Folklore, Horror Stories, and The Slender Man The Development of An Internet Mythology by Shira Chess, Eric Newsom

Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0001
Folklore, Horror
Stories, and the Slender
Man: The Development
of an Internet
Mythology
Shira Chess
University of Georgia, USA
and
Eric Newsom
University of Central Missouri, USA
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0001
folklore, horror stories, and the slender man
Copyright © Shira Chess and Eric Newsom, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-49852-6
Portions of Chapter 3 were previously published as “Open Sourcing Horror:
The Slender Man, Marble Hornets, and Genre Negotiations.” Information,
Communication, & Society 15, no. 3 (2013): 374–393.
The article is available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.
2011.642889#.U-0YgKh8EWA
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-50522-7 ISBN 978-1-137-49113-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137491138
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from

the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2015
www.palgrave.com/pivot
We dedicate this book to our own little monsters:
Oliver and Henry.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0001
Contents
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 The Face of the Slender Man 15
2 Here There Be Monsters 39
3 Open-Sourcing Horror 61
4 The Digital Campfire 76
5 The Slender Man Who Loved Me 95
6 Facing the Slender Man 118
Bibliography 129
Index 141
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0001
List of Figures
1.1 Victor Surge’s first Slender Man image 23
1.2 Victor Surge’s second Slender Man image 24
1.3 Something Awful image of an ancient Slender
Man “woodcut” 26
1.4 Image from Marble Hornets 32
2.1 Original Anonymous image 57
5.1 Trender Man meme 108
5.2 Splendorman 109
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0002 vii

Acknowledgements
All works of this nature begin with the love and support
of the people who put up with the authors as they work.
Ours is no different. Thank you to Wes Unruh and Karen
Newsom for your patience, your willingness to read and
re-read chapters, and your being there when we needed
you, even though you’re probably both a little tired of
hearing about the Slender Man at this point.
This book began at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and
we want to specifically acknowledge June Deery and James
Zappen for their support of our research and their friend-
ship during our time there.
We are grateful to Paul Booth, who found a moment in
his conquest of academic publishing in order to provide
valuable feedback on an early draft of Chapter 5.
Shira would like to acknowledge Amber Davisson and
Hillary Anne Jones for being inspirational friends and
colleagues and for their endless advice and encourage-
ment with this project. Additionally, thanks to friends and
colleagues at Grady College and the University of Georgia
who have been helpful mentors, collaborators, and writing
buddies: James Biddle, Nathaniel Evans, Itai Himmelboim,
Ann Hollifield, Andy Kavoori, Rielle Navitski, Emily
Sahakian, Jennifer Smith, Bart Wojdynski. Finally, many
thanks to my parents, Howard and Carol Chess, who have
been a lifelong inspiration to me.
Eric would like to acknowledge his parents, Tom and
Shirlene, and his sister Jane, for instilling in him a love
of scary stories, even those about crayons; Mary Adams,
Brian Gastle, and Murat Yazan for supporting early forays
viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0003

Acknowledgements ix
into digital studies; fellow faculty in digital media and communication

studies at the University of Central Missouri who continue to support
them; David Holt, Richard Chase, and all the great front porch storytell-
ers he’s ever known.
Finally, we would be remiss if we did not also express our gratitude
to Eric Knudsen, the creators of Marble Hornets, and the thousands of
other creators who have told, shaped, spread, and published stories of
the Slender Man over the past few years. We hope we have done your
efforts justice here.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0003
Introduction
Abstract: The introductory chapter presents some of the key

issues that are considered and discussed throughout the book.
Following the events of a stabbing in Waukesha, Wisconsin,
where two 12-year-old girls stabbed a third 12-year-old girl
in the name of the Slender Man, a moral panic arose over
the character, the potential malicious intent of those who
contributed to his creation, and the dangers of Internet horror
communities. But this panic ignored the benefits of a larger
discussion about who the Slender Man is, who made him,
and why his story has significance in different ways than news
media were willing to pursue.
Keywords: moral panic; Waukesha; Wisconsin
Chess, Shira and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories,

