The Slender Man (also known as Slenderman ) is a fictitious supernatural character derived from the creepypasta internet memes created by forum users Something Awful Eric Knudsen (also known as "Victor Surge" ) in 2009. It is described as an unusually tall and tall humanoid with heads and faces without properties and wearing a black suit.
Stories of Slim Man usually show him stalking, kidnapping or traumatizing people, especially children. The Slender Man is not limited to a single narrative but appears in many different fiction works, usually arranged online. The fiction associated with the Sleek Man includes many media, including literary, art and video series such as Marble Hornet , where it is known as Operator . Outside of online fiction, Lean Man has become an internet icon and has influenced popular culture, which has been referenced in the Minecraft video game with Enderman characters and his own homemade video games such as > Slender: Eight Pages and Slender: The Arrival . She also appeared on Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story , the film adaptation of the YouTube series Marble Hornets , in which she is portrayed by Doug Jones, and will appear in the eponymous film that will coming, where he will be photographed by Javier Botet.
Beginning in 2014, a moral panic ensued over Slender Man after its fictional readers were linked to several acts of violence, especially the almost fatal stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Video Slender Man
Origin
The Slender Man was created on June 10, 2009, on a thread on the forum Something Awful Internet. The thread is a Photoshop contest where users are challenged to "create paranormal images." The poster forum Eric Knudsen, under the pseudonym "Victor Surge", contributed two black and white pictures of a group of children in which he added a tall, thin, spectral figure in a black suit. Although the previous entry consisted only of photographs, the Surge completes its submission with a piece of text - supposedly from a witness - describes the kidnapping of a group of children and gives the character the name "The Slender Man":
The quote below the first photo reads:
We do not want to leave, we do not want to kill them, but the continuous silence and arms are outstretched in horror and amuse us at the same time...
The quote below the second photo reads:
One of two photos recovered from the Stirling City Library fire. Notable because it took a day that fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as "The Slender Man". Defects are referred to as film defects by officials. The fire in the library happened a week later. The actual photos were confiscated as evidence.
This addition effectively turns photos into works of fiction. Subsequent posters are extended to characters, adding their own visual or textual contributions.
Knudsen was inspired to create Slender Man especially by Zack Parsons' "That Insidious Beast", Stephen King's The Mist , reports of shadow people, Mothman and Gasser Mad from Mattoon. Other inspirations for the character are Tall Man from the 1979 film Phantasm, HP Lovecraft, the surrealist William S. Burroughs, and the survival video game horror Silent Hill and Resident Evil . Knudsen's intention is "to formulate something whose motives are almost incomprehensible, and [which causes] anxiety and terror in the general population." Other pre-existing fictional or legendary creatures similar to the Slender Man include: Gentlemen, pale black devils, pale, bald from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Hush"; Black men, lots of accounts that give them amazing appearances with unnatural paths and "oriental" features; and The Question, a DC Comics super hero with a blank face, whose secret identity is "Victor Sage", a name similar to Knudsen alias "Victor Surge".
In his book, People's Stories, Horror Stories, and Slender Man: The Development of Internet Mythology, Professor Shira Chess of the University of Georgia connects the Sleek Man with the ancient folklore of fairies. Like a fairy, Slim Man is another world, with a motif that is often difficult to understand; like a fairy, his appearance is vague and often shifts to reflect what the audience wants or fears, and, like the fairy, the Slender Man calls the forest and its wild places and kidnaps the children.
Development
The Slender Man soon became viral, spawning a lot of fanart, cosplay, and online fiction works known as "creepypasta" - a frightening story narrated in short, interchangeable pieces of text that spread from site to site. Divorced from its original creator, Lean Man became the subject of many stories by many authors in a thorough myth.
