Slender Man Movie Do You Know the Way Meme
MEMES, Bonus: Slender Homo 25:07 Copy the lawmaking below to embed the WBUR sound player on your site
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When 2 12 year-erstwhile girls attacked their friend in the woods of Waukesha, Wisconsin in May of 2014, they claimed to accept done it to please Slender Homo — a fictional monster created past Eric Knudsen, A.Thou.A. "Victor Surge," on an internet forum called Something Awful. That incident put a mainstream, national news spotlight on the effigy, which was already being widely circulated and adapted online as a meme.
In this bonus episode ofEndless Thread'due south meme serial, we examine Slender Man equally monster, meme, and myth.
Show notes:
- The Something Atrocious forum's creepy Photoshop contest
- One of Eric Knudsen/Victor Surge'due south original Slender Man images
- More on folklore good Lynne McNeill
- More on Heidi Hollis, the paranormal expert
- The episode of The Slender Nation Podcast featuring Eric Knudsen
Full Transcript:
This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.east. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.
Amory Sivertson: In May of 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the forenoon after a slumber party, 3 12 year old girls walked into the woods.
Ben Brock Johnson: Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier brought their friend, Payton Leutner, with them to play. Sometime later on, Morgan and Anissa wandered out of the trees v miles away, holding a pocketknife, dress stained with blood. Payton's blood.
Amory: Eventually, the ii girls would tell the police they were doing the bidding of a monster — a monster they learned nigh on the Internet.
[MUSIC]
[Diverse news clips: "The brutality of the criminal offence is hard to foursquare with the ages of the accused." "The latest on those two twelve year old girls accused of nearly stabbing their friend to expiry, driven past the fictional character Slender Man." "They will stand trial as adults"]
Amory: The girls said they stabbed their friend as a sacrifice to Slender Man. . . an ominous figure that went viral in 2009, and whose lore was, lurking in the shadows, stalking children, and causing unspecified harm.
Amanda Brennan: Alright, so Slender Human being is very, very, very alpine. Similar, picture the tallest person you tin can flick, then, you lot know, at present add like eight anxiety to it, and so motion picture a blank white confront. No features, merely nothing. And a suit — a very, like, well fitted, tailored suit. Big, spindly fingers are sometimes seen with him, shadows. . .
Ben: This is Amanda Brennan. She knows a lot about Slender Man, from his eerily lanky appearance, to the upshot he supposedly has on people when he's most.
Amanda: If Slender Human being is around and yous are filming a recording, the recordings will glitch and it'll get all weird and chilling. Besides, if you take been around Slender Man too much, you become slender sickness and y'all start coughing.
[Cough sound effects and audio glitching]
Amory: If you pay whatsoever attention to crazy court cases or chilling net civilization, you might think this story. And if yous do, y'all retrieve that the printing, and people in full general, freaked out well-nigh it. Because, it was this mysterious thing that seemed to get really popular on the internet and played out in real life with bloodshed.
Ben: Amanda remembers the case considering she studies this stuff pretty closely. Not bloodshed — internet memes. She's an net culture librarian.
Amanda: I love talking about Slender Human, just because it is so unique in the meme infinite to how it not only transcended cyberspace culture, but similar, became a folklore matter. Like, there's so many layers to information technology.
Ben: In this bonus episode of Endless Thread's meme Serial, we explore i you probably remember reflected through the context of the violence in the woods of Wisconsin — Slender Man as monster, meme and myth.
[MUSIC]
Amory: Ben, what'due south your favorite slice of monster lore?
Ben: I think it's that trolls volition turn to rock if yous keep them upwards past dawn.
Amory: Is that and so? OK.
Ben: That's what I heard. What about y'all?
Amory: You know, I'thousand not that up on the monster lore, I gotta say. But I definitely grew upwardly with the Bloody Mary myth — saying it, whatever it was, three times in the mirror in the dark and she would appear. But at that place'due south this idea that lore develops over time, you know? You hear new things almost a monster. New ways that they travel from the spirit world into the real world...if you're non careful. And part of the lore of Slender Human is that, the mere thought of him... ways he's near.
Ben: Who is responsible for that idea, and for the monster himself? This guy.
