dir. Sylvain White
Slender Man, based on the popular creepypasta, follows a group of high school girls tormented by the eponymous supernatural being. After they watch a video on how to summon the entity, one of the group disappears, and the rest of the movie follows the remaining friends as they seek to escape the monster. Unfortunately, not a single part of the film is remotely scary, as much as director Sylvain White clearly thinks jump cuts, sparse woods and flashing lights are the epitome of fright all on their own. Every single last actor left their performing skills at home, but then it’s hard to do anything but shrilly shriek out dialogue as poor as this (“[Slender Man is] like a computer virus that infects your hard drive, but instead of your hard drive, it’s your brain!”). The plot’s twists and turns are nonsensical – one character’s boyfriend seems to get heavily involved before disappearing for the rest of the movie, while the friends conveniently seem to know each other’s passwords and can log into anyone’s laptop (incidentally, the missing girl somewhat egotistically has a beaming picture of herself, by herself, as her desktop background). The movie tries to surprise its audience with a late reveal that one mysterious character only seen through message exchanges turns out to be, in actual fact… some complete stranger no one has any connection to. Slender Man became a phenomenon on the internet, but Slender Man became only a failure on screen.
