The Slender Man

A solid attempt at making a horror film about an urban legend called Slender Man (first time I heard about it, but it sounds kind of intriguing). I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the special effects used for depicting the Slender Man. Yes, he appears very briefly on screen, but looks well made (this is an extremely low-budget movie, so I wasn't expecting him to appear at all). The rest of the movie was just your standard "found footage" horror, unremarkable and mostly dull, only slightly more interesting toward the end.

Can't say I would recommend this to anyone but hardcore fans of "found footage" horror movies like The Blair Witch Project. It's mostly boring and acting is unconvincing, but considering it's very low production standards, it could have been worse.

Where did it all go wrong? Blast!

Slenderman has limitless potential as a film but after Slender (2016) I started to fear it was potential that would never be met.

The first 15 minutes or so of The Slender Man had me gripped, this was well made and genuinely scary stuff. Truly scary and I don't say that very often.

Then to my horror it all fell apart and this movie which I was beginning to think was going to turn into something special turned into another found footage film and an utter mess.

The plot makes little sense, the pacing is disastrous and all the magic from the start of the film flickers down to nothing.

I believe Slender Man will get a great film one day (Or has one already I haven't seen) this however is not that film.

The Good:

Genuinely scary in places

The Bad:

No rhyme or reason why people are recording most of the time

Poor audio balancing

Incoherent plot

Front cover makes him look like a gothic Koro-sensei

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

If you're going to kidnap children, doing it during the day in the middle of the street seems like a good call

The value of the dollar may have fallen exponentially over the past hundred years, but that is only half the story. Today, people are walking around with computers in their pockets that would once have required an entire room to generate such power. This means that ordinary people can make excellent quality films and share them through social media, even if they don't make any money out of them.

"The Slender Man" is said to have been made on a budget of $10,000, which is clearly an estimate, and an over-estimate at that. One should therefore not expect too much of it. The character on which it is based is said to have originated only in 2009, although doubtless there are precursors worldwide in various cultures. Leaving all that aside, does this supernatural mystery succeed? To be diplomatic, far worse films have been made on far bigger budgets, but the cast better not give up the day job in the meantime. The same cannot be said for the soundtrack composers though.

So bad. Just really bad. Most of the film was jerky footage of the ground. Much of it was so dark you just couldn't see anything while the camera was bouncing around. The terrible audio composition had me constantly turning it up and down. I get that it's low budget, but did they even try? I'm SO angry that the creators would let anyone waste an hour of their life watching this and waiting for something interesting to happen.

I have been required to put more effort into this review than was put into this entire movie. I did this to save you! Don't let the hour of my life I sacrificed be in vain. Save yourself!

Sure, The Slender Man is only 78 minutes long, but the director somehow manages to make it feel like 78 years. In this found-footage camera POV style horror film, absolutely nothing happens. People walk around, people eat, people joke, and in one or two scenes, a tall guy with a white mask shows up and spooks some people. It is truly one of the most boring films you can find. Who are the characters? Unknown. When will they die? Unknown. Where is the title villain? Who knows! There have been a massive slough of Slenderman movies lately, all of them independent and some of them probably never happening because Slenderman is now a washed up fad, but whatever. I saw this because it was free and I ended up wanting him to come find and take me to whatever fictional BS land he takes me, where my organs are ripped out of my body while I'm still alive or whatever that one website claims. Slender man potentially could be a horrifying antagonist, but he needs to kill off all of his rabid fans first and hire good filmmakers and story writers.