man makes the buzz on the internet, and is used in many fictional works, further increasing its popularity. Today it is considered one of the most famous horror stories on the internet. While Victor Surge posts the first image of the Slender Man on the internet, which started out as a joke, takes on a surprisingly creepy turn. Very quickly, false testimonies, documents and fake photographs multiplied on the web to prove the existence of the creature, bringing grain to this legend.
Very quickly, the character appears in many works of all kinds. In 2009, a web series called Marble Hornets released on YouTube. In 2012, the Slender Man became the hero of his own video game: Slender: The Eight Pages published by Parsec Production. Its success resulted in the production of a sequel in 2013: Slender: The Arrival. From that moment on, the Slender Man is derived through a dozen video games on different platforms like Xbox, Playstation and PC. Since, Slender Man is quoted almost everywhere, whether in episodes of Doctor who, of supernatural, ofCriminal minds, and even in More beautiful life.
The tragic story behind the myth
Unfortunately, the Slender Man was the source of a terrible drama. In 2014, May 31 to be exact, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, two 12-year-old girls carried out an attempted murder in the name of the creature. Indeed, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser have stabbed poor Payton Leutner 19 times, supposed to be their best friend. It all starts when the three young girls get together to celebrate Morgan’s birthday. Peyton, who did not succumb to his injuries, recounted that in a public toilet in a park, Anissa tried to knock him out. Then they took her into the woods to try to kill her.
The two torturers then explained to the police acting at the request of the Slender Man. The latter would have forced them to take action, threatening to kill their family if they refused. On February 1, 2018, the two teenage girls were sentenced to 25 and 40 years of confinement in a psychiatric hospital. A documentary, titled Beware the Slenderman, produced by HBO in 2016, traces this sordid history …
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