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Others have summarized this documentary far better than I can. I will just reiterate that the movie is far too long. There is a lengthy description of folklore and horror stories, which could have been cut down considerably.

Then there are the interviews with the parents of the two perpetrators, which also could have been cut down. It seems like there is a lot of repetition.

This movie could have been tightened up and submitted as a short- subject documentary, and I think it would have been better.

I did like the courtroom sequences; however, the cases are not yet resolved. Perhaps the film-maker could have waited another six months to give the story a better conclusion? Obviously the appeals are going to drag on for years, but at least show the audience the outcome of the trials, which apparently are taking place in the spring of 2017.

I also would have liked to have heard from the victim, or a member of the victim's family.

It's like there wasn't even a victim in this story. So sad. You would have thought the two criminals were the victims. I kept waiting to see a statement about how the victim and her family declined to participate. It never came. Their voices were so painfully absent. All tangled up in all the wrong things.

Overall it was certainly interesting, even captivating. But I found myself wanting so badly to hear from poor Payton. The only victim, along with her loved ones.

It will be interesting to see how it all turns out.

All the details about how internet myths start was so scary. And how kids are being raised now is scariest of all.

Beware of the Slenderman was well-received at its world premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. It is a true crime story about two 12-year-old girls who attempt to kill another young girl. The film, which will be broadcast in the near future on HBO. They are telling an intriguing story, but they try to tell too many stories. It seems obvious from the beginning that the girls are suffering from severe mental illness and that's the primary explanation for their violent behavior. Their behavior appears to be linked to mythic internet creature called Slenderman. Some of the most intellectual parts are their explorations of myth and folklore and how people come to rely on them. But then they seem to want to blame mental illness on misuse of the Internet. They don't seem to realize that there are mentally ill people who acted out violently long before there was the Internet. Long before "Slenderman" there were young people with psychological issues. And then spend a lot of time talking to the kids' troubled parents who feel responsible. And they explore the court procedures around their story. And they keep going on and on. They can't really figure out what story they are telling. At two hours the film simply goes on too long and goes off on too many tangents. They repeat their themes over and over without really getting that far. In the end, they could have told this troubling story a lot better and lot more simply. It is still an entertaining story, but it could have been a lot better.

It seems as though the victim in this, Payton Leutner, is just a footnote to this story. She was talked about very little, almost as if she were just some random classmate. I kept waiting to hear from her or her family, and when I didn't, I waited for a disclaimer that they didn't want to be interviewed, but neither happened. The film portrayed a lot of sympathy for the girls, and I have none. They had planned out this attack. Even at 12 years old, you know killing someone is wrong. But watching their families go on and on about how hard it was to be without their daughters and how it was so upsetting, it is easy to see why the girls themselves were so self-centered. They showed no remorse for killing her whatsoever. This film could have been so much better. What a disappointment.

I found this to be a well done documentary that effectively portrayed our society the way it is today. The film glossed over the plight of the victim just as these girls did, and we expect them to show empathy? Did the filmmakers?

It's true kids are overexposed to a lot of things on the internet, but when HAVEN'T kids been exposed to awful things? Just look at the history of the world!! It is RIFE with horrific wars, oppression, persecution, poverty, death...children have always been exposed to these things.

The justice system is ridiculous. Trying 6th graders as adults, questioning their beliefs and labeling them mentally ill at age 12 when the brain isn't even developed? There's a reason we don't diagnose psychopathy until age 18.

I'm not excusing what these girls did. Its horrific. But why are we so baffled? Wars have been raging for millennia, and even in the 21st century society ADULTS are killing each other in the name of "beliefs," which are quite honestly no less rational than internet demons.

Seriously.

This documentary is an interesting look into how a supernatural internet meme can influence young minds. In this case, 2 young girls were convinced that an an internet creation, Slenderman, made them stab fellow classmate in the woods.

The documentary delves into the mental illness and how dangerous unsupervised internet can be for susceptible minds. I also took away how unprepared the court / prison systems can be when dealing with mental issues and how there is no real rehabilitation process in place - these young girls can only have 2 contact visits with their family each month.

There are some genuinely creepy parts - especially the part where one of the girls tells her family that the "others" decide what she watches on TV in her cell at night even though she is kept in solitary confinement.