[Eric Knudsen on The Slender Nation Podcast: "Hello, anybody, I am the quote- unquote creator of Slender Man, Victor Surge."]
Ben: These days, Eric Knudsen — A.Yard.A. Victor Surge — is virtually equally mysterious as the monster itself. He almost never comes out to talk about Slender Man. What you're hearing is from a rare interview with Knudsen on the Slender Nation Podcast dorsum in 2011.
Amory: He talked about the origin of Slender Man, and how Slender Man was kind of a bare slate.
[Eric Knudsen on the Slender Nation Podcast: "Because his motives are unknown. You don't know what he wants. What is he doing? Who knows? He's but a force, yous know? Host: It's simply, he'south there. And I recollect that'due south kind of what builds into his fear-- or, people's fright of him."]
Amory: Eric's monster started on a chilling online forum called Something Awful. Something Awful is where people tend to share anything and everything that could be considered awful. Information technology'due south a popular place for creepypastas - or horror-related net stories that get reposted and changed over fourth dimension.
Ben: Like copypasta, which is a combo of copy and paste, just creepypasta. And among the creepypasta posts on Something Awful was a creepy Photoshop contest.
Amory: And most of the posts were... fine, according to Eric, whose online handle was "Victor Surge."
[Eric Knudsen on the Slender Nation Podcast: "I saw in the commencement couple of pages of that thread, and I said, you know, these are pretty good. They're kind of creepy. You know, it looks like there's a ghost there, but I tin can do something creepier than that. You know, I'll just throw this together. And it was literally x or xv minutes of idea."]
Amory: In Eric'south original photoshopped black & white photos of Slender Man, kids are in the foreground, looking toward the camera. And in the background, the tall figure lurks in the shadows, where your center might tell y'all that your heed's playing tricks on you.
Ben: In 1 flick, there's a line of kids, and Slender Man appears fashion behind them. In another, kids are on a jungle gym, unaware of Slender Human being under the shadow of a tree. At least, that's where it looks like he is. Amanda again.
Amanda: Slender Human being is only how people process fright in the unknown. There was something virtually these images in the story that Victor Surge created that actually grabbed-- people gravitated to it. And within a calendar week, a group of kids from the U.S. started a YouTube series almost it, Marble Hornets. And the way that Marble Hornets iterated on these original photos and then built a whole new set of lore, like, that is to me the nearly fascinating, dramatic piece of it.
[From Marble Hornets entry #eighteen: "Alex? Alex?" (sounds of commotion)]
Ben: So, this is entry #18 in the Marble Hornets series. People on Reddit say it'south ane of the spookiest. A character is shining a flashlight in a dark house and comes beyond an unclothed Slender Human being doll.
Amory: And he shines his flashlight on this effigy with a white-painted confront and black painted eyes. And so, the figure lunges forward and the camera person drops to the flooring.
[More commotion sounds fromMarble Hornets]
Ben: This is 480p. Like, dawn of YouTube video quality stuff here. 2009. It'due south got this Blair Witch found-footage aesthetic.
Amory: This item entry has nigh 2 million views, and there are 90 more of them, all with similar view counts.
Ben: The flick school student at the heart of this crazy successful Slender Man fan-fic video art catalogue is Troy Wagner — also a big fan of that Something Awful forum, who saw the original Slender Human images, and the additional images they were spawning. He liked them.
Troy Wagner:But I noticed no 1 had done video yet. And then I was like-- this was during the summertime, I didn't have a job. So I called up my friend, Joseph, who I knew from loftier schoolhouse and, actually, middle school. And I said, Hey, yous want to help me make a matter for the internets? And he said, Yeah, I'm not doing annihilation else.
Amory: Troy and his buddy met upward that same night and grabbed the Slender Human idea. But their graphic symbol had a different name: The Operator.
Ben: We proposed the idea that Troy and his friends might have been meme-ing when they took Slender Man off the Something Awful message board and made it into the Marble Hornets web series. He was a little skeptical.
Troy: Yous say meme, I think of a grumpy true cat, you know?
Ben: Aye.
Troy: I don't think of, I mean, although I guess if y'all want to get, like, really granular with it, you could use, like-- and also this is not a word that I'm a big fan of, is creepypasta. That's more than similar chilling memes, correct?