and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet
Mythology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004 1
2 Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man
On Saturday, May 31, 2014, two 12-year-old girls lured a third away from a
birthday slumber party into a wooded area near their home in Waukesha,
Wisconsin, distracted her with a game of hide and seek, then stabbed
her 19 times with a 5-inch blade. The attack had been premeditated,
planned over a series of months. One of the girls later told police they
had originally intended to commit the act while the girl was sleeping,
so they wouldn’t have to look into their victim’s eyes as they killed her.
Despite the number of wounds she received, the girl they had repeatedly
stabbed did not die. She instead crawled, still bleeding, out of the woods
where she was found by a passing bicyclist who called 911. Hours after,
police found her assailants walking down the interstate with the alleged
attempted murder weapon still inside one of their backpacks. The crime
was gruesome and perplexing in its own right, but what shortly there-
after propelled it into the attention of the international media was not
the horrific details of its perpetration, but rather the alleged motive: the
girls told authorities they were driven to commit the crime to impress a
supernatural creature called the Slender Man.
For most reporters and frightened parents, news of this stabbing was
their first exposure to the Slender Man. Taking to the Internet, inquir-
ing journalists found all manner of photo-manipulations, illustrations,
videos, textual descriptions—multimedia of all kinds showing the
featureless, tall, thin, occasionally tentacled humanoid in a suit. These
were then appropriated to accompany articles, broadcasts, and conversa-
tions with experts and pundits that raised fear-driven questions—Who
was this Slender Man? What role did he play in encouraging these young
girls to try to kill? Who could be blamed for his creation and propaga-
tion? How were these children exposed to his influence?—but found
them difficult to answer.
A modest moral panic arose in the days that followed, as all tried to
answer the evasive questions. Above all, one persisted: Who is Slender
Man? What most found in their investigations was a collection of folk-
loric horror that had arisen from the Internet, that had been created by
a few and developed by thousands for the past half decade, resulting in
a vast and tangled mythos. But these amateur-created stories seemed far
removed from the situation at hand, and difficult to connect to the stab-
bings in Wisconsin. Journalists in print and on the web often emphasized
that the character was not real, yet the sensationalized headlines under
which these articles appeared gave murderous agency to the character.
CBSNews.com’s Crimesider wrote “Prosecutors: Mythological tale drove
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
Introduction 3
Girls, 12, to stab friend.”1 The Washington Post called Slender Man “The
Internet meme that compelled two 12-year-olds to stab friend.”2 The
Irish Independent alleged that “Net Demon drove girls (12) to stab pal.”3
Mashable introduced Slender Man as, “The Fictional Online Creature
That Drove 2 Young Girls to Stab Their Friend.”4 The lead of the story
by renowned tabloid National Enquirer was not far from supposedly
more respectable news outlets, saying that Slender Man was “turning
the Internet into a school for murder—spawning a deadly cult that’s
molding vulnerable teens into potential killers.”5 For instance, Australia’s
News.com.au went full bore, originally under the headline “The terrifying
Slenderman cult,” reporting the existence of “an Internet horror-cult that
almost caused a killing.”6
On television, reporters struggled to pronounce the name of the
fictional creature (while most verbally stumbled by pronouncing the
single-word spelling Slenderman as though it were a last name, Fox
News anchor Shepherd Smith almost conjured a different monster as he
misspoke: “Splendor . . . I should say, Slender Man.”7) in front of screens
displaying loops of canted black-and-white images while Theremin-
driven generic versions of the X-Files theme played beneath.8 Though
reporters and anchors often led their stories by identifying the character
as wholly fictional, the Slender Man was somehow still partially to blame.
“There he is,” Headline News’s Nancy Grace told viewers as an image of
Slender Man appeared on screen. “It looks so real; it sucks children in to
think that they have to try and commit murder.”9 Multiple outlets began
to refer to the attack as “The Slender Man Stabbing.”
The growing panic was amplified when a woman in Hamilton, Ohio,
