Slender Man

Slender Is The Night

Slender Man
2018 USA Directed by Sylvain White
UK cinema release print.

I don’t know too much about the original Slender Man internet meme (or whatever this new urban myth is best known as) but I remember, not too many years after joining twitter, that it was mentioned quite a lot on my timeline. I never really took much interest and the reality is it’s just a fictional character created by someone online and which has caught the imaginations of various people (mostly kids and teenagers, from what I can make out) and which has somehow found a life outside of the original scary pictures which were the starting point of this phenomena. Then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped coming up... a few years ago, maybe.

Part of the reason people may have stopped worshipping at the shrine of this strange, fictional creature may have been to do with various real life kids committing stabbings and knife attacks in the name of this character. I suspect that’s what has also delayed the arrival of this movie in cinemas (I’m pretty sure I saw a trailer for this in cinemas over a year ago... didn’t I?). So, yeah, the film seems to have arrived way past it’s time, when the character is just not on the pulse of popular teen culture anymore.

Also, it’s fairly disappointing.

Well, I say it’s disappointing but I do have to acknowledge that it’s a competently made movie with nice production values, some excellent performances from the main cast of five girls... played by Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalise Basso and Taylor Richardson... and a nicely dark and unreal atmosphere for most of the film. So I don’t know why the heck I didn’t get much from it, truth be told.

The film has some incredibly surrealistic scenes in it which, quite honestly, wouldn’t look out of place in a movie concocted by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel... so it’s not that the film is particularly boring. Especially since it’s supported by such a nicely on-the-nose musical score by Brandon Campbell and Ramin Djawadi. True, it’s from the modern school of ‘horror music equals sound design’ but it is quite eerie and soothingly dream-like, in some ways, so I am looking forward to grabbing the CD release of this one when I get a chance. So, I can’t in all honesty turn around and say it’s a terrible film, for sure.

That being said it does suffer from some absolute clichés of teenage targeted horror films which really do hit home here.

For instance, this is one of the films where the teenage protagonists only have access to parents when they absolutely need it or when those parents are required to play an active part in the story to move it along. Most of the time, however, they seem to be vaguely absent from the houses of the various teens fighting against their personal visitations of the Slender Man and this often makes the whole set up seem somewhat implausible. I mean, what the heck is happening here? Do these various responsible adults just go out all night and leave their children alone in their house?

And talking about the night... this film has way than more of its fair share of night time scenes. I mean, yes, we all know that horror works best when the lights are out and its the middle of the witching hour but, honestly, the town these people live in here seems to be almost perpetually night. There are scenes set in the daytime but they seem few and far between and, worse, some scenes start of in broad daylight and after a quick ten minute walk in the transition cut between two scenes, it will suddenly be set at night again... for absolutely no credible reason other than the obvious one... that horror movies are more effective when played out in darkness. Which seems a terrible justification of throwaway scenes which don’t quite gel together in the finished product, it seems to me. It’s almost like certain sequences filmed have been left on the cutting room floor when they might have accounted for the various incidents of missing time in the storyline. A sacrifice not worth making if it’s that relatable to the temporal space of the movie, I would say and, apparently, there are even two death scenes in the trailer which don’t make it into the final movie here. In fact, we don’t actually get to see what happens to those two characters here so... yeah... it feels a little bit incomplete (although I’m sure that could be rectified with a Blu Ray extended version of the film... which seems to be the fashion at the moment).

And goodness knows how all the kids seem to have each other's laptop and social media passwords. Um... what?

Ultimately, though, my main problem with the movie is... it just isn’t scary. And I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because the movie makers keep on piling encounter after encounter with the titular character that one just becomes jaded to it very quickly. Or maybe the timing on the jump scares are really not that good. In fact, I remember a scene fairly early on where one of the characters is trying to see if there’s some kind of intruder outside the house and the camera is doing the usual horror movie tricks of panning around empty rooms waiting for you to spot something. Well, before I knew it, I found myself listening to a musical sting and the character ran screaming from the room. The character must have seen something, presumably a manifestation of the Slender Man in the background of the shot but... I certainly didn’t see anything. I must have been looking at the wrong part of the screen by this point and missed all the action, which seems odd since a horror movie will usually direct your gaze to notice these little spots of terror quite expertly, I think. So yeah, I have to admit I was coasting through the movie without really fearing for any of the characters and I just felt kind of numb in terms of the potential emotional content of the movie.

Okay... so I’m sorry this is a slightly short review but I really don’t have much more to say about Slender Man. As I said before, some of the surrealistic sequences in the movie are nicely done but are maybe just a little too frequent and ultimately may be better when viewed out of context rather than watch them as part of their surrounding story line here. Not a movie I would recommend to regular watchers of the horror genre but certainly it could possibly be effective if you’ve never seen a horror movie before and are not as familiar with the various tropes and plot mechanisms that regular watchers may have grown accustomed to. Probably steer clear of this one if you are not in that camp.