Movie Review: 'Slender Man' Horror in Truly Bad Taste

As soon as Slender Man cropped up in cinemas in 2018 I was told that I was mistaken for accusing the movie of utilizing the attempted homicide of a young girl to sell the movie. This was when I reviewed the movie on the radio. A fan said that it wasn't consequential by virtue of the story of the movie Slender Man not being the same as the real life tragedy. The action of the film casts the Slender Man as another in a long line vaguely ill-defined supernatural villains such as The Bye Bye Man or whatever the creature was in the Sinister franchise.

That doesn't hinder me withal, from again accusing the creators of Slender Man of being sleazy and exploitative. In 2014 a pair of girls from Waukesha, Wisconsin repeatedly stabbed a 12 year old friend and left her for dead. The girl lived through this and when the two girls were asked why they stabbed their friend, they stated that the fictional character, Slender Man, had made them.

The film Slender Man does not tell that story but without that near murder in Wisconsin, Slender Man the fictional movie doesn't get made. Yes, I admit, Slender Man was a bit of an internet phenomenon but it was Waukesha, Wisconsin that made Slender Man a well known entity. Before the attempted murder in Waukesha brought the name brand recognition of Slender Man to the masses, movie producers weren't interested.

But with a controversy to exploit and a genre audience that forgives a great deal for their supposed scares, Slender Man got made into an assembly line, machine tooled horror movie complete with a star bad guy with name recognition that could stand him alongside the stars of the horror genre. Slender Man may not be Freddy Kruger but with enough market muscle behind him, and a real life tragedy to exploit, perhaps he could be a hit like The Strangers was a hit, low budget and low ambition.

Low is the operative word for every aspect of Slender Man. Low ambition, low art, low expectations, though not low enough for the film to reach beyond what you expect from such a by the numbers bit of horror nonsense. It worked, they rode their low ambitions and tragedy exploiting title to a significant profit that will no doubt lead to a sequel down the road, as long as they can keep the budget as low as the spineless original.

Slender Man tells the story of four friends who get bored and decide to conjure the legend of the Slender Man, a faceless, suited menace with long arms, legs and spindly fingers. It is said that if you look directly at Slender Man he could drive you completely mad and naturally, that ends up happening here. One of our four female leads opens an eye during their conjuring and disappears into the forest not long after.

The three remaining friends set about calling on Slender Man to help them bring back their friend and naturally this leads to another of these tiny brained teens to open her eyes and begin to go mad. Eventually it is determined that Slender Man is bent on killing on anyone who calls him forward and that looking at him, I guess, doesn’t matter. He sets after each of the girls and bumps them off in a family friendly, PG-13, fashion, in case you weren’t already painfully aware that Slender Man was merely a mass market product.

Even if they hadn’t used a real life tragedy as marketing for the movie, Slender Man would still be terrible. The performances are a bore with even the radiant Jamie King coming off muted and bored. The characters have no forward momentum of their own, they are simply made to wait impatiently for Slender Man to come and wait for him to finish them off. Does he do that? I think so, his plan appears to have something to do with turning his victims into tree bark and that got rather confounding late in the movie.

I loathe Slender Man both for it’s ugly exploitation of a tragic near murder and for being one of the lamest examples of dim-witted, mass marketed, product in recent times. Screen Gems are the soulless, corporate, monsters that adapted the character of the Slender Man in order to capitalize on a real life tragedy to launch a new 'Freddy' or 'Jason.' It's unclear whether they succeeded. Thus far, sequel talk has been muted based off of mediocre box office to match the sub-mediocre movie.

In case you still question just how in poor taste Slender Man was upon release in 2018, the producers decided not to release the movie in or near Waukesha, Wisconsin, likely because they knew exactly how gross and exploitative their film was. The father of the Waukesha girl who nearly died said this upon the release of Slender Man, "It's absurd they want to make a movie like this. It's popularizing a tragedy is what it's doing. I'm not surprised, but in my opinion it's extremely distasteful. All we're doing is extending the pain all three of these families have gone through." Hollywood is often of low taste but Slender Man, even two years later, as I write this, has still left behind a bad taste.