
Perhaps most tellingly, he tends to stick to rural areas.Īgain, all this is purely fictitious, but it's interesting that so many of these individual threads converged into a single vision coherent enough to yield a substantive game in Slender: The Arrival. He's most aggressive when you're trying to look straight at him. So how does he terrorize us now? When he approaches, he causes electronics, particularly cameras, to malfunction and glitch out. Slender Man is now a self-reinforcing curiosity of the modern era, reflecting the deep-seated fears of our connected culture. From that point on, he became a meme in the truest sense of the word, evolving and changing to suit whatever the population thought would yield the most easily shared terror. He is the embodiment of the unknown, and he preys on the weakest among us-children. The first few images of him depicted children running away-and right there, we have the seeds for a great ghost story. A few Photoshop projects featured a thin, suited figure without an apparent face. He's now a self-reinforcing curiosity of the modern era, reflecting the deep-seated fears of our connected culture.įor those unfamiliar with this phenomenon, Slendy, as some affectionately call him, was born on the internet forums of the 21st century.


Although he is without a doubt fictitious-a legend manufactured wholecloth in full view of the internet's many denizens-he's transcended himself. I can't help but blend those headlines with subsequent forays into the Slender Man mythos. Slender Man has captured a large part of the popular psyche-large enough that two girls stabbed a third girl 19 times, and other children commit acts of arson, all in his name.