reported to local television stations that she believed the Slender Man to
have influenced her daughter to attack her with a knife. The mother told
local Fox affiliate WLWT that the girl was dressed in a white mask when
the stabbing occurred, that her daughter often wrote about Slender Man,
and had modified the game Minecraft to create a world influenced by the
character.10 On the same day that the Ohio stabbing was reported, CBS
Las Vegas affiliate KTNV shared a quote from the neighbor of murderer
Jerad Miller, who along with his wife Amanda, had shot and killed two Las
Vegas police officers the previous weekend: “Neighbor: Gunman dressed
up as Slenderman, Joker11.” As a result, Huffington Post UK asked, “Has
Slender Man struck again?”12 and ABCNews reported that the Slender Man
was, “now linked to three violent crimes.”13 Fox & Friends asked the ques-
tion “What can we do to stop ‘Slender Man’ attacks?” as psychiatrist and
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow suggested that Slender Man stories
should carry a Surgeon General’s warning: “Traditionally, [Slender Man
creators] are shielded by First Amendment rights, your right to free speech.
However, in this case, if you watch the Slender Man video, how could
somebody create that video and not believe this could inspire a person to
kill? If I were a parent and my daughter were dead, I would sue them.”14
“A deadly instrument”
In this initial rush to define a fictional being in terms of how much influ-
ence he might have to inspire others to kill, journalists missed the oppor-
tunity to truly identify the “them” that reactionary pundits like Ablow
wanted to take to task. An oft-raised question after the stabbings asked
if Slender Man creators, or the hosts of the website Creepypasta Wiki,
where the attackers first encountered the character, could or should be
held accountable, or partially accountable, for the attack(s). But while the
Slender Man’s origin is somewhat traceable to an afternoon of Photoshop
work by a single Something Awful forum poster, literally thousands of
other amateur writers, filmmakers, and digital artists have contributed to
the complex mythos that defines the character. The efforts of storytell-
ers who, as we discuss in the following chapters, utilized Slender Man to
entertain, to explore cultural anxieties, and to build creative communi-
ties, were nonetheless vilified by fearful parents, media, and authority
figures as evil reprobates with the potential to befoul innocent children
everywhere via the ubiquity of computers with Internet connections.
Russell Jack, police chief of the Wisconsin city where the stabbing took
place, told reporters, “There is not just one Internet site that they were
accessing to obtain some of this information. It’s multiple websites of a
similar nature that deal with this type of incident.” In a press conference,
he called the attack a “wake-up call,” and warned parents in his rich
Wisconsin accent that, “The Internet can also be full of dark and wicked
things. It has also provided an opportunity for potential child predators
to reach our children like never before.”15 Though Chief Jack was not overt
in connecting Slender Man creators to potential child predators—at the
initial press conference, he declined to name the character—the implica-
tion was certainly there in his prewritten statement.
Others used similarly charged language to warn of the potential
predatory danger they believed existed at sites like Creepypasta Wiki.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
Introduction 5
CNN Correspondent Miguel Marquez told Nancy Grace that, “If you
push your kid in a room with the Internet and you close the door, it’s
the same thing as letting a stranger, a grown man, into your 12-year-old’s
room with them. Why would parents do that?”16 Huffington Post blogger
and professional therapist Candace Platter, like Chief Jack, declined to
name the Slender Man, but equated those who ran the websites in ques-
tion with mass murderers:
Apparently, these girls were heavily influenced by a website they were
into—one that I don’t even want to name here, just like I don’t want to keep
naming the other killers who have betrayed us as a society in recent years,
months, weeks, and days. This information is available if you want to Google
it yourself—it’s not something I wish to perpetuate. But I will say this: there is
something really sick and twisted about the people who put up websites like
this, and something very neglectful about parents who don’t take the time to
know where their 12-year-old children are spending their time, both online
and off.17
Were Platter’s readers to Google for themselves, as she prescribed, they

