Slender Man **
Dir:
Sylvain White. With: Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalise
Basso. 93 mins. Cert: 15
A
Slender Man movie might well have presented as a commercially viable option
earlier this decade, when the spectral childsnatcher created by Eric Knudsen
for somethingawful.com was proliferating as one of the Internet’s creepier
memes. That was before the near-fatal 2014 stabbing of a 12-year-old Wisconsin
girl by classmates claiming to be serving this fictional creation, the objections
the victim’s father raised to the then-shooting project, and the cuts designed
to both appease the relatives and secure a teen-baiting rating. Sony have
hustled the results out into scattered late-night slots without fanfare,
perhaps understandably, as there’s not much left to distribute: if you thought
the bogeyman was slender, wait till you see the film.
Writer
David Birke and director Sylvain White here graft together material from The Ring, the Blair Witches and Wes Craven’s
Nightmares, garnished with an incongruous dash of the Traveling Pants franchise. (Arguably just the pants bit.) In a
nondescript Massachusetts backwater, four broadly interchangeable BFFs stray
during a sleepover onto a website blasting epileptic-unfriendly imagery. When
one subsequently vanishes, the others begin roaming dark woods and shadowy
reference libraries with torches, attempting to bargain with a figure who
strikes the eye as far less disturbing than Jacob Rees-Mogg. Makeweight and
unfinished, this Slender Man’s featureless visage mostly recalls those
balls-on-sticks deployed as placeholders in the filming of effects movies.
Despite
the cuts, what’s going on around him proceeds with a vague internal logic,
albeit of the dull, flat, relentlessly unoriginal kind: here’s a stock horror
scenario, White proposes, and here’s how it generally plays out. What’s been
vanished from this theatrical version is any trace of blood or dread. Too
often, these scenes default to indifferently timed jump scares, mothballed
dream imagery, and cinematography so artlessly murky it’s no surprise
characters keep disappearing. (Faceless ghouls almost become normalised when
you can’t see anybody’s eyes.)
The
modest, generally well-behaved young crowd I saw the film with on opening night
tolerated an hour before shrugging exitwards or trawling their phones for “Baby
Shark” remixes; they missed one late, semi-arresting sylvan sequence that might
have served as a legitimate showstopper in a less obviously compromised
production. Still, when the multiplex’s cultural reference points are this
vaporous and moment-specific, can we really blame the target audience for
moving on, or simply failing to see the outcome at all?
Slender Man is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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