The Slender Man
Oh, this is cool and creepy. I have only recently been made aware of the existence of ‘The Slender Man’ and it is one of the creepiest things I have seen in ages. I watched all the videos last night in the dark, and even though I was talking with my housemate as I watched them, they still rather unnerved me in a way nothing has done in a while.
An explanation of what The Slender Man is can be found here, but if you can’t be bothered to read that, it’s just an urban myth that was fabricated on the internet. Some guy came up with it on this fake paranormal photos thread and attached a little story to it. The story is that there is this being who stalks and kidnaps children, who has no discernible face, wears a business suit and is able to extend its limbs and even increase their number. On the face of it, it sounds somewhat ridiculous and generic, but some of the fake photos of it are pretty good.
They’re nothing compared with the videos on MarbleHornets’s YouTube channel, however. I recommend starting with ‘Introduction‘ and moving along them in their numbered order as intended. They are brilliant. They are the sort of videos that YouTube, that the internet in general, exists for. Apparently there’s some sort of ARG (Alternative Reality Game) attached to them, which is ongoing, but the videos as a series are accessible without participating in that, so if you didn’t know what an ARG was, just watch them.
Want more explanation before you jump in and make the time commitment of a few minutes to the videos? Well, the story goes, as is explained in ‘Introduction’, that this guy Alex was making a student movie. Halfway through the project his behaviour changed, he became irritable and paranoid, and then he abandoned the project, even though he had filled up all these tapes. He planned to burn these tapes, but his friend, a fellow film student, asked to have them in order to save them from the fire. Alex agreed so long as the tapes were never mentioned again. The guy who took the tapes didn’t do anything with them for a while, then got around to watching them. He noticed that Alex had started filming himself more than the film, and was carrying a camera with him wherever he went. That’s the start of the story.
The videos themselves are presented somewhat out of order and are a mix of footage from Alex on the set of his film, Alex’s house and interviews with the film-cast. It’s all done incredibly realistically, without the contrivances of, say, Cloverfield, and for the most part the videos are quite mundane. The thing you start to notice is that in the background of a lot of the shots is a humanoid figure, often stood motionlessly watching. It shouldn’t be nearly as creepy as it is, and it wouldn’t be if the figure ever moved or attacked or anything, but it doesn’t. It just stands.
It seems that Alex has become somewhat obsessed with this figure, or perhaps it is obsessed with him. He often leaves his camera recording overnight while he sleeps, and often snatches it up when he becomes aware of something near him, frantically trying to capture footage of this creature which stalks him. He only ever gets snatches of it, except in the lingering day-time shots where it stands in the background.
The videos also have a clever use of various effects which make the footage much creepier. For example, some of the videos have massive sound distortion or no sound at all. When this is coupled with mundane footage of Alex location-scouting, it somehow becomes really sinister.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how or why these videos are so creepy, but they are. Go watch them. At night. With the lights off. I’ve never written a horror story, but if I did, this is the sort I would want to write, this sort dealing with pervasive insipid horror. There’s never yet any direct confrontation with anything, with the Slender Man figure, just a feeling that he’s always there, waiting, watching. It’s the stuff of childhood nightmares.
There are a couple of minor instances when the videos border on the farcical, suffer from being, as they obviously were, made by students, but as YouTube videos they are perfect, they deliver the kind of story, the kind of horror experience, no film, no conventional novel, could ever hope to. That they’re creepy in spite of the Slender Man figure being acknowledged to have been created on the internet from a few explicitly fake photographs, is all the more to their credit. It rather reminded me of something Stephen King once said, which I can’t remember exactly, so I’ll paraphrase. Something along the lines of:
“My audience are the intelligent, rational people who does not believe in such things as ghosts and monsters, but keep their feet under the covers just in case.”
That’s the effect I felt the Slender Man videos had on me: of course I don’t believe it, it’s just a story, but I wrapped myself up tight in my covers after watching them, and I turned more lights on than usual when I went to the toilet in the night.
Go check out:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets
and
http://www.youtube.com/user/totheark
Tags: ARG, horror, MarbleHornets, narratives, scary, Slender Man, Totheark, videos
