I don't often get to a stage in my blog where I have space to review films of my own choosing. Why oh why then did I decide to check out the critically panned Slender Man, especially considering I knew it to be a bad film. Directed by Sylvain White, and based on a cool Creepy Pasta (basically the modern day version of urban legends) created a tiny way back in 2009, this film apparently was a bit of a mess to make, with drastic re-writes to try and distance the movie from the negative press the idea of Slender Man was getting (stemming mainly from two girls who conspired to murder their friend and blame it on the figure making them do it). These changes in the film's story were late enough that even trailers showed character death scenes, when the final version boringly features zero deaths even remotely near showing on-screen.
Four teenage friends - Wren (Joey King - Independence Day: Resurgence), Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles), Chloe (Jaz Sinclair - Gen V TV show), and Katie (Annalise Basso - Ouija: Origin of Evil, Oculus) are bored and decide to look up a way to try and contact urban digital legend the Slender Man. After around a minute of searching online they discover the summoning video, which they all watch but then dismiss it as an internet hoax. As the days pass, the four begin to experience inexplicable hallucinations and nightmares, with things getting more serious when Katie vanishes into thin air during a school field trip. The remaining friends now knowing the Slender Man is real at first seek a way to rescue Katie, but then later on it becomes far more about self preservation from the figure's grasp.
Surprisingly, it isn't the lack of any type of body count that really pulls Slender Man down, it is more how it tries to be a jack of all trades and inevitably becomes a master of none. The horror is so inconsistent here, with barely any rules as to what the characters will go through. One friend vanishes, another goes insane (I assume anyway, the character just kind of exits the film never to really return), the remaining two getting increasingly paranoid and plunging into waking nightmares. The horror mainly takes the form of limp jump scares that never worked, semi-effective nightmares (one character being stalked by a multitude of Slender Men within a compact library was maybe the film's highlight scene), and poor CG. The CG in particular was very off putting as it looked like the type of CG you might find in an early 2000s film. It is hard to be scared when characters are impaled or grabbed by obviously computer generated tentacles.
The design of the titular antagonist isn't a bad one, the relative newness of this fabricated urban legend meant it was hard to take it seriously. It appeared in some decent enough scenes, usually anything out in woodland made for at least a couple of decent shots of the tall faceless being blending in with the trees.
The story was all over the place. You have to have a bit of suspension of disbelief that the real ritual for summoning the creature is readily available online with the smallest of searches, and that it is guaranteed to work. Much is made of modern technology, and it is sometimes put to decent enough use. I liked when characters receive video calls from the being that then show a first person perspective of it walking through the victim's home. Not so good was a mid-film investigation montage that again speed runs through the investigation, as if it was just checking off a box on a to-do list, the character swiftly finding what she wants to know with the minimum of searches on her laptop. Originally, there was planned to be a kill count, it sounds like this was going to be a more traditional horror. With that kill count abandoned however, there are just a whole bunch of scenes that end up unresolved. Characters vanish from the story with little fanfare, and rather than feeling mysterious, it just feels like the endings to the characters fates ended up on the cutting room floor.
Slender Man was a bloodless, generic, lazy and dull horror movie that really was as bad as it had been made out to be. Perhaps with not so much of a knee-jerk reaction to claims it was glorifying real world crime, this could have been somewhat entertaining. Instead, this is a muddled and meandering mess of a movie that doesn't seem to know what it is trying to achieve.
SCORE:
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