However a bit too long and one sided - the 2 girls are not really the victim

This started off as a fascinating insight in to a horrific crime and it's young instigators but it is far too insular in its focus. By the 60 minute mark I was satisfied that the assailants motivations had been biasely justified, the whole "slenderman" and mythology in general had been thoroughly covered and I was craving for the story to expand in to the physiology of the young impressionable mind, into psychopathy (a blatantly obvious trait of at least one of the girls) and for the focus to switch to the victim and her family (in a respectful way, considering they didn't want to be involved), their complete ommission from the documentary plays out as an indifference to their horrific experience instead. I was also surprised with the multiple mentions of "believers" needing a group to belong to and the brainwashing involved in that dynamic, that the documentary makers weren't brave enough to bring up religion in that discussion (especially as a world leading expert on the subject Richard Dawkins was on a Skype call at one point)... But no they only used santa clause and the tooth fairy as examples.

I have done some research about this case, so i found this documentary both Terrible, one-sided, and disturbing. The whole thing at nearly two hours long includes far too much about this ridiculous character the girls who committed this brutal crime blamed it upon. One of them though she may be at the start of a lifelong mental illness, it is pretty obvious at the time of the crime that they both knew what they were doing was wrong. In fact they had been planning it for nearly six months prior. The stupidity of the so called experts psychiatrists and psychologists is truly baffling, in my opinion both girls at just 12 years old seemed to have manipulated the system. We have seen this before and I really hope they cannot hurt anyone else. My thoughts are with the brave victim and her family, since both the defendant's families don't seem that remorseful either. Could have been a gripping and deep look at an appalling case, felt like a sympathy plo from two highly disturbed and dangerous children.

"Beware the Slenderman" (2016 release; 115 min.) is a true-crime documentary. As the movie opens, we are told it is "Waukesha, WI - May 31, 2014", and the police are coming out en masse after a 12 yr. old girl is found stabbed and in critical condition. It's not long before we understand that the girl was stabbed 19 times by two other 12 yr. old girls, apparently to appease a certain Slenderman. What happened here exactly? At this point we are 10 min. into the movie but to tell you more of the 'plot' would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: this is the latest from writer-producer-director (and veteran documentarian) Irene Taylor Brodsky. She traces the lives of Morgan and Anissa and how they eventually planned to kill their friend Bella, and why. The movie does a good job giving those of us not familiar with the Slenderman phenom what it's all about, and how this may have influenced these young girls into doing what they did. One of the key legal issues is whether the girls should be tried as adults or not. The best part of the movie for me is the extensive footage taken from the (separate) interviews of the girls the day they are apprehended. You can't make this stuff up, just absolutely amazing. There are also extensive interviews with the parents, none of whom had any clue whatsoever that something might not be right with these girls. And then there are the multiple psychiatrists who pitch in whether this involves delusional disorder or even schizophrenia. Yes, for 12 year old kids! My only complaint is that, at about 2 hours, the documentary is a bit too long for its own good. Tighter editing could've easily trimmed 15 min. or so without losing any of the essence of this fascinating true-crime documentary.

The documentary originally aired on HBO in early 2017, but thankfully I found this in the HBO On Demand library just the other day. Beware: filming for the documentary concluded (roughly) at the end of 2015, so the movie is frankly a little bit out of date by now, and I ended up searching on-line what became of all this in the last 3 years. Other than that, I was transfixed by "Beware of Slenderman".

It seems to me most of the people who don't like this movie feel that way simply because they think these girls are "evil".

I DO have sympathy for these girls because I am very familiar with schizophrenia and schizo-typo mental disorders, and can see beyond the black/white dichotomy of good and evil that people like to cling to. I thought the interviews with the parents were crucial in establishing the mind-frame of the kids at the time, as well as showing the guilt and anguish that a parent feels in the aftermath of your child committing a brutal crime. Never did I feel like the film was excusing the horrific nature of the crime, but trying to draw out how it ended up happening in the first place.

I know that people have voiced criticism that there was little on the victim - that is because the victim's family declined to participate (totally within their rights, and totally understandable). But the fact of the matter is, with cases like these, the important part is to study the perpetrators -- how do you prevent horrors like this from happening if you don't understand HOW they came to happen?

Personally, I thought the section about urban folklore, and how it can multiply rapidly on the internet to be really interesting.

I'm a true crime doc, and I thought this was well done.