Amory: But internet librarian Amanda Brennan says Slender Man has one of the central characteristics of a meme.
Amanda: I recollect a meme is any type of thought or piece of content or, like, epitome or even, like, sentence structure that passes from person to person and changes along the way. And I call back this is a great example of, like, literally passed from person to person, and the second person is iterating. I just remember at that place's something so novel about the spookiness of it all.
Ben: Troy and his crew were the ones responsible for some of the lore commonly associated with Slender Man now. Marble Hornets added the ideas of "Slender sickness," and coughing when he's near — as well the idea that Slender Man's presence makes sound glitch out.
Amory: Even though the monster has a different name, The Operator, it'south all role of the Slender Man idea. But it'southward a malleable idea.
Troy: The way that we fabricated The Operator in the serial, like, we didn't explain squat about it. We didn't say, Oh, you know, he'south a ghost of a business man, yous know? I don't know, like, we didn't overly explicate annihilation, it was just, he's there. Bad things happen when he's at that place. Now we're going to focus on what the characters are going to exercise almost information technology.
Amory: In other words, Troy's Slender Homo — The Operator — didn't accept a backstory. Beingness unmoored from an origin allowed people to fill in the blanks themselves of who Slender Man was, what he did, and what he wanted.
Ben: Amanda says information technology used to exist that Hollywood told us what to exist scared of — same with eons-one-time urban legends. But Slender Man started online and and then transcended the online space.
Amanda: Thinking nearly horror as a genre — information technology's a lot of the same story retold over and over once more, and in that location is something about Slender Man that is markedly different because he came from the internet. And I think it's also kind of a democratization — nearly similar, you don't need to exist a giant film franchise to scare people.
Amory: Hollywood did get in on the Slender Homo craze, though. A movie made in 2018 brought in over l million dollars at the box office — past post-obit the trend, not starting it. Over fourth dimension, Slender Human being has besides inspired fan fiction, erotica. Somebody fifty-fifty came up with an older origin story from Deutschland, which lended some pre-internet credibility to the monster.
Ben: There was some goofiness that got added over time, too. Slender Man got incorporated into My Petty Pony fandom... somehow?
[Audio from a "My Petty Pony"-meets-Slender Man fan video]
Ben: But for some people, there wasn't anything fun or funny about Slender Man.
Amory: Slender Man lives… sort of… in a minute.
[SPONSOR BREAK]
Amory: The next time you find yourself wide awake in the middle of the night, scan the AM airwaves of your radio and yous just might stumble upon this...
[George Noory: "I'll be curious to run across the amount of phone calls we become, Heidi, from people who have had shadow people or Chapeau Human experiences. Do yous have to be a special person to see these entities or have these entities approach you? I mean-- "
Heidi Hollis: "It's a threat nosotros'll all experience and at some bespeak, even in passing. You know, you lot think a large bug is flying through your business firm, and it's like, they kind of look like that."]
Ben: This is Heidi Hollis, a frequent guest on the late-dark AM radio talk testify Coast to Coast.
Heidi: I'1000 an author, researcher and podcast host all on anything out of the ordinary, from angels to Aliens, Lid Human to shadow people, all of the above and all the in-betweens.
Amory: Slender Man genuinely scared Heidi considering of what he reminded her of — a unlike paranormal phenomenon. She started getting calls not long after images of Slender Homo appeared on the cyberspace.
Heidi: Believe information technology or not, I had people reaching out to me proverb, Heidi, is this your stuff, because this resembles Hat Man. And I'm similar, Well, let's run into: he's wearing a conform, he likes to approach children, and he causes terror wherever he goes. Yeah, that looks pretty much like a Hat Homo phenomenon.
Amory: And who is Hat Man?
Heidi: And so Hat Man is this guy that wears a three piece suit, generally, sometimes he wears a trench coat. Other times he has a cape. Sometimes he has a hat on. Near of the time he does. And he does like to go after children quite a bit. And there'southward also another phenomena that surrounds him called shadow people. He seems to directly these black, shadowy minions, if you will.
Ben: We should say, that Heidi doesn't but enquiry the paranormal — she believes in it. And for her, Hat Human being is definitely real. You, like the states, might exist a petty skeptical of that perspective.
