Prior to seeing this film, I only had a vague notion of what Slender Man is. After seeing this film, I only have a vague notion of what Slender Man is. Seriously, I don’t know what the fuck this movie is about. This movie is so bad that Sony tried to get out of its contractual obligation to release it. To put that another way, the people that proudly brought us the Ghostbusters remake and The Dark Tower didn’t want to be associated with this film. To be fair, I’m not sure who is more to blame: Sony or director Sylvain White. Slender Man was heavily edited both to avoid an R-rating (which necessitated cutting all scenes of violence and gore, including scenes that appeared in the trailer) and to avoid backlash stemming from a real-life stabbing incident inspired by Slender Man. That latter point caused the studio to remove entire scenes and they didn’t bother to refilm anything to account for the missing footage. Consequently, this is literally an unfinished film. But I also can’t imagine that a good version of this fucking thing ever existed.
The plot……right. Um, well a group of girls (one of whom is played by Joey King, who starred in last year’s far more entertainingly terrible Wish Upon) have a sleepover. I always assumed that when girls have a sleepover that they mainly just strip to bra and panties and have tickle fights, but this movie dashed that assumption. Instead, they watch a video (that looks suspiciously like a recut version of the video from The Ring) that is supposed to summon Slender Man. They do summon him and then….I don’t know. There are random loud noises and creepy images on screen for 90 minutes or so. Then it ends. I don’t really know why or how it ended, but at least it ended.
Watching Slender Man is like watching a work-in-progress, a collection of scenes that will become an actual movie once an editor goes through it and works their magic. Except, in this case, the editor had gone drinkin’ and never came back. Scenes seem to be out of order. Characters make references to things that are contradicted in the next scene. Characters just fucking disappear. I started assuming that missing characters had been killed by Slender Man, but I honestly have no fucking idea. Imagine watching A Nightmare on Elm Street with all of the death scenes cut out. Did Freddy kill them? Maybe, but why aren’t any of the other characters concerned about their missing friends? People are missing, goddamn it! It also doesn’t help that some of the characters look pretty damn similar. At one point, a girl is in the hospital (again, not sure why) and I went a good 20 minutes before I realized that it was a different girl than I thought it was. That’s how disjointed this film is; I didn’t bother questioning that a character was both at home and in the hospital at the same time. That kind of shit was par for the course at that point.
This movie is also the latest in a trend of horror films that establish no rules for their villains (see also: The Bye Bye Man or Truth or Dare). I don’t know what Slender Man does or why. I don’t know where he comes from. I don’t know what his abilities are. I don’t know what his goal is. Fucking nothing. He could be trying to sell popsicles for all I fucking know. The fact that all of the death scenes were removed from the film doesn’t help, but I don’t even have any background information to form a guess as to what’s happening. All I know is that the sound of three bells means that the Slender Man is near (similar to the train whistle with The Bye Bye Man). Why three bells? I can answer that about as well as I can explain what a fucking train has to do with The Bye Bye Man. What’s the source of the video that summons him? Who fucking knows. The funny thing is that the summoning video is literally the top search result on Google; its not like these people had to scour the dark web for it. At one point, a girl is warning a guy not to try to find the video. Literally by the time that she finishes the sentence, he has already pulled the video up on his phone. How Slender Man isn’t a bigger problem given the accessibility of the video, I have no idea.
Again, despite the editing, there is no way a good version of this exists. Even if it made sense, its still just a checklist of godawful modern horror clichés. A bullshit collage, if you will. We have pointless jump scares, unexplained loud noises, awful computer effects and “spooky” images that appear with little context and seem to be ripped from a mid-90s Nine Inch Nails video. The characters are so generic that I literally couldn’t tell them apart. The next time that somebody questions why I’m so harsh toward modern horror films, I’m going to sit them down and make them watch Slender Man and A Nightmare on Elm Street back-to-back and ask if a further explanation is needed. And then I’m going to punch them in the face.
If you go see Slender Man, you are literally paying for an unfinished product. I’m a little stunned that this was actually released in theaters and I think everyone that paid to see it has a legitimate case for a class action lawsuit against Sony. Aside from that, this is just a pathetic excuse to take advantage of a cultural trend that’s largely embraced by kids and idiots and does so well past the height of that trend’s popularity. I expected more from the director of Stomp the Yard.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man_(film)#/media/File:Slender_Man_theatrical_poster.png