Many aspects of the Slender Man myth first appeared in the original Something Awful thread. One of the earliest additions was added by a forum user named "Thoreau-Up", which created a 16th-century German folktale involving a character named Der Gro? Man, which is implied to be the initial reference to the Lean Man. The first video series involving Slender Man evolved from a post on the Something Awful thread by a user of "ce gars". It tells of a fictitious schoolmate friend named Alex Kralie, who has found something annoying while filming his first major project, Marble Hornets . The video series, published in recording style found on YouTube, forms an alternate reality game depicting the filmic fictional experience with Slim Man. ARG also incorporates a Twitter feed and an alternate YouTube channel created by a user named "totheark". In 2013, Marble Hornets has more than 250,000 subscribers worldwide and has received 55 million views. The other candied YouTube Fun series followed, including EverymanHYBRID and TribeTwelve .
In 2012, Slender Man was adapted into a video game titled Slender: The Eight Pages ; in its first month of release, the game is downloaded more than 2 million times. Several popular variants of this game are followed, including Slender SlotMan Shadow and Slender Man for iOS, the second most popular download app. The sequel to Slender: The Eight Pages , Slender: The Arrival , was released in 2013. Several independent films about Slender Man have been released or under development, including Entity and The Slender Man , released online for free after the $ 10,000 Kickstarter campaign. In 2013, it was announced that Marble Hornets would be a feature film. In 2015, the film adaptation, Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story , was released on VOD, where the character was described by Doug Jones. In 2016, Sony Pictures, Screen Gems, partnered with Mythology Entertainment to bring the Slender Man movie to theaters, with the title character played by Javier Botet.
Maps Slender Man
Description
Since Slice Man's "mythology" fiction has evolved without an official "canon" for its reference, its appearance, its motives, its habits, its ability is not fixed but it changes depending on the storyteller. He is most often described as very tall and thin with very long arms, like tentacles (or just tentacles), which can be expanded to intimidate or capture prey. In most stories his face is white and without character, but sometimes his face looks different to anyone who sees it. He was dressed in a dark suit and tie. Lean Man is often associated with forests and/or abandoned locations and has the ability to teleport. Proximity to Lean Men is often said to trigger "Slim disease"; fast onset of paranoia, nightmares and delusions accompanied by nosebleeds.
Early stories show him targeting children or young adults. Some show young adults driven crazy or acting on their behalf, while others do not, and others claim that investigating Lean Men will attract his attention. The web series of Marble Hornets formed the idea of ​​proxies (though humans were included in Slender Man's influence) even though they were really crazy at first, rather than the Slender Man dolls. Marble Hornets also introduced the idea that Slender Man can interrupt video and audio recordings, as well as the "Slender Man symbol", which is a common feature of Slender fiction. Graphic violence and bodily horror are rare in the Slender Man myth, with many narratives choosing to leave the fate of the victim unclear. Shira Chess notes that "It is important to note that some of the retardation identifies exactly the kind of monster that the Slender Man may have, and what the specific intent is that all of these points remain mysterious and unclear."
As a folklore
Some scholars argue that, although it is a fictional work with an identifiable origin, Slim Man represents a form of digital folklore. Shira Chess argues that Slender Man exemplifies the similarity between traditional folklore and the open source ethos of the Internet, and that, unlike traditional monsters like vampires and werewolves, the fact that Slender Man myths can be traced and tagged with signatures. strong insight into how myths and folklore are formed. Chess identifies three aspects of the Slender Man myth that tie it to folklore: collectivity (meaning that it is created by a collective, rather than an individual), variability (meaning that the story changes depending on the teller), and performance (meaning that narrative storytellers change to reflect audience response).
Andrew Peck also considers Slender Man as the original form of folklore and notes the similarities with the form of offline legend performance that appears. Peck pointed out that digital folklore performances broaden the dynamics of face-to-face performance in several important ways, such as by asynchronizing, encouraging impersonation and personalization while also allowing perfect replication, incorporating oral, written, and visual communication elements, and generating shared expectations for performance impose group identity even though no group is physically present. He concluded that Lean Man is a digital legend cycle that combines generic conventions and emerging quality of oral and visual performance with the potential of collaborative network communication.
