Film
Slender Man
- Director
- Sylvain White
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 93 mins
Your new word of the month is ‘tulpa’. That’s the term for a thought form that is incarnated because so many people believe in it, often as a result of becoming an internet meme. It’s all bollocks, of course, but there’s no shortage of credulousness in the social media age.
Slender Man is a particularly interesting example because we know exactly where and when it originated. This creepy, tall, thin, child-abducting humanoid was invented by one Eric Knudsen back in 2009. By 2014, it had become a full-blown moral panic, with sightings reported all over the shop. Belief in the Slender Man even fuelled the near-fatal stabbing of a 12-year-old girl. So here’s the inevitable spin-off horror movie, in which a bunch of teen girls are menaced by the skinny freak, which is likely to be rather less interesting than the foregoing. That it acknowledges Knudsen’s copyright of the character will no doubt prove as effective in encouraging disbelief as the Mattel logo on those Ouija movies does in reminding punters that the spooky parlour game originated as a Victorian children’s toy.
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