might be surprised to find that many sites featuring the Slender Man
consist not only of, as Marquez suggests, grown men telling these stories,
but some women and children telling them as well. The open, shared
nature of the Slender Man mythos encouraged participation and young
creators often engaged with the stories they read by creating new varia-
tions. Far from being sick and twisted, this is the way that ghost stories
have always been told, but enhanced by the affordances of the digital
spaces that housed their telling.
Nonetheless, some parents were shocked to find that the Slender
Man, the paranormal attempted-murder-inspiring monster they had
just discovered for themselves the first time, was already old hat to their
children, who had watched web series or played video games starring the
character. Interrogating adults derived a value judgment from whether
their children were aware of the Slender Man mythos. NBC’s Kate Snow
followed a report on Today by confessing, “I had a talk with my own son
last night, thinking that he knew nothing about Slender Man. He knew
all about it.”18 After a follow-up story by Snow later in the week, Today’s
Natalie Morales described her own parent–child conversation as having a
better outcome from her perspective: “Around the dinner table last night,
I had a conversation with my own ten-year-old, because I was concerned
as a parent. I just wanted to make sure that this was not something he’s
ever done. Fortunately, he didn’t know what I was talking about, which is a
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
good thing.”19 Morales, perhaps unintentionally, paints her moral message

with a broad brush, damning not only those connected with the develop-
ment of the Slender Man, but also those who had even only heard of him.
Other news reports echoed the statement made by Chief Jack and
expanded their critique beyond content to the media itself: the Internet is
a place where darkness lurks. An editorial in The Journal Times of Racine
Wisconsin (an hour south of Waukesha) asserted that “The bottom line is as
much as we love technology—smartphones, Google and Facebook—there
is an evil side to it.”20 Wisconsin Radio Network quoted Madison College
marketing professor Steve Noll: “The Internet is akin to a chainsaw. It can
be a wonderful, powerful, and needed tool . . . but in the hands of a child or
someone who doesn’t know how to use it, it can be a deadly instrument.”21
Though other news stories somewhat contemporary to the media’s explora-
tion of the Slender Man phenomenon clearly demonstrated a darker side to
the Internet—the rise of the Deep Web and Silk Road, the spread of violently
misogynistic expression in men’s rights activism, the unprecedented moni-
toring of digital communication by the NSA—only the Slender Man was
widely characterized by the media as pure, real evil with the cartoonish
sanctimoniousness normally reserved for Jack Chick tracts.
Most news outlets considered only the product of Slender Man,
divorced from the creative processes that yielded him, and few suggested
the potential positives of these processes. Froma Harrop, writing for The
Providence Journal, had a more evenhanded response: “What makes this
case very modern is that the parents seemed unable to act as intermedi-
aries between their children and their children’s darkest fantasies. And
how could they when the imaginings were hidden in their kids’ online
lives?” Furthermore, she asks, how would parents recognize a “silly char-
acter” like Slender Man as a potential danger? Harrop suggests that they
might even see value in the creative nature of participating in Slender
Man storytelling.22 Our research into the rich and complex creative proc-
esses behind the character, as presented in the following chapters, helps
to demonstrate the value of the Slender Man by illustrating the individual
and cultural effects that participatory culture is capable of manifesting.
“Stories and the real world”
In a June 4 phone interview with a 12-year-old Creepypasta user named

Emily, Headline News’ Jane Velez-Mitchell asked a question related to the
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
Introduction 7
specific motive of the two Waukesha assailants who had told authori-
ties that they had hoped to convince Slender Man to let them become
his “proxies” by impressing him with the murder they thought they had
committed. Velez-Mitchell asked, “Does Slender say to become a proxy,
you have to kill someone in this fictional world? Because that’s what
we have been led to believe, that there’s some—like if you want to get
in his orbit, if you want to be buddies with Slenderman, you got to do
something really bad?”23 Emily was not able to pinpoint from among the
thousands of Slender Man texts a specific instance of this being the case,
but the point of the question was obvious—if Slender Man was fictional,
then what made these girls pursue their goals as though he were real, to
the point of stabbing a supposed friend and setting off down the inter-
state to see him in person, like Dorothy and Co. headed to the Emerald
City to meet the Wizard? In light of the tragic incident in Waukesha,
this is a difficult acknowledgement to make, but one that must be made
nonetheless: the degree of immersion for the two girls who committed
the crime and the subsequent fear-fueled media analysis of the Slender
Man confirms the abilities of the collective of mostly amateur creators
to conjure a convincing and compelling horror creature using at-hand
digital tools and distribution networks.
In an attempt to explain, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin drew a distinction
between the horror stories of her youth, and the Internet-based creepy-
pasta of today: “Telling ghost stories around the campfire . . . listen, I was
a big fan of that back in the day, or at a slumber party. It’s not uncom-
mon. But . . . you know, this blurred line between these stories and the
real world really could be something new here, and the Internet could
be serving as the catalyst.”24 Somewhere, for these two girls, a line had
somehow been blurred until it disintegrated, and Baldwin suggested that
perhaps that it was the medium through which they had encountered
the Slender Man that was to blame. After all, the stories were often told
through YouTube videos and social networks with a goal of achieving
verisimilitude.
Under sudden unexpected media scrutiny and occasional parental
vitriol, sites that had hosted Slender Man or creepypasta stories found
themselves on the defensive about maintaining borders between fiction
and reality, and facing questions of whether they were partially respon-
sible for the various crimes through the dissolution of those borders.
Louise Hung, author of the “Creepy Corner” column at the website XO
Jane suspended her regular feature temporarily to discuss the Waukesha
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
stabbing: “There’s always been a fear in the back of my mind that some-
one would find inspiration in that specific brand of horror. This is not
new, this is not the first, but it is the first time I couldn’t help but feel a
pang of responsibility.”25
Moderators at Creepypasta Wiki, which had been banned by Waukesha
schools after the attack, opened a fundraiser for the stabbing victim and
posted a statement distancing themselves from the crime committed by
its former readers: “Only a small minority of people (mostly newcomers)
on the wiki (and the Internet) truly believe what they read here. And
for most people, they will not attempt to replicate atrocities presented in
some of the literature on the wiki.”26 In conclusion, they stated (perhaps
for News.co.au specifically): “There is a line between fiction and reality,
and it is up to you to realize where the line is. We are a literature site, not
a crazy satanic cult.”27
Those who ran the irreverent web site Something Awful, where the
Slender Man mythos was first born, had a characteristically irreverent
response:
We are 15 years post-Blair Witch. These girls were 12. Found footage Youtubes,
shaking cameras and bad Photoshops of people with socks on their head
standing in the woods should not be fooling anyone. Especially not 12 year
olds who should be better at the Internet and media culture than actual
adults. But maybe all these chemtrails and Art Bells are actually making
people dumber. Maybe there is a lot of lead paint being used in Waukesha.
Maybe the Internet makes you stupid.28
Mass media-driven moral panics about the dangers of a different form