HBO documentary about the famous case of the two 12-year-old girls who tried to murder a friend, as a tribute to the character from the Creepypastas in 2009.

On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser lured their friend Payton Leutner into a forest and stabbed her 19 times in an attempt to take over the fictional character Slender Man. Leutner survived and recovered. After six days hospitalized. Weier and Geyser were found not guilty for mental illness, being interned in mental health institutions with sentences of 25 and 40 years, respectively.

The documentary emphasizes the testimonies of the parents of the victimizers, but the most interesting are the images of the interrogations hours after the attack and in them you can see how convinced they were of the existence of the terrifying being and that what they did was something necessary.

The bad thing about the document is that it is from 2016 and it was released in 2017, so there is only the hearing in which a judge decided that they should be tried as adults and not as minors (remember that they were 12 years old at the time of the event ), so there is no trial that sentenced Weier to 25 years (she was paroled on September 21) the ideologue of the fact and Geyser to 40 years, after diagnosing her as schizophrenic, since she was the one who stabbed her friend.

While the documentary seeks to explore several themes around mental health, modern folklore, bullying, and modern technology's role in adolescent development and parenting it seldom finds a coherent thread to pull them together in any meaningful way. The film starts interestingly enough exploring the story of two adolescent girls who are pending trial as adults for the attempted murder of their friend. This in and of itself would make for a compelling case study on mandatory laws surrounding the subject of violent crimes committed by minors. Add to that the fact that the girls committed this act to gain the favor of a modern fictional boogeyman named Slenderman, and we now have the potential for an even more compelling discussion around mental health, the internet's influence on child development, modern parenting and any number of related topics. Unfortunately, this is where the narrative seems to stall with the filmmakers doing little more than exploring the folklore of Slenderman and how the girls' mutual status as outsiders may have led them to seek acceptance through belief in the fictional being. Though the filmmakers make several attempts to explore other themes including mental health (which arguably should be the central narrative), they seldom make it past a cursory examination of the facts as they exist, and attempt to draw little to no conclusion about how these facts should influence the outcome of the still pending trial. Perhaps this stance, or lack there-of, is out of respect for the victim in this tragic case, which is surprisingly absent through most of the discussion. The result however, is a story that would be thought provoking as a 30 minute true-crime new story, but feels a bit drawn out as the handful of facts are repeated ad nauseum, rarely digging past the surface of any single topic.

I was disappointed with this documentary. I wanted to learn what happened with the girls who stabbed their friend but way too much of the documentary was about Slenderman, luckily I could fast forward through all those parts. If they removed all the stuff about Slenderman I would have given this a much higher rating.

Theres nothing exceptional about the film making, overall it's a relatively bland documentary- however, because the topic is so very interesting, theres no way the documentary can end up being boring. It ends up being more of an informative video than an involving documentary, but that's OK.

Yes, that's a bit of brevity before we address a few serious topics.

This documentary was very topical when it was released 9 years ago. There were several key elements that needed to be addressed with this incident, most notably the use / overuse of technology by our youth, and its potential repercussions.

Before the days of the internet and social media, we wouldnt have considered entertaining the idea of strangers or adults being left alone in private situations with our children. With the influx of our now tech saturated world, the parental challenges faced have left most playing catch up - or attempting to.

The 2014 Waukesha incident made national headlines when a stabbing incident among three 12-year old "friends" stunned those well beyond Wisconsin borders. This documentary attempts to get to and beyond the "why" and the "how" this could ever occur.

The documentary starts off slick, polished, and grabs our attention. The interviews that take place with the two perpetrators and their families do shed a great deal of light on the "why" beyond this tragedy, one that gratefully did not come at the expense of a life cut short far too early.

Still there were issues I was waiting to have addressed that were barely touched upon, or never were. First, what was brought up in several reviews, the fact that the victim and her family are not present. Certainly it was their choice to refrain from taking part in this. Not everyone wants to have their families exposed to this type of publicity. Peyton's family wanted no part of this, which I can fully understand. Personally, we would very likely feel the same in a similar scenario.

As someone who worked in the field with youth to young adults dealing with emotional and psychological traumas for well over two decades, I found the interviews with the two girls to be quite telling. You could see the impact of social media universe on these girls as well as a generation of kids who are considered the 'misfits' among their peer groups. Both Anissa and Morgan displayed intelligence beyond their years in certain aspects of life - those no doubt related to their social media personas and pursuits. But the exposure to many life aspects where the repercussions are beyond a 6th grader's comprehension were quite evident as well.

