![]() ![]() The 2012 video game The Eight Pages cemented Slender Man’s natural habitat as a deep, dark forest, straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Like any good and properly bustling canon, it has agreed-upon classics and lesser works: The Marble Hornets YouTube series, uploaded only a few weeks after the original Something Awful post, furnished the Slender Mythos with a few of its most enduring tropes, including the idea that Slender Man creates distortion in electronic equipment wherever he appears. (The term the posters use is “The Mythos,” with a capital M.) The stories, the fan art, the YouTube clips - they all serve to enrich or attach themselves to The Mythos. What grew out of all this feverish creative energy was a sort of Slender Man canon. The Slender Man, maybe, had always been with us. The idea was to suggest that Slender Man wasn’t just one message-board poster’s great idea, but was in fact the latest manifestation of a ghoulish fairy tale dating from antiquity. ![]() ![]() In one Creepypasta story, a German boy named Lars from the 18th century is taken from his home. Posters Photoshopped images of Slender Man onto ancient German woodcuts. As the stories snowballed, his character became more ominous. Someone introduced him as a character in Minecraft. Creepypasta, the fanfiction horror website, published countless stories about Slender Man. He became become the subject of e-books, web series, YouTube clips, video games, fan art. But good stories have a way of breaking their imprisonments, and soon Slender Man stepped a long, mantis leg over the border and began spreading his tentacles into nearly every corner of the internet imagination. Perhaps he influenced them to do terrible things on his behalf.Īt first, making up Slender Man stories was the exclusive pastime of the paywall-protected Something Awful message board. Who was he? What did he want? He preyed on children, or he kidnapped them or lured them away. The Slender Man’s appeal was so fascinatingly ambiguous that message-board members piled on eagerly, elaborating on his backstory. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man.’” One poster marveled, “This is going to give me nightmares.” In a bit of morbid flair, he captioned it, “We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified us and comforted us at the same time…” (He added “1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.”) The second showed the same distant figure behind a playground, captioned, “One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. In the first, he added a blurry, ominous figure, tall and sticklike, behind a group of children. The pictures were his entries in a contest called “Create Paranormal Images,” held in part to see who could come up with the the most evocative and disturbing fake photo. In June 2009, Eric Knudsen uploaded two Photoshopped pictures to a web forum called Something Awful. ![]()
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