Heidi: Evil is real and he wears a hat.
Amory: Then Heidi believes in Hat Man. She doesn't believe in Slender Man, because she says Slender Man is a stolen idea — a fictional version of the real evil that is Hat Man. The Hat Man she'south written and spoken at-length most. And, she says, turning real evil into fictional viral, meme-ified internet evil is dangerous.
Heidi: Just to think of, you know, making something fictional of such a threat to humankind and people's souls, acknowledging where it came from, acknowledging that this is a real miracle, and acknowledging information technology'southward something that is actually going on in the world. And you lot slapped a different championship on it. So I wish that definitely that that message had gotten beyond.
Ben: Simply Lynne McNeill has a different bulletin she wants to become across and a different perspective on the whole Slender Human being conversation. Lynne is a folklore professor at Utah State Academy.
Lynne: I teach Slender Homo every bit a great example of creepypasta, of digital folklore, of legendry and of internet meme.
Amory: What you lot probably won't hear Lynne lecturing about…
Lynne: I've certainly been asked by many, many young people, Is Slender Man real? And that's an interesting question for a folklorist to get, because folklorists love to dodge that question. We like to point out we are not cryptozoologists, we are not Bigfoot hunters, we're not ghost hunters or paranormal investigators. Nosotros actually are not always interested in, Is this true? We recall there's many more interesting questions to inquire — the main one beingness, Why does the story persist?
Amory: Lynne thinks function of why a figure like Slender Human has persisted is that he represents something bigger than a spindly man in a suit. He might be a kind of updated version of something that'due south spooked united states for eons.
Lynne: Any successful slice of sociology is probable to be tapping into tropes and motifs that take already withstood the test of fourth dimension. Then in both folk tradition and popular civilization, nosotros've seen some Slender Man-similar figures. The Pied Piper is a keen example — someone who lures children away much to the, y'all know, grief and horror of their parents.
Ben: Perhaps Slender Man is the Pied Piper of the digital age — a sort of digital folklore, as Lynne calls it. And included in digital folklore is something that, by now in this serial, we're all pretty familiar with…
Lynne: Net memes are probably one of the biggest forms of digital folklore because they're then concise and efficient in their communication of traditional ideas. You encounter information technology, you take it in, you go the impact. The message is succinct and well articulated. And here's the thing: because of the self-correcting nature of sociology, due to its dynamic variation, if a meme isn't peculiarly poignant and succinct, someone'southward going to fix information technology until it is. And that's one of the all-time things about folklore, is that it is constantly evolving and updating itself to remain relevant.
Amory: So Slender Man, co-ordinate to Lynne, is both a meme and folklore. Only there'southward another word she uses to categorize him.
Lynne: Legend stands out as being about possibility and probability. These are the stories that nosotros tell each other to say, Could this really happen?
Ben: Could Slender Man be existent? Legend has it, which creates just plenty space in some people's imaginations to take him seriously. And in one case, besides seriously.
[News prune: (Ambulance siren) "Breaking News: A 12 year-erstwhile girl is stabbed, leading to a big police search in Waukesha."]
Amory: On that morn in May of 2014, in the woods of Waukesha, Wisconsin, a 12 year-old girl was attacked — not by Slender Man, but by 2 of her friends, who claimed to have done it to appease Slender Man. Hither's Anissa and Morgan, telling law what happened.
[From the constabulary interrogation video: Anissa: "Morgan handed me the knife." Morgan: "Then I started to count again." Anissa: "Nigh v feet away, I said, 'Now, go ballistic. Go crazy.'" Morgan: "Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab."]
Ben: Payton Leutner had been stabbed xix times.
[From the 9-one-ane call: Dispatcher: "Sir, are you with her right now?" Man: "Yes." Dispatcher: "Is she awake?" Human: "She's awake." Dispatcher: "Is there any haemorrhage going on?"]
Amory: Just by happenstance, a human being riding his bike in the remote woods came across Payton, who was bleeding profusely.
[From the 9-1-1 telephone call: Man: "Her clothing has got blood on it." Dispatcher: "OK, and you lot found her and she was but laying at that place?" Man: "Yeah."]
