Also caught Slender Man, the new horror movie based on the Internet creepypasta. Creepypasta, if you didn’t know, is a type of crowd-share internet story designed to creep you out. Slender Man is one of the stories, a modern bit of folklore that photoshops an image of a very tall, very thing faceless man in a suit (sometimes with tentacles) into old photographs. If you seek out Slender Man, he may take you away or drive you mad. It’s an interesting bit of folklore since we know exactly when and where it was created but some people apparently take it seriously. Or pretend to.
Anyhow, this new movie is based sort-of on that folklore. The character Slender Man exists as creepypasta in the flick but is also a real supernatural being. Four friends decide to summon him one night since you might have stared into a mirror and said Bloody Mary when you were a kid too, so why not? Slender Man then randomly messes with the girls and starts to vanish them one at a time. Can they figure out how to make him go away? I dunno. Do you care?
And it’s all very boring, very tedious, and very very – so very – dark. I’m not sure if the projector was broken or if the film was supposed to be as dark and murky as it was… though I’ve seen other reviewers point out the darkness so maybe it was intentional. If so, it made the movie almost unwatchable. Didn’t help that it was also unwatchably dull. Predictable. Full of dream sequences so you know if something creepy is happening, it’s probably not really happening so why bother being scared?
To be fair, the movie does seem to be trying to invoke a forboding, dark mood. There are individual shots that look fairly artsy and thought-out. But that doesn’t matter when the rest of the script and the film-making is so bland.
On top of that, the Slender Man himself doesn’t really match with the character on the internet. The girls have to watch a video that looks like it came from The Ring in order to summon him. And the Slender Man is a tree? Or turns people into trees? And makes creaking lumber sounds when he’s around? I mean, there’s a LOT of creepypasta stories about an entirely fictional creature so maybe the movie is reflecting some of those? I dunno… it just felt like they didn’t have enough spook to their spook so they just started tacking stuff on because, why not?
Only a few individual artistic and moody shots are worthwhile in this bad, generic scary movie. Characters are routine horror movie victims with varying levels of acting prowess. They squander the idea of creepypasta in general and Slender Man in particular. So, yeah, nobody need apply. Go read a creepy story on some message board instead.
Score: 62