Now that we're in the middle of October and I'll be doing the OSU Trunk or Treat next week (Monday if the weather cooperates, Wednesday if the weather doesn't work out), I think that it's appropriate to talk about the scariest legend ever: Slenderman.
Yeah, you know that internet meme that was a big deal when Victorious was on Nickelodeon and the Twilight films were a big deal (neither Victorious or Twilight have anything to do with Slenderman, just citing them as pop culture things popular when Slenderman was popular)? And that meme that outside of discussions on the moral panic that happened with crimes were being linked to it, but outside of that has faded from relevance.
I'm actually talking about the Slenderman meme because it's a bit of a punching bag for me, because I've never found it scary for one. And two, I just don't understand how people can commit crimes based on something that's not real.
First, the serious stuff. I'm not crapping on Slenderman as a creation. However, it just doesn't make sense to me that people can attempt to kill other people because they claim that this Agent 47 from the Hitman games expy told them to. Either the people who did that just weren't right in the head to begin with (IE, the have legitimate mental problems that manifested themselves in this fashion), or the people who committed such crimes had pretty good lawyers.
I feel for the victims and such, but I'm just curious, and probably a bit perturbed, how such a thing can happen.
Now, on to the fun stuff. I already poked a bit of fun at Slenderman by saying that he looks like Agent 47 from the Hitman video game franchise without a face. But to me, such a thing was never really very scary.
I mean, I watched a few episodes of the MTV thriller series Eye Candy back in the day, and they were scarier than Slenderman. Twilight was scarier than Slenderman. The Jade West character that Liz Gilles played on Victorious was scarier. The Lindy Sampson character as played by Victoria Justice on Eye Candy was scarier. Speaking of Victoria Justice, Tori Vega from Victorious, Naomi from Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List and Victoria herself are scarier than Slenderman. The Undertaker and Kane are scarier. Want me to keep piling it on?
Granted, I was very much an adult when Slenderman came out and was popular, and the whole previous paragraph I wrote was just for fun. But in all seriousness, unless you were a little kid, how would Slenderman scare someone?
I knew that Slenderman wasn't scary when I saw a YouTube video by YouTube personality Penguinz0 (AKA Cr1tikal) playing Slender: The Eight Pages. Pretty hilarious video, if you don't mind dirty jokes and swearing.
Speaking of Penguinz0, he also did a review of that spectacular train wreck of a film called Slender Man that got released last year by Sony. Not only was the film short on scares (yeah, I know, it was also rated PG-13, and most PG-13 horror films tend to suck. But The Messengers was PG-13 and reasonably creepy, and Eye Candy was dealing with PG-13 rated content, and was also fairly creepy), but it was also ill timed. The only relevance that Slenderman had was related to crimes and attempted murders linked to the mythos, but otherwise, Slenderman was a big nothing sandwich.
Slenderman was popular as a meme from basically 2010-2013 or so. Again, to give perspective, Victorious had its original run on Nickelodeon from '10-'13. It started to decline in popularity around 2013-2015. Sony decided to release the film Slender Man in 2018, years past when Slenderman's popularity was past its prime. To further back this up, when Penguinz0 went to see the film to review it for his YouTube channel, he said that there was practically no one there in the theater. To say that Slender Man bombed at the box office was an understatement.
I wrote this post mostly to poke some fun at the Slenderman mythos and such, but also mention how somewhere, somehow the line between fiction and reality got blurred and some bad things happened as a result. And I wanted to share my personal feelings on both issues as we're getting closer to Halloween.
Everyone have a good one
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