of mass media on our nation’s youth are nothing new. A 2013 report by
the Media Coalition, “Only a Game: Why Censoring New Media Won’t
Stop Gun Violence,” compares panics from recent Congressional grous-
ing about violent video games to the Frederic Wertham-led crusade
against crime and horror comic books in the mid-1950s, and to cultural
revulsion to dime novels and penny dreadfuls of the previous century
that threatened to corrupt the nation’s youth. “More recently,” the report
states, “rock n’ roll, goth culture, and rap music aroused concern. Today,
such fears appear hysterical. It is clear they are factually unsupported.”29
Others have taken strong stands against media moral panics. Following
the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, that
inspired a wave of moral panic, media studies professor Henry Jenkins
was called to testify before Congress on the connection between violent
media and violent acts by teenagers: “Media effects research most often
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
Introduction 9
empties media images of their meanings, strips them of their contexts,

and denies their consumers any agency over their use . . . I think mean-
ingful distinctions require us to look at images in context, not looking at
20-second clips in isolation.”30 This book seeks to do just that—to iden-
tify the contexts of the Slender Man phenomenon that are more than the
evening news’ 20-second isolated clip, and to suggest what wider import
those contexts suggest.
Who is the Slender Man?
And so there remains something to this question. In the reactionary

op-eds, the by-the-numbers introductions to the Slender Man mythos
intended for worried parents, the glib information packages delivered
on morning shows, and even the more nuanced columns by tech-savvy
writers for whom Slender Man was old news, the answer was never quite
satisfactory—there weren’t enough minutes or column inches to devote
to a holistic discussion of the character and the communities that had
honed him over the years. As a remedy, this book takes a longer and
closer look at the creation and propagation of this communally created
horror character, in order to understand the contexts and the qualities
from which he was born. In many ways, those traits that seemed to be
ascribed negative value in news reports on the Slender Man might, in a
less reactionary context, be seen as strengths.
The Slender Man is a unique collective creation that applies the
affordances of the digital age to age-old storytelling processes. By doing
so, it illuminates cultural anxieties both ancient and contemporary,
engages audiences—who in turn become creators—and helps to develop
new media literacies through the creative process. Digital platforms
allow for open access, memetic distribution, the ability to easily modify
or remix, and open participation. Combined with a folk-influenced
storytelling process, this yields shared ownership, variability of form,
and the constant and consistent invitation for audiences to become
storytellers themselves. The blurring of reality achieved through use
of new media tools allows for enriched immersion, and for tellers and
audiences to more easily engage with the tensions and situations that
fuel the metaphors behind the horror. Our effort to answer the ques-
tion “Who is the Slender Man?” will not only address the qualities that
potentially influenced the Wisconsin attackers, but will provide better
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
understanding of the work and processes of thousands of Slender Man