Jeff Tolbert also accepts Lean Men as folklore and suggests it represents a process he calls "reverse ostension." Ostensi in folkloristics is the process of playing folklore. According to Tolbert, Slim Man does the opposite by creating a set of folklore-like stories where nothing before. It is an iconic figure that is generated through collective efforts and deliberately mimicking existing and familiar folktale genres. According to Tolbert, this represents two processes in one: involves the creation of new objects and examples of broken new experiences, and this involves the combination of these elements into the "traditional" narrative body, which is modeled on existing folklore (but not entirely indebted to certain traditions).
Professor Thomas Pettitt of the University of Southern Denmark has described the Slender Man as an example of the closure of modern times "Gutenberg Parenthesis"; the period of discovery of the printing press for web deployment in which stories and information were codified in discrete media, to return to older and more basic story forms exemplified by oral traditions and bonfire stories, where the same story can be retold, reinterpreted and rearranged by various tellers, evolving and evolving over time.
Reasons for success
Media and folklorist expert Andrew Peck attributes the success of Slender Man with its highly collaborative nature. Because the characters and their motives are shrouded in mystery, the user can easily adjust the metaphors and imagery of the Slim Men to create a new story. This ability for users to harness the ideas of others while also supplying them themselves helps inspire the collaborative culture that appears around the Lean Man. Rather than privileging the choice of particular creators as canonical, this collaborative culture informally places ownership of beings across the community. In this case, Lean Man is similar to a campfire story or an urban legend, and the character's success comes from enabling social interaction and personal acts of creative expression.
Although almost all users understand that Slender Man is not real, they suspend the distrust to be more fun when telling or listening to stories. This adds to the sense of authenticity of the Slender Man legend and blurs the boundary between legend and reality, keeping the creature as the object of the dialectical legend. This obscurity has caused some confusion about the origin and purpose of the character. Just five months after his creation, George Noory's Coast to Coast AM, a radio calling event dedicated to paranormal theory and conspiracy, began receiving callers who inquired about Slim Man. Two years later, an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune describes its origins as "difficult to determine." Eric Knudsen has commented that many people, although understanding that Lean Man was created on the forums of Something Horrible, still entertain the possibility that he may be real.
Shira Chess describes the Slim Man as a metaphor for "helplessness, power difference, and anonymous power." Peck sees parallels between Slim Man and the general anxiety about the digital age, such as a feeling of constant connectedness and unknown third party observation. Similarly, Tye Van Horn, a writer for The Elm , has suggested that the Slim Man represents an unknown modern fear; in an age inundated with information, people become unfamiliar with the ignorance that they are now afraid of what they can not understand. Troy Wagner, the creator of the Marble Hornets, links the terror of Slender Men with their flexibility; people can shape it into whatever scares them the most. Tina Marie Boyer notes that "The lean man is a barrier monster, but the guardian's cultural limits are not clear.The victims do not know when they have broken or crossed him."
Copyright
Regardless of the quality of its folklore, Slim Man is not in the public domain. Some non-profit businesses involving Slim Man firmly recognize Knudsen as the creator of this fictitious character, while others are civilizedly blocked from distribution (including Kickstarter-funded films) after legal complaints from Knudsen and other sources. Although Knudsen himself has given his personal blessing to a number of projects related to Slender Man, the problem is complicated by the fact that, while he is a character creator, third parties hold the option of adaptation into other media, including movies and television. The identity of the holder of this option has not been published yet. Knudsen himself argues that the enforcement of copyright is less related to money than with artistic integrity: "I just want something extraordinary to get out of it... something frightening and annoying and somewhat different.I do not like something coming out, conventional. "As of May 2016, media rights for Slender Man have been sold to the production company Mythology Entertainment.
Related incidents
Waukesha stabbed
On May 31, 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin allegedly detained and stabbed 12-year-old classmates 19 times. When asked later by the authorities, they reportedly claimed that they wanted to commit murder as the first step to become a proxy for Men Lean, having read about it online. They also stated that they feared that Slender Man would kill their family if they did not commit murder. The victim can crawl from the forest, where he is abandoned, to reach the side of the road. A passing cyclist intervened, and the survivor of the attack. Both attackers have been diagnosed with mental illness but have also been accused of being adults and each facing up to 65 years in prison. One of the girls reportedly said Slender Man watched her, could read minds, and could teleport.
