Slender Man: Everything You Need To Know About The Internet Urban Legend

You know his name. You know his "face." You know he came from the Internet. You might know about something called the "Slender Man stabbings." But despite starring in his own feature length Slender Man movie this year, these vagaries may be all you know about the first Internet urban legend, Slender Man -- or, Slenderman as he's also known.

The expression-less, business-formal monster has appeared in grainy black and white photos in online forums and "found" film footage on YouTube. He stands at the edges of children's playgrounds. He hides in the woods, amongst the trees. He peers in at third-story windows of hospitals. He's an inter-dimensional legend for a cross-media generation.

"At first, she could only see an inky blackness and somehow [it] seemed to swirl in itself," the author of Slenderman writes. "When she blinked in surprise, the void melted away. She wished it hadn't. In its place, there stood what she could only guess was once a man. The limbs were long and inhumanly awkward, with bulky joints branching off into several arms, not unlike the branches of a tree. The creature was drap[ed] in a black suit, somehow ma[king] the thing more nightmarish to her. The icing on the proverbial cake, however, was what passed as the hellish thing's face. It was as though her mind blurred the ghastly visage to spare itself further shock and horror."

Stories like this one, posted anonymously to Creepypasta.com on January 10, 2010, helped mythologize something that began as little more than a prank, instigated on a thread in the SomethingAwful forums. "Creating paranormal images has been a hobby of mine for quite some time," a user named Gerogerigege posted on June 8th, 2009. "Occasionally, I stumble upon odd websites showcasing strange photos, and I always wondered if it were possible to get one of my chops in a book, documentary, or website just be casually leaking it out into the web [...] So, let's make a shitload?"

Slender Man Eric Knudsen — One of the first Slender Man photos posted by Eric Knudsen

By adding a filter and inserting blurry shapes that could be mistaken for supernatural entities, contributors to the thread found they conjure up "evidence" of the paranormal convincing enough to terrify anyone who wasn't aware of the source, like the shadow creatures cast by clever hand arrangements behind a campfire. User Victor Surge (real name: Eric Knudsen) created and posted two altered photos, coining the name "Slender Man" to describe the child-napping figure hiding the backgrounds.

Slender Man is no different than the scary stories we tell each other on dark nights in the woods. He's no different from the Bogeyman, Freddy Krueger or The Grudge curse. Because of his digital origin -- and one that is a well-documented forgery at that -- it's easy for outsiders to be sniffy about the idea of anyone believing he could be real, even for a moment. But most of us have felt a shiver of dread at the sudden noise coming from the bushes as a friend holds a torch under their chin, mid-ghost story. Or felt their pulse quicken by a mysteriously creaking floorboard from somewhere in our house in the middle of the night. Or walked just a little bit faster home from the movie theater after watching the latest jump-scare flick. If that's ever been you, you're no different than that teenager, up past their bedtime in 2010, scrolling through images of Slender Man "sightings," feeling that same shiver of dread as they read captions like: "'We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but it's persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time...' -- 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead."

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Though the character was created in 2009, his legend apparently extends all the way back to the 16th century, the extensive history of which can be found on this Slender Man wikidot page. "Where did Slender Man come from? Did his idea spontaneously come to us on SAF (SomethingAwful Forum)?"

The authors recontextualize the monster as more than just a recently "discovered" urban spectre, but as an immortal being who has gone by many names and guises, from Der Großmann in Germanic lore to The Tall Man in Romanian fairy tales; a malicious presence that links together stories of families turning on one another, cases of missing children and people driven to the brink of insanity that span from the 1800s to the early '90s. These are accompanied by photographs, audio files and transcripts from phone calls, therapy sessions and diary entries.

Hans Freckenberg woodcut of Der Grobmann (Slender Man)

Suitably, Slender Man's creator cobbled the creature together from a mixture of the traditional and modern. "I was mostly influenced by H.P Lovecraft, Stephen King [...] the surreal imaginings of William S. Burroughs, and [a] couple [of] games of the survival horror genre -- Silent Hill and Resident Evil. [...] I used these to formulate something whose motivations can barely be comprehended and cause[d] unease and terror in a general population."

Knudsen's creation did end up causing terror in a horrifically real sense. In 2014, two separate stabbings -- one in Wisconsin in May and the other a month later in Ohio -- were connected to Slender Man. Not, of course, done by the creature himself, but by young girls fixated on the idea of becoming a "proxy of Slender." A proxy is akin to a Bride of Dracula. This romanticized addition to the Slender Man mythology reappropriated the child-snatching monster as more of a Pied Piper-esque, digital folk hero whose lonliness and demonization young, Internet-weened fans empathized with. The 2016 HBO documentary, Beware the Slenderman revealed that the main participant in the Wisconsin case suffered from an undiagnosed mental disorder, meaning she couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy. His "proxy's" actions carried out in his name, in a sense, have given his gangly arms further reach into the real world than most of his monstrous precursors.

Slender Man has now become a mainstream member of the genre he was inspired by, though it's hard to imagine that any single movie could ever be as fascinating as the character's own tangled history as a Horror icon made by and for a post-modern, multi-platforming age. "Before you had angels and succubi, and then ghosts and spirits, today we have shadow people and inter-dimensional beings," Knudsen reflects. "The Slender Man, and other newly created entities, are just the newest addition in the progression of a long, and very real, human tradition.

"You've seen him, now you can't unsee him."

Directed by Sylvain White, Slender Man stars Joey King, Julia Goldani-Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalise Basso and Javier Botet.