creators who have contributed to the mythos. In the following chapters,
we connect pre-digital concepts to digital work, reframing scholarship of
both traditional and Internet-based collective processes. We also connect
these processes to wider cultural connotations in order to contextualize
choices and characteristics of these digital communities and their crea-
tions. Our study privileges the process of creation, rather than the product,
allowing for examination of works that are inherently and necessarily
incomplete. A study of a creation like the Slender Man is an examination
of a text-in-progress, a snapshot of an action that is currently happen-
ing but has not yet ended. Perhaps this latter point demonstrates why
some members of the media had a difficult time tackling the question—a
final, conclusive answer is not yet available and may never be found. The
Slender Man mythos is not an isolated occurrence, but is rather part of a
broader trajectory toward participatory communities built around fully
shared, ever-changing, collective creations. As scholars in a digital age,
we value the ever-morphing nature of the work we study, and intend that
our own process provide a model for future scholars exploring this sort
of storytelling.
Organization of this book
Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an

Internet Mythology provides a broad but detailed analysis of the Slender
Man myth, origins, meanings, and implications. The book is written for
both those already aware of the Internet myth, as well as those who are
encountering the Slender Man for the first time. While the book’s focus
is on the specific myth, the larger issues of the book address how digital
storytelling taps into both old and new traditions—creating a form of
folklore that is both reminiscent of traditional forms of storytelling yet
distinctly a child of Internet culture.
In Chapter 1, “The Face of the Slender Man,” we establish the Slender
Man’s connections to transmedia storytelling practices and to cultures of
memes across multimedia channels. We trace the history of the Slender
Man myth to its origins on the humor-based web forum Something
Awful, and follow it as it blossomed, first on that forum, and as it later
migrated to other forums, blogs, social media, and video-based story-
telling efforts. We specifically discuss the first Photoshop manipulations
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
Introduction 11
of “Victor Surge,” the pseudonym of Eric Knudsen, which contained

the first visual representation of the Slender Man, and then analyze
subsequent iterations of the Slender Man myth in the video series Marble
Hornets, TribeTwelve, and EverymanHYBRID, as well as the Slender video
games. Through an examination of these formative Slender texts, we can
not only observe the early Slender Man mythos taking shape, but also
study the malleability of the character as it passed through multiple crea-
tive hands.
Chapter 2, “Here There Be Monsters,” connects the Internet-born myth
with prior horror stories, monsters, mythologies, folk tales, fairy stories,
and characters from mass media. Through an examination of archetypes
and themes expressed through the Slender Man stories, we demonstrate
the cultural anxieties broached by these stories. By identifying the traits
that originally drew audiences to the mythos, and looking at specific
manifestations of those characteristics that have since been developed
collectively in various stories, images, and web shows, we connect the
Slender Man to anxieties old—patriarchy, masculinity, facelessness and
the uncanny, transition to adulthood, the boundaries of civilization and
the wild—and new—surveillance and self-surveillance culture, privacy,
and electronic legacies. Finally, we connect the imagery of the Slender
Man with that of Anonymous and Occupy, social movements that came
to prominence as the Slender Man was coming into being, and that share
similar iconography.
Chapter 3, “Open-Sourcing Horror,” considers the creation and propa-
gation of the Slender Man through a uniquely digital lens, studying the
application of open source culture to generic horror conventions that
led to the development of the mythos. Open source software is free,
modifiable, and created using distributed, voluntary labor. Widespread
participation and decentralized ownership is key to successful creation
of applications. Similarly, we argue, the Slender Man is established,
debugged, and negotiated through a complex set of generic yet evolv-
ing expectations. We connect two distinct fields of study—open source
scholarship and rhetorical genre construction—in order to argue that the
communal construction of the Slender Man mythos indicates a model
of genre negotiations in online spaces. Drawing on literature that estab-
lishes genre as a form of “social action,” we demonstrate that commu-
nally negotiated generic expectations, themes, and styles resonate more
profoundly in online spaces where content and form morph and mutate
along with the technologies that are used to create and house them.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
In Chapter 4, “The Digital Campfire,” we turn away from digital rheto-

