[Once
again I'm going to attempt to do a horror(ish) movie review a day for
the entire month of October. I've done this the last few years on The
Cleveland Movie Blog. Most of the time I succeeded (usually with the
help of a few other writers). Other times I didn't. We'll see if I can
pull it off this year.]
One could argue (and some have) that it’s in poor taste to
make a movie like SLENDER MAN. The
film is based on the internet
“creepy pasta” (essentially urban legends for the internet crowd) about a
mysterious faceless, tentacled figure in a suit and tie who lures children and
teens to terrible fates including insanity and death. The reason being that
this particular story influenced two 12-year-old girls to attempt murdering one
of their friends here in the real world. Whether or not that’s a deal breaker
is for you to decide. Obviously it wasn’t for me, because I watched the thing.
The set up is basically the same as THE RING. A group of teenage girls decide it would be a laugh to “summon”
Slender Man. The way this is supposed to be done, or so the movie tells us, is
by playing a video with your eyes closed until you hear a bell ring three
times, and then opening them just in time to see a short creepy video play. Nothing
happens at first, but then one by one, the girls start hearing and seeing things.
Could Slender Man actually be real?
Not much more to say, except of course the teens start to
die one by one. There’s no point in telling any adults because, of course, they
wouldn’t believe it. So the survivors try to learn what they can both online
and in an actual, honest-to-goodness library with books and stuff. But the
frightening truth is, there may not be any way to stop this creepy creature.
I actually kind of like the Slender Man mythos. It’s a good,
creepy campfire story, and some of the faked photos are convincingly scary. In
theory, it could be turned into a decent horror film. In theory.
SLENDER MAN isn’t
awful; it’s just rote and mediocre. Just like a lot of the crap I have
nostalgic love for from the eighties. Which boils down to: if you’ve already
seen a fair number of horror movies and/or are over the age of 25, this
probably won’t impress you much. There’s no real depth to the characters or
themes, and the plot is cookie cutter. But it does have some effective scares,
and I’m sure it works just fine for its intended audience.
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