A great deal of the 2nd half was focused on Morgan's schizophrenia diagnosis, and its impact on how it led to the stabbing. Yet, the entire second have of the documentary found me waiting for a key issue to be addressed - that of Anissa's key role in how it all played out. Anissa and Morgan were very tight, so its very likely Anissa understood Morgan's limitations and vulnerabilities. "They" planned the attack long in advance, yet when it came time to act, Anissa made excuses, and stepped back from the assault, all the while aggressively egging on Morgan to carry out the plan to attack her friend. {"Go ballistic" - when have you ever heard a 12 yr old come up with that one?} How this all played out manipulatively and psychologically between the two girls was glaringly absent from this final hour.

Also, were their ever attempts made by the parents of the two assailants to reach out to Payton and her family?

Other factors:

* I've long observed how empathy has been an increasingly missing facet from our culture, and not just among the current generation of teens. Many of the adults were far more focused on how this event impacted them personally than showing concern for the girls. For the most part they were very locked in / trapped by their own personal bubble. The two perpetrators themselves simply had no ability to empathize with anyone beyond themselves, something I pray they have developed over time.

* The segments that included family members beyond the 3 parents featured were brief, lacked depth, and really didnt add anything to the story.

* When the psychologist was on the stand, he gave out numbers / degrees of severity of Morgan's diagnoses. An explanation of what these findings meant would have been helpful.

* Sites such as the Creepypasta site, what they represent, how they fill a void in an isolated young person's life, and the potential short term and long term implications.

Most disappointing is this would have been a great opportunity to address the facets of bullying, exclusion, isolation, and internet obsession, and where they may all lead. And how for we as parents it is absolutely essential that we are "all in" in doing all we can to protect our dependents from the damage and evils the outside world is all too eager to bring into their lives. Let our kids and teens fuss and protest, ultimately helping them to navigate the teen and preteen years with the goal of a mentally healthy and productive adult life should always be priority number one.

All that said, this is a documentary that every parent should watch, maybe even with other parents, which will hopefully lead to some hard discussions thereafter.

I have a rule. I rate documentaries with: 7 if it is great. 6 if it is good. 5 if it is less than good.

The reason is: Docs have lower ceilling and higher floors, because they are all at least an extensive view/opinion on something (even if it is morally or factually wrong), and at most they are all edits of real life (no matter how long the doc is and how factual it is, there is subjetivity and therefore not the real thing).

This one is pretty straight. Its fine. It informs you of the situation, more or less. And that's pretty much it. There is no doubt about the situation of the girls and the reasons behind what they did. Its a proffesional job of an interesting story, but there isn't much more than that.

Beware the Slenderman is a fascinating documentary exploring the tragic stabbing of a young girl by two of her friends. The young girls became infatuated with a fictional online character (Slenderman) and believe they must kill their friend Bella or the Slenderman will kill their families. Crazy right? Well yes, but lets get to know why... and that is exactly what Irene Brodsky (director) does.

The documentary gives an insight into the act of killing, the repercussions, the crazy US justice system, the effects on family and friends and the ​issues of mental illness in children. I imagine the victims family did not want to be interview for the film but I would of been interested to contrast the families pain after this awful event.

The film is careful ​about how it challenges the​se​ subjects​,​ however does so by showing the very real and heartbreaking story of this particular case. The film is well made, brilliantly directed and challenges how we view and 'treat' mental illness. A lot of people might of been excepting a rubbish horror movie when they saw the title of this film but I can assure you this film is far more scary, distressing​ but an important watch.

I think the trailer for this documentary were VERY misleading. I was so disappointed, mostly because it doesn't focus on the victim, or even, Slenderman for that matter. I felt that it was basically a forum for the suspects' families to try and justify the actions of these evil little girls. I mean, watching the interviews of the girls left me speechless at how they didn't have an OUNCE of remorse. Then, the worst part, was the interview of the grandmother of one of the girls. In my opinion, this did nothing except display at the ignorance of the parents. HBO usually kills it with documentaries in general, such as "There's something wrong with Aunt Diane". That's a awesome film. But, if you want to know more about the "Skenderman stabbing" case, watch 48 hrs.