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.

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Satan’s Little Helper is one of the best films I’ve seen in a while, and that’s not bad for a film that cost me £1. It was one of those films I bought from a Poundshop last Halloween, expecting nothing more than some cheap laughs at the terrible scripting and atrocious special FX, but recently I saw it on an IGN feature on the ten most under-appreciated horror films of the noughties. That raised my expectations for the film somewhat, and it didn’t disappoint.

One of the reasons the film is so good, despite being obviously low-budget, is that it works with its budget-constraints rather than against them. Most budget horrors over-reach, trying to create scary, supernatural monsters, and falling into the traps of cliche. There were only a couple of times in Satan’s Little Helper where the effects let it down, but these were minor and brief. Mostly the film avoids gore, making its sudden appearances all the more shocking, not that the film relies on jump-scares.

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I have been terrible at updating this site, and in being creatively generally, not only since the start of this year, this new decade, but a little while before. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block exactly, it sounds like an excuse, but I’ve certainly had a dearth of creative output. Well, I’ve been writing my dissertation, but that’s only been here and there. No, I just haven’t been inspired for a while, and I’ve been busy, well, busyish. What have I been doing? I’m currently addicted to two games for a start: Forza Motorsport 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. The first is, as the name implies, a car game. I’m not even that into cars, a few months ago I couldn’t tell an R8 from a Veyron, a Dino from a Testarossa, but somehow I’ve been addicting to driving around in virtual sports cars, and it’s time-consuming. The second of those games is an epic fantasy game of the really geeky sort, with elves and dwarves and mages and such. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of that sort of thing, though I like the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s such a well-made game that can’t help but love it. Girlfriends take up time too, but I can hardly complain about that.

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