Slender Man Stalks The Big Screen This May
It had to happen eventually….Slender Man, the iconic representation of Internet creepypasta, is getting his own movie. Today the first trailer was released by Screen Gems and Sony, and broken by IGN.
Unlike most creepy campfire tales and urban legends, we know exactly where the Slender Man came from: a thread on the Something Awful forums where people were given a challenge to post perfectly normal photos and come up with scary stories behind them. A user who went by Eric Knudsen first proposed the idea that a tall and lanky figure could be suggested as hiding in one of the photos.
This led to the name Slender Man and the proliferation of the story all over the Net. Unfortunately not everyone could grasp that this was just a story, and Slender Man wound up causing a real murder in 2014 when two mentally ill teens who shared an obsession with him thought he demanded a “sacrifice.”
Now Slender Man is a movie, and like the original photos, you don’t see much of him in this trailer beyond the occasional distant shadow. What you do get are typical horror movie trailer tropes — scared and screaming teenagers, with brief flashes of creepy stuff. Time will tell if the actual picture is less run of the mill. Slender Man opens May 18.