We’ll be dealing with an urban legend today, readers: those old tales purely made to be the stuff of your nightmares. And while he may be a more modern legend than many, in typical fashion, you have to do some digging to find what you can of the true origin.
The origin of this character came from a Photoshop battle on the Something Awful forums, which would make the creator of Slenderman none other than Eric Knudsen, who was even ruled to have been the copyright holder. Frankly, it’s less surprising than you may think that an urban legend has a copyright, Paul Bunyan, for example, was created by a logging company.
Quick disclaimer: I am unable to verify if this is the original image; archival information is sadly not well-kept. This image was found several times while researching and was used by CBS News in an interview with the creator, so to my best knowledge, this may be the original image.
Slenderman was an early internet monster I’d heard of a few times, yet I never dove into the YouTube videos that made him popular. Several channels were dedicated to Slendy, but it’s hard to argue against Marble Hornets being the biggest name, due to the simple fact that the late Roger Ebert praised them in a tweet. This alone was enough to make Slenderman a permanent stay on Wikipedia, but where Slenderman finally became a talking point was from a surprise hit viral game.
The idea was you had to retrieve eight pieces of paper from trees or structures. I have no idea why—that’s just not something I questioned—nor why finding them all will stop Slenderman. With each page you pick up, the more Slenderman will be after you.
Graphically, he looks as intimidating as breakfast, and when you have no pages, that’s also about how threatening he is. He won’t come after you until you collect your first page, so you only have the atmosphere to be afraid of, which is still enough thanks to just how well this free internet game manages to capture the pitch dark of an isolated forest. Swallow your fear while you’re not being chased though, as it’s the only chance you’ll have to scope out the area and find every page before you collect them. Consider it cheating if you must, but know that Slenderman will also cheat.
Every page collected will ramp the difficulty, and there will be times when the game just straight up makes Slenderman win. For example, if you find a page in the brick hallway area, be sure you grab it first, because when you turn a corner in that building, it will count as a spot Slenderman can spawn in front of you, and it will always choose to do so if you have enough pages. The game will be unwinnable because of this, and this is one of those times when having no checkpoints technically makes the game easier, as you’re better off starting from the beginning instead of being checkpointed into the unwinnable situation.
Playing it again now, there’s a perfect sense of hopelessness. I got lost in the forest and my flashlight would start to die the longer I walked aimlessly (and there are no extra batteries to pick up like in other flashlight-based games). The game’s forced difficulty surprisingly makes everything tenser instead of annoying. I ended up feeling like an insignificant bug who needed to think ahead and then be lucky on top of that. The jump scares felt like warnings instead of cheap tricks, and it was truly harrowing to experience all over again.
The formula just worked perfectly for Slenderman to the point I do think it still holds up against other “chased by monster” games such as Amnesia or Outlast. I’m a bigger fan of horror games where you can’t fight back; I feel a lot of action-horror games try too hard to still make players feel like a badass, which makes the threats so much weaker that I lose my fear of them. I also prefer horror games without the threat of death, as it can feel forced or cheap to try and compensate. Weirdly, The Eight Pages makes death even cheaper, and yet I love it for that. It adds to the hopelessness, that I never had a chance anyway, and it is finally time to admit defeat. Its cheapness serves the horror.
The game was free (and hard to find; for some reason there was never a Steam/Itch.io/GOG page) but was a big enough success to found Blue Isle Studios and then spin off into a sequel named Slender: The Arrival. Arrival’s reputation is a less positive story. Steam does currently consider it “very positive”, but the Metacritic scores across all platforms are in the 60s/50s.
Reading those reviews real quick, the game’s considered tedious and too short. Admittedly, so is the original, but I suppose you need something beefier when there’s a price tag. I would give my thoughts, but my thoughts aren’t much more than “I bought the Switch port years ago and forgot to ever play it.” There’s a graphical update coming on October 18 to celebrate the 10th anniversary, so there’s still some love for it despite the reception.
Slenderman’s reputation didn’t take much of a hit from Arrival being a dud, but sadly, the reputation would take several hits later on. In 2014, two little girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin attempted to sacrifice a friend of theirs to the Slenderman. The victim survived, not that it undermines the tragedy, and this brought heavy controversy to the Slenderman IP.
In terms of film; the 2016 HBO documentary Beware The Slenderman seems to be fairly divisive, while the 2018 movie was fully panned (although the box office returns were $51.7 million with a budget of between 10 and 28 million, so it did okay in terms of commercial success). On top of that, the copyright to the character has vanished. Knudsen sold the copyright to Mythology Entertainment, which dissolved from a partner split, meaning it’s not clear who owns the IP anymore.
The sad thing is, I’m not sure if those are the only reasons. I like the character, but I also think you could replace him in any of his stories with a Wendigo, La Llorona, or a Yokai, and it wouldn’t change anything. He’s kind of played out already. Even Blue Isle Studios is making a new horror game called S: The Lost Chapters, and it notably doesn’t use the word “Slenderman” or even “Slender”, despite still using those words while promoting the new update for The Arrival. I expected to defend the character, but maybe there’s no reason to.
The world moved on from Slenderman, and it will have to take a lot of convincing to make him viable as a worthy IP again. While I do think it’s possible, I’m also aware there are a lot of urban legends who fade into obscurity for everyone other than the scholars and fanatics. Maybe Slenderman is just the internet’s first true example of that, and maybe he’s waiting to pounce into pop culture relevance once again. We’ll just have to wait and see.