News

‘Slender Man’ Is Far Too Thin On Lore

Published

6 years ago

August 12, 2018

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: My friends and I called it ‘Slenderman’. The 2018 film called it ‘Slender Man’. I will use those two spellings to differentiate between the two.)

I grew up in the height of the Slenderman craze.

I was in the early years of high school when ‘Slender’, the online horror flash-game featuring the titular Slenderman as its antagonist, was released. My friends and I would huddle up in a dark room and play it, with the volume booming. We’d run out of the room screaming after jump-scares.

It was all silly, stupid fun.

But I wanted more than silly, stupid fun from Slender Man.

This poster is the best thing about Slender Man

Directed with undeniable visual gusto by Sylvain White, and starring a quartet of likable young actresses, this movie had a lot going for it. It even featured Javier Botet, one of the greatest working creature actors, as its antagonist! Botet terrified in movies like Mama (2013) and REC. (2007), but he is utterly wasted here.

The main issues with Slender Man come from the film’s basic misunderstanding of what actually made Slenderman scary in the first place. When we were kids, my friends and I would spend hours poring over the supposed ‘accounts’ of encounters with the creature, watching videos (shout-out to Marble Hornets!), and coming up with our own stories.

Slenderman was documented on the internet, but he didn’t exist there. He existed inside us. In our minds. It was the idea that he might actually be out there, in the woods (not on the net), that made it scary.

First of all, the film presents us with a convoluted ritual which must be used to ‘summon’ Slender Man. This was never part of the lore (that I knew of, admittedly the mythology was pretty vast), and in my opinion, it weakens the plot. Slenderman was scary because he could get you anywhere, at any time.

He didn’t need to be summoned. He was already there.

Slender Man presents the monster as being a sort of digital Candyman. He lives on the internet. He’s from there. He only comes to the real world when he’s ‘summoned’.

Our heroines watch a spooky online video (yes, dear reader, it is exactly like The Ring), and the Slender Man starts stalking them. They start to have bad dreams, which is admittedly where the movie shows off its best, creepiest imagery.

They also start to see the Slender Man, which…leaves a lot to be desired.

There is such a thing as taking a design too literally. It is clear that, when designing this film’s visuals, the graphic artists looked at drawings of Slenderman. But their Slender Man looks like a sad, digital rendering of the most basic of those drawings.

I always found that one of the scariest things about Slenderman was that no one could quite nail-down what he looked like. Every drawing was a little different.

But in this film, when he’s not too shrouded in darkness to see, Slender Man looks like a CGI suit on a store mannequin with big, rubber hands. They also chose to add the ill-advised ‘back tentacles’ (an unfortunate result of the ‘Slender’ craze), which look clunky and too-thick to be useful.

And then, to top it all off, I kid you not…Slender Man walks on big, clunky spider legs. Like Pennywise.

It is decidedly not scary.

So now, let’s talk about what Slender Man did right, and how they could have made it better.

A nightmarish vision from Slender Man.

There is a good movie hiding somewhere in Slender Man. The four main characters, particularly our secondary protagonist Wren (played by Joey King), are legitimately well-acted and likable.

Sure, they’re a discount ‘Losers Club’, but I’ll give them a pass nonetheless.

This movie does its best work early, when Slender Man is still just an idea, and not a literal monster. He appears in the abstract. In nightmares, in sounds from the forest, as a shadow on the wall. We still have no direct confirmation that he is real. We just know our protagonists are afraid of him.

One of my favorite sequences comes right near the middle of the film, when two of the principle characters search the room of a missing girl for clues. What they find are drawings, dozens of drawings, showing different iterations of Slender Man.

The creepiest of them shows a tree, with a long spider-hand coming down from a seemingly normal branch, holding a girl’s hand.

The more real Slender Man we get, the more the movie falls apart.