ric to a more traditional framework—that of folklore. We apply a folklor-
ist approach of emphasizing storytelling as an act and event that occur
in an arena where teller and audience are co-present and participatory to
the development of the Slender Man mythos in order to shift the context
of digital storytelling from product to process. We utilize the folklorist
framework to situate Slender Man storytelling efforts in a tradition that
favors variability, participation, and community, collectively creating
what we identify as the “digital campfire.” However, we also question
how the relocation of the telling from a physical to a virtual space revises
the expectations and functions of the folk tale. The nature of variability,
participation, and community are different for participants in the digital
campfire—the flexibility of the Slender Man story owes to both its
borrowing from traditional storytelling methods and its web-enhanced
ability to create a larger, more contributory group of storytellers.
Chapter 5, “The Slender Man Who Loved Me,” looks at the wider
phenomenon of creepypasta and fan fiction, current practices in horror
writing online, and different variations of the story as guided by their
telling around distinct digital campfires. We focus on participatory sites
like Creepypasta Wiki, several subreddits, and FanFiction.net. Drawing
on literature of fan fiction and participatory cultures, we examine the
power and potential of digital horror myths as a path to digital literacy
and empowered storytelling. By examining specific stories, we conclude
by demonstrating that crowd-sourced, wiki-generated fiction gives a
forum to those experimenting with their literary and stylistic voices.
At the same time, we demonstrate that some stories are seen as more
legitimate than others, often reflecting gender binaries.
Our final chapter, “Facing the Slender Man,” concludes the book by
taking a broad view of the Slender Man phenomenon, its increasing
popularity and appropriation by mainstream media, and the resistance
of the Slender Man communities towards this migration away from their
shared digital culture. We end by returning to the attacks in Wisconsin
described earlier in this preface, but turn our point of view away from
the media, instead asking how the unexpected scrutiny impacted the
Slender Man storytelling community, and how they responded to both
the attacks by the girls and the calls for bans that followed.
Ultimately, our book provides a greater context for the Slender Man,
his creation, his fostering by creative communities, his growth as enabled
by digital tools, spaces, and distribution methods, his transcendence of
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
Introduction 13
the creators who made him, and what all of this means for the future
of digital storytelling, horror, and collective creation. We celebrate the
Slender Man as a first step in crowdsourced storytelling to come. While
the character, himself, is faceless, this is the true face of the Slender
Man.
Notes
1 Crimesider Staff, “Prosecutors: Mythological Tale Drove Girls, 12, to Stab
Friend.”
2 Dewey, “The Internet Meme That Compelled Two 12-Year-Olds to Stab
Friend.”
3 Sherwell, “Net Demon Drove Girls (12) to Stab Pal.”
4 Reis, “The Fictional Online Creature That Drove 2 Young Girls to Stab Their
Friend.”
5 Blosser, “Scourge of Slenderman.”
6 Seidel, “A Brutal Stabbing Attack by Pre-teens Obsessed with the Slenderman
Puts Spotlight Back on the Popular Culture of Horror Stories.”
7 For more on Splendorman, see Chapter 5.
8 Dries, “Watch News Anchors Spaz Out About Slender Man.”
9 Grace, “Midwife Charged with Homicide; Dad Outbursts in Court; 911 Calls
and Police Statements in Slenderman Case.”
10 Evans, “Hamilton Co. Mom: Daughter’s Knife Attack Influenced by Slender
Man.”
11 The “Joker” in this headline refers to the Batman villain.
12 HuffPostUK, “Has Slender Man Struck Again? Internet Bogey Man Now
Linked to Murders of Las Vegas Policemen.”
13 Murray, “Slender Man Now Linked to 3 Violent Acts.”
14 Hasselbeck, “What Can We Do to Stop Slender Man Attacks?”
15 ABC7 Eyewitness News, “Girls, 12, Stab Wis. Friend 19 Times in Planned
Attack, Cops Say,” 7.
16 Grace, “Midwife Charged with Homicide; Dad Outburst in Court; 911 Calls
and Police Statements in Slenderman Case.”
17 Plattor, “12-Year-Olds Are Stabbing 12-Year-Olds: Are We Paying Attention
Yet?”.
18 Holohan, “Slender Man: Do Your Kids Know Him Too?”
19 Ibid.
20 The Journal Times, Journal Times Editorial, “Journal Times Editorial:
Stabbing of 12-Year-Old Is Harsh Reminder of Need for Parental Vigilance.”
21 Beckett, “Pushing Online Safety in the Wake of Slenderman Stabbing.”
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
22 Froma, “What Lurks Deep Down in a Sweet Child’s Online World?”.

