Slender Man Review: A 90-Minute Horror Montage

In a weird way, horror meme and internet urban legend Slender Man seems like one of the world's easiest genre movie pulls. After his 2009 "debut" on the SomethingAwful forums, he's garnered a pretty active, albeit niche, fanbase of internet residents who like their spooky photoshops and creepypasta stories on message boards and wikis. The premise itself is simple, too: A tall, faceless guy with a bunch of arms (sometimes) or tentacles (other times) who may or may not abduct children and who can "infect" people who think about him too hard. It's easy stuff, really, and low hanging fruit for anyone looking for a quick and easy monster movie.

However, despite the obviousness of the premise, it's taken nearly a decade for Slender Man to make the jump to the big screen with the eponymously named Slender Man, directed by Sylvain White (Stomp The Yard)--but it turns out the internet's favorite monster should have kept the home field advantage and stayed online.

Slender Man follows a cluster of teenage girls in a sleepy town trying to navigate their unremarkable high school lives while planning their escape to the very grass-is-greener world beyond graduation. There's Wren (Joey King), the consummate "bad girl" who has a vague interest in the occult and a prickly attitude; Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles), the track-and-field all star; Chloe (Jaz Sinclair), who is squarely in the "normal" category; and Katie (Annalisse Basso), who dreams of running away from her alcoholic dad. Their hobbies seem to be sneaking alcohol and bumming around in Katie's basement while her dad drinks himself into a stupor upstairs. They do some authentically teenage stuff together like watching weird videos online and trying to gross each other out--you know, the usual.

However, one night their routine is interrupted by a rumor. There's this video they've heard about, and supposedly, some of the boys at school are planning on watching it. If you watch it, you'll summon Slender Man to come and haunt you. If this is starting to sound a bit too much like The Ring, don't worry, it gets worse. Of course, the girls watch the video--a hacked together bunch of unsettling clips of random, eerie images--and then shortly after begin suffering its effects. Spoiler alert: The rumors were true, and now Slender Man is after them. This is a horror movie after all.

Things promptly start going off the rails from there. The Slender Man mythology as told by the internet is full of random, contradictory bits and pieces--the nature of an urban legend that's been built by committee--and you can absolutely feel the movie trying to wrestle with the myriad pieces of the puzzle while simultaneously attempting to put its own spin on the story. It's an admirable effort at times--there are some genuinely cool moments of tension where the girls try to initiate contact with Slender Man in the woods, or go online to start searching for help--but those ideas never really come to fruition.

What's left is a blurry and unfocused mess of seemingly random ideas. As the movie really starts to pick up and the girls start going missing, Wren becomes obsessed with energy fields (?) and the effect electromagnetic waves can have on a person's brain (??). Hallie starts hallucinating images that look like they were pulled from a roulette wheel of stereotypical horror tropes: really long hair, pregnant bellies, people without faces, endless hospital hallways--you name it. Slow motion and montage become less spooky and more obnoxious as the surreality of the situation gets kicked up to 11--dreams start overlapping with reality, images from the tape start popping up randomly, people start going crazy. There isn't much of a plot--the girls are terrorized, they try to fix things--and the rules are never clear. What does Slender Man want? No one knows. What does he do with people? Great question. What are his powers? We can't be sure. What's the deal with the video and why does it matter? Your guess is as good as mine.

That said: the movie does manage to wrangle a handful of semi-interesting scares. When it wants to, it pulls back on the throttle a bit and lets the ominous foreboding fear of being followed really work its magic. More than once, one of the girls sees visions of the Slender Man in broad daylight. There's a trick with shadows and one with smartphones that really does manage to evoke some genuine terror, if only briefly.

At the end of the day, Slender Man isn't unwatchable, but there are better ways to seek out your cheap, internet-based thrills. In fact, if Slender Man is really your jam, you might be better off sitting down to watch one of the many free YouTube found footage series he's inspired--they'll do better to scratch that itch and probably provide more genuine scares per second than this 90-minute montage.