ESSAY: Parsing the Slender Man

 “Into the lands of civilization came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister.”

 - H. P. Lovecraft

(by user Victor Surge, Something Awful, 2009)

Started by a user named Victor Surge on June 10^th of 2009, who placed a tall, dark-suited man toward the back of a photograph, the Slender Man graduated quickly from a forum photo gag into a minor web phenom, akin to progenitors like Zalgo and The Rake.  Internet-savvy as I am, I saw him for the first time last week.  Directed to the Something Awful forums, which housed the thread that inspired the Slender Man, the image of the pale man in the dark suit creeped me out quickly, inspired my interest for a few hours…and then I moved on.

It was days later that I wondered what creeped me out so thoroughly, but, as soon as I recalled the Slender Man, I immediately thought of analogues.  After a few minutes, I even began to consider the Slender Man a reduction of villains throughout movies, literature, and even culture as a whole.  Once you start looking, you realize the damn guy is everywhere.  You can call him the Slender Man, or the Suited Man, or the Man in Black.  I’ll call him the Shadow.

The first few images of the Slender Man look ripped straight from John Carpenter’s Halloween.  The Slender Man appears mostly normal, notable for his backgrounded appearance and his sheer discordance.  The Slender Man should not be here, and that is enough to unnerve.  The image of the pale face and dark suit calls to mind other slow, backgrounded villains.  The faceless antagonists from The Strangers, the Tall Man from Phantasm, Frankenstein in Frankenstein, and even Cesare in the formative horror watershed, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Cesare (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919)

His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. 

– Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”

Michael Myers (Halloween, 1978)

(by user Victor Surge, Something Awful, 2009)

As the image of the Slender Man codifies, other posters in the Something Awful forums play with the idea of the Slender Man as a legitimate urban legend, like the Sasquatch or Mothman.  Convinced they can create a new myth, they write epistolary (letter-documented) accounts of the Slender Man.  By using that form, they (unknowingly?) take a page from classic horror literature.  Authors like Poe and Machen framed their tales in the manner of oral accounts or letters, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula worked in exactly the same way.  The posters presume that their accounts will lead to modern plausibility; instead, it places the Slender Man in the very style that fostered classic Gothic horror.  The first-person account.

The more the posters try to distinguish their creation as a unique entity, the more they inadvertently take from their own interests.  People agree that the Slender Man holds a strange power of children, just as in the dark fable “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”  He hides in the deep of the forest, like the Blair Witch (indeed, a formidable homage to The Blair Witch Project develops on Youtube).  People say that no one can behold the Slender Man up close, as was the case for the King in Yellow and great Cthulhu.  The Lovecraftian element becomes even stronger, as some decide that the Slender Man is (natch) not of this Earth, but an interdimensional being.

The Tall Man (Phantasm, 1979)

His face was very long and pale…he was very tall. He was wearing a black three-piece suit, and I knew right away that he was not a human being…

 - Stephen King, “The Man in the Black Suit”

(by user Marble Hornets, Youtube)

While the cross-pollination of inspirations initially excites, eventually the "legend" feels like patchwork, and as the drawings and accounts grow wearying and obvious (many of the pictures turn into forested variations on Where’s Waldo).  Nonetheless, Slender Man remains a frightening image.  The best pictures and tales on the thread, and the aforementioned Youtube series, give the Slender Man a presence all his own.  Stoic, inscrutable, quietly deadly.  Among Carl Jung's archetypal images, culled from dreams, was an archetype called the Shadow.  The figure, yin to the yang of a person's conscious ego, consisted of their dark desires, unfiltered, sharp and clear in the unconscious mind.  While I can't presume to be a scholar of psychology or dream therapy, there's something archetypal about the Slender Man, as innate as Jung's notion of the Shadow.

I suspect that's the main reason I responded to the images.  There’s a potency to the Slender Man, something that goes beyond definition.  Certainly there’s the distance, and the stillness, and that monochrome anonymity.  Traits common to stories separated by centuries.  But mostly, there’s that nagging voice inside that whispers this should not be here.  But, of course, it is here, and we have to deal with it.  Late in the thread, one of the users suggests that by putting all their individual ideas and horrors together into this one figure, they may have given form to an actual boogeyman, a la Candyman.  Silly, yes, but, after we wake from a nightmare, and the stars are still out, aren’t there at least a few seconds where boogeymen (and slender men) feel as real as anything else?

The Man in the Mask (The Strangers, 2008)

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.

 - Carl Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious”

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