Slender Man

I would make a stupid joke here, but He won't let me

When I was a young child, I only ever really wanted two things. One was a massive aquarium which could house a colossal squid and a sperm whale because I thought it would be amazing to see the two fight, and the other was to be able to live in the middle of some deep forest far away from the strains and disappointment of grown up life I found myself hurtling closer and closer towards. My affinity with woods started from a very early age, where I grew up they were fairly plentiful and there was nothing I liked more than climbing their trees and exploring as much of them as possible. Their sheltering comfort and collection of woodland creatures symbolised a world just beyond human comprehension, each wood represented a self sufficient organic city where the only rules were those which pertained to the laws of the jungle. 

They were simpler times but undoubtedly good times. Those days are gone now. Now I know of the lurking terror within even the smallest copse, watching and waiting for me to dare to try and live out that childhood dream. What could possibly cause such a drastic upheaval in logically fuzzy yet morally sound ideals? Slender Man, that's what. He's big, he's mean and he wont be happy until everyone is dead. He wears a suit because he means business and has tentacles for arms, all the better to wrap around your throat my dear. Never heard of him? Lucky for you, but I aim to change that. For your own sake of course.

The uncomfortable story behind this sinister figure came into the public eye a relatively short time ago, when the above picture appeared on an internet forum from an anonymous poster. The story which accompanied was that it was taken in 1983 in the American town of Stirling, and shortly afterwards there was a huge fire in the same local school which killed every one of the children inside. The fire was supposedly started by Mary Thomas, the same person who took the photo, who has been missing since the event. Like the snarling beast that it is, the collective consciousness of the internet took the Slender Man mythos to its blackened heart and suddenly supposed sightings were cropping up everywhere, from Japan to Norway and every country in between. Thousands of people had their own Slender Man story to tell, mostly involving a dark suited figure emerging from surrounding forests, with unusually long limbs and no memorable facial features. The 'bogeyman' had been reborn with a terrifyingly new persona, a modern day fairytale for the cynical Nintendo generation.

My, My, Whiskey. How you have grown.

One of the most creative iterations of the Slender Man legend is that of the YouTube channel known as Marble Hornets. If you follow that link, have a few hours to spare and don't mind wasting the precious little time you have on this Earth, you can watch all 33 episodes, back to back, whilst you also slowly watch your sanity slipping away. The videos are a supposed documentation of an American graduate going through a friends forgotten rushes for a film he was supposed to make. As he delves further into the tapes, he realises his friend was being stalked by a mysterious figure dressed in a black suit of indiscernible features, sort of like a burns victim James Bond. The series is brilliantly made, relying mostly on the viewers imagination to fill in most of the gaps as all of the greatest horror stories do and is a work in progress, being updated with new posts sporadically.

Whether you choose to believe in the Slender Man or not is of course up to you, I'm not here to preach the words of any creeping ancient evil just like I wouldn't preach the words of any shining triumphant deity. I'm just laying down the facts as I hear them, and you're free to take from it what you will. Part of the thrill of watching the Marble Hornets videos is the underlying uncertainty as to it's validity, and it's far more fun to suspend your disbelief whilst watching than it is to scorn it for being a poorly produced sequence of films.

We didn't want to go, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms
horrified and comforted us all at once 

I suppose through the willingness of the collective internet to keep him alive and further his presence through  spurious photographic evidence and scant recollections, Slender Man represents a need in society to have an ambiguous mystical ubiquity haunting the general psyche. It's much easier for us to anthropomorphise death as a skeletal Grim Reaper figure or a Yeti or a blurry faced businessman than it is for us to admit death as being the far scarier unknown that it is. Either that, or it's a very clever marketing ploy by the logging companies to make people more willing to the idea of decimating every rainforest on the planet in the hope of ridding ourselves of his omnipresent terror once and for all.

I've decided to give Slender Man a very middle of the road 5 out 10, because my respect for him is perfectly counter balanced by my fear of him. Sleep Well.