Movie review, my opnion of: Slender Man

Official movie poster taken from IMDB
Currently in theaters in Canada (26/08/18)

After discovering that classmates are conjuring Slender Man, a group of 4 teenaged girls watch a video that allegedly calls the mythic creature. They soon discover that Slender Man is no urban legend when nightmares are invaded by him, unexplained noises and a sense of unease invade their lives. Soon, one of them, Katie, disappears, and the other three are left to fend for themselves, believing that it is best to pretend that Slender Man doesn't really exist. However, Wren believes that by performing a sacrifice, the group can save themselves and rescue Katie, this fails when Chloe takes off her blindfold and sees Slender Man, this sends the group running and separates the trio in more ways than one. Chloe's mind is soon invaded by Slender Man, while Wren and Hallie are tormented by him. It is discovered that the ritual wasn't enough and that the girls will have to sacrifice themselves if they want to stop Slender Man from harming anyone else in the town, including Hallie's sister, Lizzie, who was tricked by Wren to participate in a Slender Man sacrifice ritual.

Based on the Creepy Pasta of the same name, this movie could have been a truly fantastic horror movie, however, due to their attempt to pander to Millennials and a law suit (a Slender Man inspired attack), the movie fell to the wayside not only in marketing, but also quality content. The movie's scares where the typical jump scares you'd expect from a movie that doesn't put much thought into developing characters you care about, therefore negating the fear of losing someone you care for. The audience is essentially waiting for the "monster" to show up. Perhaps they believe Millennials aren't capable of connecting to who they see on the screen and cannot focus on anything for too long. The low quality scares may also be due to the creators not wanting to be accused of inspiring audience members acting out scenes from the movie or being inspired by it. However, if this was true, with the amount of horror movies made over the years, if this was true, there would be many more horror movie based crimes in the world than actually exists.

This movie felt like a rip off of many other movies including Truth or Dare with similar visuals of Slender Man in certain scenes, as well as the idea of sacrifice at the end of the movie. Although in Truth or Dare, the protagonist sacrifice the world while as in Slender Man, Hallie sacrifices herself. It also came off as Cry Wolf and Urban Legends, where you have a group of teenagers trying to find out if an urban legend is true or not. In Cry Wolf and Urban Legends, the urban legend(s) turns out to be false, with the antagonist setting up the deaths to look as if something happened in a certain way. While as in Slender Man, the urban legend is real but no adult believes it is true. Another movie it copies is It, in both movies, the adults are not involved, or very little, in the lives of their children and don't get very concerned when bad things start to occur to the kids.

In the Creepy Pasta story, Slender Man was much more about atmospheric scares and what could happen to you, and although the movie had achieved this at moments, ultimately the movie referred too often on jump scares that don't add to the story. The movie also uses technology to add to the scare factor of the movie, in a couple of the scenes, Slender Man uses the girls cellphones to do a video call to them, showing the girls where he is and distract them before he attacked them. This felt a lot like Unfriended: Dark Web to me, where movie makers are trying to show Millennials they're hip to the tech stuff by using it as part of the plot of the movie.

In the end, even though there were quite a few scary moments, I was deeply disappointed in the movie and felt it had the potential to go further and should have depended a lot more on atmosphere to scare the audience rather than jump scares. Slender Man himself should have remained hinted at throughout most of the movie. It is a shame that many of the story lines in the movie are not closed at the end of the movie, most notably, what happen to Chloe and Lizzie and the end of the movie? Will we have to wait for a sequel for their stories to be completed? If they want characters' story lines to be left open in order to open a sequel, they should have gone the Final Destination route, in the end of that movie, it was clear that the characters were going to be part of a sequel. In Slender Man, it is hinted at, but there's no guarantee of a sequel even occurring, let alone that these characters will be a part of it.

This movie get 2 "Bioelectric Organisms and the Paranormal" out of 7 "he has no face".
(All views in this article are my own and the rating is as valuable as unicorn farts).