Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
In June 2009, Eric Knudsen uploaded two Photoshopped pictures to a web forum called Something Awful.
One poster marveled, This is going to give me nightmares.
The Slender Mans appeal was so fascinatingly ambiguous that message-board members piled on eagerly, elaborating on his backstory.
What did he want?
He preyed on children, or he kidnapped them or lured them away.
Perhaps he influenced them to do terrible things on his behalf.
Creepypasta, the fanfiction horror website, published countless stories about Slender Man.
As the stories snowballed, his character became more ominous.
The Slender Man, maybe, had always been with us.
What grew out of all this feverish creative energy was a sort of Slender Man canon.
Slender Man was just another meme then a dark one, maybe, but seemingly benign.
(Against all odds, Leutner survived.)
They were headed to Wisconsins Nicolet National Forest, 200 miles north, to join him in Slender Mansion.
He can be anywhere from six to fourteen feet tall, Anissa earnestly told investigators.
He can read minds and has teleportation skills.
She and Morgan decided to stab Payton, Anissa explained, because she wanted to prove the skeptics wrong.
Related Stories
The girls were put in juvenile detention to await sentencing.
The case made national news.
Morgan was sentenced to 40 years in a mental institution in February.
Leutner, according to her mother, sleeps with scissors under her pillow to feel safe.
A town was scarred forever; three families were torn apart.
He gets in your head, a young female voice-over whispers.
Another girl is shown screaming and strapped to a cot, presumably institutionalized.
You could imagine how someone, somewhere, might recoil.
This is crass commercialism at its worst, the petition announced.
To date, the petition has garnered just over 19,000 signatures.
This petition is really about corporate accountability on Sonys behalf, Perris says.
Where are your morals in this, you know?
Because right now it looks like a blatant money grab around a story thats really affected peoples lives.
Screen Gems, the division of Sony responsible forSlender Man, seems a little queasy about its investment.
The film is in no way a dramatization of any real life individuals or events.
Did they think the movie should be halted from release?
Is the movie dangerous?
Or are they simply five years too late on a meme?
And the real question: Do kids even care about Slender Man anymore?
I think it has waned since then.
Its much more something associated with childhood and adolescence nowadays.
Hes much less an internet monster now, she tells me.
There is another jokey offshoot, a well-dressed ghoul, calledSplendorman.
Kids play tag and say Slender Man got you.
Hes lost his fangs, a little bit, admits McNeill.
We see this happen a lot with online folklore that is initially believed.
People still make fan art and new stories about Slender Man, but activity has gradually tapered off.
Still, the spectre of the Waukesha stabbings haunts The Mythos in ugly and unsettling ways.
She also entirely understands the town of Waukeshas visceral aversion to it.
Definitely in that town, that movie means something very different than it does anywhere else.
We cant fight this with anything but the tools weve already had, which are open discussions and conversation.
It was just a lot slower.
But speed is its own kind of danger.
Guns, after all, are deadlier when they shoot faster; cars more dangerous at higher speeds.
There is something about the Slender Man figure that makes him a bogeyman uniquely suited to internet life.
He watches, usually in the background, aims unclear.
He is faceless, omnipresent, with tentacles that can reach into unexpected places.
McNeill says, laughing.
Someone is watching me, trying to lure me with stuff it knows I want.
For children, Slender Man often reflects their concerns about the world of adults.
We see a lot of confusion and conflict in the way hes depicted by kids, McNeill notes.
Hes an aggressor; he can come get you.
She declines to guess why, but notes that the tone of Slender Man stories has grown increasingly ambiguous.
She singles out a recent story in which a female protagonist watches horrified as Slender Man vivisects her tormentors.
This sort of ambiguity is important to the life force of legends.
Legends, in some ways, are how we debate the nature of reality.
And that ambiguity, ultimately, is what will never come through in a mass-marketed genre horror film.
The principle of folklore is that it if doesnt speak to us, it goes away, McNeill says.
Bad movies still get made; they still have funding.
They might tank, but they will make it to the theater.
If we dont like a story, we just stop telling it.
I think were swimming in good Slender Man stories.
They cant beat what weve already got.