[From an ABC News story: David Muir: "Do you remember leaving the park to become to the woods?" Payton Leutner: "They only wanted to go on a walk, and I didn't think much of information technology. Information technology's just a walk. It's in Waukesha. Like, what bad stuff happens in Waukesha, Wisconsin?"]
Ben: This is Payton, talking to ABC News. She survived, fifty-fifty though a lot of people thought — and still think — she didn't. In a style, her attack became part of the legend of Slender Man. And maybe the ending that a lot of people misremember — that Payton died — is a testament to how memes become changed and twisted equally they circulate.
[MUSIC]
Amory: The Waukesha incident spooked a lot of people — including Troy Wagner, the co-creator of the Slender Human spin-off spider web serial, Marble Hornets. He says he and his crew wondered if they diameter whatsoever of the blame for the attack past contributing to the lore of Slender Man and giving him more than of a platform.
Troy: For twenty 4 hours or so, our phones were ringing off the claw of reporters wanting to telephone call u.s.a. and ask us almost these things. Nosotros would say, yous know, Was this ultimately a bad idea? Only I mean, eventually we but had to kind of settle on the fact that, like, if it wasn't us, that would accept been somebody else, yous know, that this was based on, yous know? It's similar, you can't stop these things from happening, yous know?
Amory (to Lynne McNeill): Is there any responsibility that that boils down to the creator?
Lynne: Yous know, that'south really hard to say.
Amory: Once more, folklorist Lynne McNeill has thoughts.
Lynne: I think the curt respond that a folklorist would requite, and I certainly can't claim to speak for all folklorists, is no.
Ben: Lynne says Slender Homo is a byproduct of the world and society we live in and no one person or grouping of people can exist held accountable for his existence or what people choose to do in his proper name.
Lynne: And then that sense of responsibleness really becomes a shared responsibility that nosotros both react to, and help maintain, a globe that requires Slender Man in gild to cope symbolically with what's happening around united states of america. And and so we are all complicit in the cosmos of that and and so forth. Therefore, nosotros are all required to have responsibility in helping to deal with that. Simply, you lot know, long story brusk, when a middle schooler asks me if Slender Human is existent, I say no. He was made up on the internet to be a really practiced, conceivable story.
Amory: Afterward the stabbing in Wisconsin, the always-elusive Eric Knudsen, the original creator of Slender Human being, released a statement extending condolences and declaring in bold letters, "SLENDER Man IS NOT Real."
Ben: This didn't deter all of the believers, but, according to folklorist Lynne, it did change Slender Man's significance for some people.
Lynne: He became, and through his own fandom in many means, most an ally to troubled children, where he became this character who, given his new backstories, was being portrayed equally a bullied child himself and, therefore, someone who could maybe come to help children who are being bullied at present. And one actually great report looks at the symptoms of "Slender sickness" and compares them to the signs that a child is being bullied and finds an amazing amount of overlap.
Amory: Amanda, the internet librarian says, lately, the cobwebs have been accumulating in Slender Homo'southward corner of the interwebs.
Amanda: The pandemic has put a lot of things into perspective for people. And like, the same things that scared the states before are very different. And I personally oasis't seen a lot of Slender Human content over the past twelvemonth. Only like, when looking at, similar, the types of news and so types of content that people have shared over the pandemic, when something that disruptive to life comes, like, I don't think people are seeking out that kind of meme when life is so scary.
Ben: But folklorist Lynne says Slender Human is skillful folklore. And good sociology may rising and fall in popularity over time, but it doesn't dice. Information technology only lurks in the shadows until nosotros need it again.
Lynne: Bad folklore just goes away. And so if it'due south not going away, at that place's something about it that's speaking to us.
Ben: And here we are, in 2021, doing an episode about Slender Man. So there must be some reason he's on our minds...
[Sound glitch sound effect]
Amory: Merely like they say: if y'all're thinking about him, he'southward virtually.
This bonus episode was produced past Quincy Walters and Nora Saks. Cheers to DaveDickIllustration for letting the states include his piece, "The Slenderman."
Slender Man Movie Do You Know the Way Meme
Source: https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2021/10/31/memes-slender-man
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