The Slender Man (also known as Slenderman) is a fictional character that originated as an Internet meme created bySomething Awful forums user Eric Knudsen (a.k.a. "Victor Surge") in 2009. It is depicted as resembling a thin, unnaturally tall man with a blank and usually featureless face, wearing a black suit. Stories of the Slender Man commonly feature him stalking, abducting, or traumatizing people, particularly children.[1] The Slender Man is not confined to a single narrative, but appears in many disparate works of fiction, mostly composed online.[2]
The Slender Man was created on a thread in the Something Awful Internet forum begun on June 8, 2009, with the goal of editing photographs to contain supernatural entities. On June 10, a forum poster with the user name "Victor Surge" contributed two black and white images of groups of children, to which he added a tall, thin spectral figure wearing a black suit.[3][4] Although previous entries had consisted solely of photographs, Surge supplemented his submission with snatches of text, supposedly from witnesses, describing the abductions of the groups of children, and giving the character the name "The Slender Man":
The quote under the first photograph read:
The Slender Man soon went viral, spawning numerous works of fanart, cosplay and online fiction known as "creepypasta": scary stories told in short snatches of easily copyable text that spread from site to site. Divorced from its original creator, the Slender Man became the subject of myriad stories by multiple authors within an overarching mythos.[2]
The first video series involving the Slender Man evolved from a post on the Something Awful thread by user "ce gars". It tells of a fictional film school friend named Alex Kralie, who had stumbled upon something troubling while shooting his first feature-length project, Marble Hornets. The video series, published in found footage style onYouTube, forms an alternate reality game describing the filmers' fictional experiences with the Slender Man. The ARG also incorporates a Twitter feed and an alternate YouTube channel created by a user named "totheark".[1][7] Marble Hornets is now one of the most popular Slender Man creations, with over 250,000 followers around the world, and 55 million views.[8] Other Slender Man-themed YouTube serials followed, including EverymanHYBRID and Tribe Twelve.[1]
In 2011, Markus "Notch" Persson, creator of the sandbox indie game Minecraft, added a new hostile mob to the game, which he named the "Enderman" when multiple users on Reddit and Google+ commented on the similarity to the Slender Man.[9] In 2012, the Slender Man was adapted into a video game titled Slender: The Eight Pages; as of August, 2012, the game has been downloaded over 2 million times.[10] Several popular variants of the game followed, including Slenderman's Shadow[11]and Slender Man for iOS, which became the second most-popular app download.[12] The sequel to Slender: The Eight Pages, Slender: The Arrival, was released in 2013.[13] Several independent films about the Slender Man have been released or are in development, including Entity[14] and The Slender Man, released free online after a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign.[15] In 2013, it was announced that Marble Hornets would become a theatrical film.[8]
