Why Slender Man is an effective horror monster

- by Ninja Ross, 13 August 2012

Since you follow my work obsessively, I know you read my horror article at Essential Webcomics! Didn’t you? In that article I discussed horror and what, in my opinion, makes a good horror story. Gore only when needed, a bad guy who stays mysterious and stuff, a good setting and great characters. Well, what about a good monster? Do we even have any good monsters in pop culture now?

The Thing is pretty much only useable in that franchise, the B-Movie monsters are mostly just terrible versions of classics, and we’ve grown bored of werewolves and ghosts and especially vampires. They’ve been reduced to terrible teen franchises. I’m pretty sure the sparkling is like a form of decay. Rotting in the eyes of pop culture, becoming a sad sparkly shell of a monster...

But we do have monsters! It’s just that monsters aren’t where we look for our thrills anymore. They’re not scary, right? Of course not. So why is The Slender Man causing the internet to lose it’s cool?

The Slender Man has a pretty simple history. In 2009, SomethingAwful.com forums posted a photoshop competition to create paranormal pictures (click). All manner of spooky images were submitted but the one that stood out was Slender Man.

Slender Man, as he appears in the original image (background).

The Slender Man is a skinny figure, often described as being between 6 and 14 feet tall. He has no defining facial features and pretty much always wears a black suit, tie and a white shirt. Well, I’m no head doctor but I’d say you’re all a bunch of wimps!

OH GOD! DON’T LET IT TAKE ME!
Ok, so the Slender Man is pretty darn creepy. Could it be the fact that he represents a faceless corporation filled with suit wearing monsters who feel they’re better than everyone else? Don’t think so. It seems more likely that he’s simply new and intriguing. Think about why vampires are so terrible now. We’ve seen them too much. How many TV shows have vampires in it now? 11 or something? More? Less? I dunno, I’m not going to count them. There’s a lot, is the point.

Horror has been waiting for a new monster to come along for years, now. Zombie and vampires wore out their welcome a long time ago but nobody really seems to have noticed, so this new freak has sparked our imagination.

What’s better, is, the people of the internet are adding to his history. So it’s not Hollywood’s version of scary, it’s OUR version of scary. People are adding their real fears to his background. Because humans are dumb and we like scaring ourselves. And since internet folk tend to avoid sleep, we see a lot of things in the corner of our eye. The Slender Man gives that thing an identity. He’s an internet horror, right down to his creepy, skinny core.

So, maybe this guy is the start of a new breed of monster for a new age of people. An internet age! Vampires, werewolves, zombies; they scared a different generation! A generation who needed monsters to explain the crazy stuff that haunted them. The decaying of bodies, men turning savage, movement where there is NOTHING!

And now, thanks to the vast amount of information we have, we’re not so easily frightened. Horror has become about gore and over the top serial killers. But we need monsters, we need them to take our mind off of the real horrors of the world. It’s not about explaining the unexplainable now, it’s all about entertainment; horror for the sake of thrills!

So! Why is the Slender Man scary? He’s a whole bunch of our fears mixed into one skinny, creepy man/thing and we should be doing that more often. Just like entire villages and cultures invented the original monsters, the people of the internet have FINALLY started to create their own.
Horror monsters never went away.
They were just waiting for you to stumble upon them again... MWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
Mwa ha ha ha!
Ha ha!
Ha...

Tagged: movies & tv.

blog comments powered by Disqus

---

Follow @TrashMutant