Experts testify in court he also said he spoke with Lord Voldemort and one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. On August 1, 2014, he was found incompetent to stand trial and his prosecution suspended until his condition improved. On November 12, 2014, a doctor judged that his condition was good enough to be tried, and on December 19, 2014, the judge ruled that the girls were competent to stand trial. In August 2015, the presiding judge ruled that girls would be tried as adults. They are tried separately. On August 21, 2017, one of the girls, now 15 years old, pleaded guilty to being a party to a second degree murder, but declared that she was not responsible for her actions on the basis of insanity. Although the prosecutor alleged that he knew what he was doing was wrong, the jury decided that he was mentally ill during the attack. He will spend at least three years in a mental hospital. On December 21, Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren sentenced Weier, 16, to a hospital stay for 25 years from the date of the crime, which would have him institutionalized until the age of 37.
In a statement to the media, Eric Knudsen said, "I am very sad with the tragedy in Wisconsin and my heart goes to the families of those who are affected by this horrible act." He stated he would not give an interview about this problem.
On September 25, 2017, it was reported that 15-year-old Morgan Geyser had agreed to plead guilty for attempting first-degree murder in a setting that would allow him to avoid imprisonment. In terms of setting Geyser will remain in a mental hospital where he has lived for the last two years for at least three more years.
On February 1, 2018, the Associated Press reported that Geyser had been sentenced to 40 years in a Wisconsin mental hospital, the maximum penalty allowed.
The documentary about an incident called Slenderman Hearts was released by HBO Films in March 2016, and aired on HBO on January 23, 2017.
Other incidents
After hearing the story, an unidentified woman from Cincinnati, Ohio, told the WLWT TV reporter in June 2014 that her 13-year-old daughter had attacked her with a knife, and had written horrible fiction, some involving Slender Man, which she said motivated the attack.
On September 4, 2014, a 14-year-old girl in Port Richey, Florida, allegedly set fire to her family home while her mother and nine-year-old brother were inside. Police report that the teen has read the online story about Slender Man as well as the Atsushi manga? Kubo Soul Eater . Eddie Daniels of Pasco County Sheriff's Office said the girl "has visited a website that contains a lot of information and Slender Man stories [...] It would be safe to say anything to do with it."
During early 2015 an epidemic of suicide attempts by young people aged 12 to 24 on Pine Ridge Indian Reserves, The Slim Man is called an influence; The Oglala Sioux tribal president noted that many Native Americans traditionally believe in a "suicidal spirit" similar to the Slim Man.
Reference in media
- In 2011, Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of the indie sandbox game Minecraft , added a new enemy to the game, which he named "Enderman" when some users on Reddit and Google commenting on similarities with Slender Man.
- The Slender Man is the antagonist of the 2013 episode Lost Girl "SubterrFaenean", in which Lean Man is said to be the base for the Pied Piper legend.
- In the 2014 episode of "Pinkie Apple Pie" from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic , the horse version of the character appears in a short cameo.
- The Supernatural TV series parodied Slender Man as "Thinman" in the 2014 episode of the same name.
- In 2016, American horror punk band Haunted Garage released an EP titled Slenderman and Other Strange Tales, which featured accompanying music tracks and music videos based on characters and cases of stabbing 2014.
- The sixteenth season of the crime drama series TV Law & amp; Order: Special Victims Unit featuring episodes, "Glasgowman's Wrath", inspired by Slender Man stabbing.
- Board game Kingdom Death: The monster has a Slender Man-based expansion package.
See also
References
Further reading
Curlew, Kyle (2017). "Slim Human Legend: Boogieman cultural oversight". First Monday . 22 (6). doi: 10.5210/fm.v22i6.6901.
External links
- Thread the forum where Slender Man is made, somethingawful.com
- Gallery Eric Knudsen containing all his Slender Man images, deviantart.com
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments