Slender Man (2018)

Who is the real savage?

How in the hell can you make a horror movie so boring and ugly to look at? How do you make a 90 minute movie feel so goddamn long? How do you make a movie without any sense of framing, momentum or feeling of any kind? Well I don't know, but I have a feeling director Sylvain White does. For some reason, makers decided that 2018 was not in the least bit five years too late to milk a buck out of the old creepy pasta Slender Man, and for reasons unclear, a fictional character that thousands around the world have crafted intriguing stories or ideas around wasn't able to become a good movie. It's irritating, seeing as the character has all the pieces to be something really scary, but what was turned out by (who else?) Sony in 2018 was not scary, not entertaining and not even watchable.

Forget everything you know about even the most basic storytelling techniques, because they have no place in this goddamn neighbourhood! Almost every good (or even mediocre) horror knows to open with an attention-grabbing scene to establish thrills and some idea of antagonist--hell, even the really crap movies know to do this. Know how Slender Man opens? With the most bland shots of a high school you can imagine, and then two girls sitting on the bleachers taking selfies. Cor damn! Unencumbered thrills are certain to follow. I don't know how they will possibly top this informative and exhilarating introduction.

Their exact reactions to receiving parts in this film

The first dialogue we get is from the four main girls talking about what age they would be if they could stay that way forever, before they cross paths with a group of boys who say they're going to be having a sleepover and doing secret stuff. As sexual as that sounds, one of the girls later tells the others that the boys are in fact summoning Slender Man--which still sounds pretty sexual. This serves as our very unceremonious introduction to what we know will be the antagonist, but only because the title tells us so.

Within five minutes, the girls are also having a sleepover and soon watch a stupid Ring-style 'website video' that supposedly summons the creature. The pacing of the first act (not that traditional acts are even decipherable) is so jarringly abrupt and sets the tone for the rest of this dull, dull movie: two minute scenes of nothing that continuously fail to establish any flow or linearity. Despite denouncing the concept of Slender Man as bullshit just moments before, they are suddenly creeped out by the video and begin to have crazy visions and stuff.

Although a caption helpfully informs the stupid audience that it is now a week later, the kids are suddenly on a class trip to a cemetery (?!?) and one of the girls just vanishes. Suddenly the cops are here to look for her, and she's a missing person. We're no more than fifteen minutes into the film. You thought that one of the four main characters would get any actual screen time or development? You should have known better. Next one of the other girls starts going crazy and stops coming to school. I can't even remember if she dies or what, the movie just forgets about her and I have no idea what we're supposed to make of it all. By this point Joey King's character has covered every inch of her bedroom wall with scribblings and newspaper clippings and is convinced that Slender Man is after them. It feels like perhaps they are positioning her to be the main character, but then she dies in tree-mendous fashion (sorry), and the one remaining girl is suddenly the central figure.

Sony could legit be the next Jason or Michael. True evil.

Everything is just so disjointed and inconsequential. I have never seen a movie so jumbled and pointless. The split-ended thread of a plotline is padded out to bursting point with pointless sequences of nightmares, hallucinations, stupid visual segues and the worst evil of all... Sony product placement. The movie seems certain that if it throws enough CGI mist and trees and dismembered limbs at you that it'll be scary or even somewhat arty. The real events of the movie could just about make a short, but it has nothing to offer a feature length picture. Decent movies use their run time to create tension and build characters that the audience cares about, whereas all the filler in Slender Man is boring and useless and does nothing to move anything along.

Slender Man is also understood to cause a beanie hat epidemic

The performances never once hit the right note, always falling into either underacting or overacting. Joey King is easily the strongest in the movie, but even she is poorly directed and always seems to be playing a part rather than being a person. White's direction is completely misjudged, coming off as either incompetent or lazy. Slender Man doesn't seem to fit very naturally into White's scant filmography, and he seems way in over his head with directing a horror movie that actually engages the audience. I kept wondering how fucking long the thing had left to run, and when it did end, it was in keeping with the rest of the crappy movie. One shot could have made a reasonable cut to black, but it goes on to another pointless scene, but then it still doesn't end. The final note is a voiceover and schoolkids in the hallways, talking about how we let ideas infect us like viruses or some such shit. The ending aims at some weird Lifetime TV movie moral, and doesn't fit at all with what came before it.

There are plenty of bad horror movies that are at least watchable or entertaining, but Slender Man is the dullest and least scary viewing experience I have had in a good long time. It really is as bad as people say, and having watched it twice now, can confirm that you will gain nothing for checking it out.