The real Slender Man ends up being a generic poltergeist who drags screaming children into the woods with living tree branches and CGI tentacles. There is no strange, hypnotic charm. No mind-control. No “Pied Piper” aesthetic.

The Slender Man just takes you, and kills you. That’s it.

And that’s not Slenderman.

One of the original Slenderman Images.

One of the most common themes of Slenderman lore was that kids wanted to go with him. He didn’t take you, you went willingly. And how terrifying is that? The idea that you would go purposefully into the woods at the whim of a tall, faceless specter; off to god knew where?

The fact that this film didn’t take advantage of an element as bluntly terrifying as that is criminal.

I won’t lie, I truly believe that the people behind Slender Man were trying to make a good film. It never felt to me like a simple, dumb cash-grab. It had a lot of elements that I genuinely liked, or at least appreciated.

But I think, as adults so often do, the creators of Slender Man misunderstood what was so damn scary about the thing in the first place.

When you turn Slenderman into a sort of generic ‘boogeyman’, a jump-scare engine that pulls kids screaming into the woods, you lose a lot of what made him scary in the first place. This movie would have been better served showing a lot less of its title character, and leaving a lot more to the imagination.

Slenderman lives in the imagination, you see. He’s not online, or in the woods. He’s inside you. In your head. In your friends’ heads. He is every too-tall shadow. Every branch that looks vaguely like a hand. Every weird, hollow sound in the night.

Slenderman isn’t any one thing.

He is exactly what you want him to be.

(RATING: 3 out of 5 Stars)

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News

Melissa Barrera Says Her ‘Scream’ Contract Never Included a Third Movie

Published

9 hours ago

April 15, 2024

Timothy Rawles

The Scream franchise has done a major overhaul to its original script for Scream VII after its two main leads departed production. Jenna Ortega who played Tara Carpenter left because she was overly booked and blessed while her co-star Melissa Barrera was fired after making political comments on social media.

But Barrera isn’t regretting any of it. In fact, she is happy where the character arc left off. She played Samantha Carpenter, the latest focus of the Ghostface killer.

Barrera did an exclusive interview with Collider. During their talk, the 33-year-old says she fulfilled her contract and her character Samantha’s arc finished at a good spot, even though it was meant to be a trilogy.

“I feel like the ending of [ Scream VI ] was a very good ending, and so I don’t feel like ‘Ugh, I got left in the middle.’ No, I think people, the fans, were wanting a third movie to continue that arc, and apparently, the plan was a trilogy, even though I was only contracted for two movies.

So, I did my two movies, and I’m fine. I’m good with that. I got two – that’s more than most people get. When you’re on a TV show, and it gets canceled, you can’t harp on things, you gotta move on.

That’s the nature of this industry too, I get excited for the next job, I get excited for the next skin I get to put on. It’s exciting to create a different character. So yeah, I feel good. I did what I set out to do. It was always meant to be two movies for me, ’cause that was my contract, and so everything is perfect.”

The entire production of the original seventh entry has moved on from the Carpenter’s storyline. With a new director and new script, production will resume, including the return of Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox.

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News

Read Reviews For ‘Abigail’ The Latest From Radio Silence

Published

13 hours ago

April 15, 2024

Timothy Rawles

The review embargo has lifted for the vampire horror movie Abigail and the reviews are abundantly positive.

Matt Bettinelli– Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence are getting early praise for their latest horror movie which opens on April 19. Unless you’re Barbie or Oppenheimer the name of the game in Hollywood is about what kind of box office numbers you pull on opening weekend and how much they drop thereafter. Abigail could be this year’s sleeper.

Radio Silence is no stranger to opening big, their Scream reboot and sequel packed fans into seats on their respective opening dates. The duo are currently working on another reboot, that of 1981’s Kurt Russel cult favorite Escape From New York.

^Abigail

Now that ticket sales for GodzillaxKong, Dune 2, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire have gathered patina, Abigail could knock A24’s current powerhouse Civil War from the top spot, especially if ticket buyers base their purchase off reviews. If it is successful, it could be temporary, since Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s action comedy The Fall Guy opens on May 3, just two weeks later.

We have gathered pull quotes (good & bad) from some genre critics on Rotten Tomatoes (score for Abigail currently sits at 85%) to give you an indicator of how they are skewing ahead of its release this weekend. First, the good:

“Abigail is a fun, bloody ride. It also has the most lovable ensemble of morally grey characters this year. The film introduces a new favorite monster into the genre and gives her room to take the biggest swings possible. I lived!” — Sharai Bohannon: A Nightmare On Fierce Street Podcast

“The standout is Weir, commanding the screen despite her small stature and effortlessly switching from apparently helpless, terrified child to savage predator with a mordant sense of humor.” — Michael Gingold: Rue Morgue Magazine

“‘Abigail’ sets the bar as the most fun you can have with a horror movie of the year. In other words, “Abigail” is horror on pointe.” — BJ Colangelo: Slashfilm

“In what may become one of the greatest vampire movies of all time, Abigail provides an extremely bloody, fun, humorous & fresh take on the subgenre.” — Jordan Williams: Screen Rant

“Radio Silence have proven themselves as one of the most exciting, and crucially, fun, voices in the horror genre and Abigail takes this to the next level.” — Rosie Fletcher: Den of Geek

Now, the not-so-good:

“It’s not badly made, just uninspired and played out.” — Simon Abrams: RogerEbert.com

A ‘Ready or Not’ redux running on half the steam, this one-location misfire has plenty of parts that work but its namesake isn’t among them.” –Alison Foreman: indieWire

Let us know if you are planning to see Abigail. If or when you do, give us your hot take in the comments.

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Movies

Ernie Hudson To Star In ‘Oswald: Down The Rabbit Hole’

Published

3 days ago

April 12, 2024

Elijah Turner

This is some exciting news! Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters 1984, The Crow 1994) is set to star in the upcoming horror film titled Oswald: Down The Rabbit Hole. Hudson is set to play the character Oswald Jebediah Coleman who is a brilliant animator that is locked away in a terrifying magical prison. No release date has been announced yet. Check out the announcement trailer and more about the film below.

ANNOUNCEMENT TRAILER FOR OSWALD: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

The film follows the story of “Art and some of his closest friends as they help track down his long-lost family lineage. When they find and explore his Great-Grandpa Oswald’s abandoned home, they encounter a magical TV that teleports them to a place lost in time, shrouded by dark Hollywood Magic. The group finds that they are not alone when they discover Oswald’s come-to-life cartoon Rabbit, a dark entity that decides their souls are it’s for the taking. Art and his friends must work together to escape their magical prison before the Rabbit gets to them first.”

First Look Image at Oswald: Down the Rabbit Hole

Ernie Hudson stated that “I am excited to work with everyone on this production. It’s an incredibly creative and smart project.”

Director Stewart also added “I had a very specific vision for Oswald’s character and knew I wanted Ernie for this role from the start, as I’ve always admired iconic cinematic legacy. Ernie is going to bring Oswald’s unique and vengeful spirit to life in the best way possible.”

Lilton Stewart III and Lucinda Bruce are teaming up to write and direct the film. It stars actors Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters 1984, The Crow 1994), Topher Hall (Single Drunk Female 2022), and Yasha Rayzberg (A Rainbow in the Dark 2021). Mana Animation Studio is helping produce the animation, Tandem Post House for post-production, and VFX supervisor Bob Homami is also helping. The budget for the film currently sits at $4.5M.

Official Teaser Poster for Oswald: Down the Rabbit Hole

This is one of many classic childhood stories that are being turned into horror films. This list includes Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, Bambi: The Reckoning, Mickey’s Mouse Trap, The Return of Steamboat Willie, and many more. Are you more interested in the film now that Ernie Hudson is attached to star in it? Let us know in the comments below.

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