23 Valez-Mitchell, “New Details on Middle School Stabbing.”
24 Baldwin, “Fantasy Inspired Stabbing: White House Apologized; Bergdahl
Investigation; Norovirus Outbreaks.”
25 Hung, “Creepy Corner: In Light of the ‘Slenderman’ Stabbing, a Response to
Those Who Think Creepy Corner Is Glorifying Violence.”
26 Sloshedtrain, “Fiction, Reality, and You.”
27 Ibid.
28 Parsons, “Please Do Not Kill Anybody Because of Slenderman.”
29 Media Coalition, Only a Game: Why Censoring New Media Won’t Stop Gun
Violence.
30 Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0004
1
The Face of the Slender Man
Abstract: This chapter tells the origin story of the

Slender Man as he was created by Eric Knudsen (under
the pseudonym “Victor Surge”) and developed by users
on the humor forum Something Awful. The chapter then
further describes early variations that came in the form
of the web series Marble Hornets, TribeTwelve, and
EverymanHYBRID. Drawing from forms unique to
new media—alternate reality games, memes, viral and
spreadable media—the early Slender Man stories built on the
expectations of transmedia storytelling to yield something
that was different from digital stories that preceded it. An
examination of these formative Slender Man texts not only
observes the early Slender Man mythos taking shape, but also
identifies the malleability of the character as it passed through
multiple creative hands.
Keywords: alternate reality games; EverymanHYBRID;

Marble Hornets; Memes; Something Awful; spreadable
media; TribeTwelve

doi: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005 15
It all started with Something Awful. On June 8, 2009, a member of the

online forums for the web site Something Awful began a new thread,
challenging members to “create paranormal images through Photoshop.”
Throughout the first two days, forum members created the expected fare:
a variety of ghostly or generally creepy images (often adding half-seen
spirits into backgrounds of real pictures). But on June 10, the tenor of the
forum shifted dramatically when a user posted two doctored photos and
a news story identifying a faceless “slender man” in a suit who stalked
children. Almost immediately, an obsessive interest in the Slender Man
took over the forum discussions. Constant additions expanded the fledg-
ling Slender Man mythos with new photographs, drawings, short fiction,
and even woodcuts showing his appearance in multiple places through-
out history. With these creations often evoking a “Where’s Waldo?” style
by not placing the character in the center of the frame, forum members
pored over images, seeking out eerie evidence of the supernatural villain.
As this nefarious creature developed via forum discussions, the character
quickly grew in popularity, and his presence expanded to other web sites.
Ultimately, the Slender Man story expanded into a collectively created,
interweaving universe of web series, novels and novellas, video games,
mobile apps, and fan fictions. Thousands of people have now read, told,
or played materials and stories related to the Slender Man.
This chapter focuses primarily on how the Slender Man came into
existence, and identifies key versions of the mythos. We begin by discuss-
ing the story as a result of both transmedia storytelling and Internet
meme culture. We then chronicle several major iterations of the story
as it appeared, and continues to appear, on forums, blogs, YouTube, and
other forms of social media and gaming. To conclude, we establish how
ongoing shifts and new iterations of the Slender Man help to maintain
instability and flexibility. This instability, encouraged by the speed of
information online, plays a primary role in making the myth so power-
ful. It is also why media critics found the phenomenon so threatening.
While most of the versions online were relatively benign, the version
that the Wisconsin girls ultimately created or appropriated, then acted
upon, was not. The fluidity of the story gives it power.
Transmedia storytelling and alternate reality games

The Slender Man phenomenon came about during the mass media turn
toward transmedia storytelling. Transmedia describes the fragmentation
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005
The Face of the Slender Man 17
and distribution of narrative across different media, and has gone by

numerous other names—360-degree storytelling, cross media, deep
media, distributed storytelling, and others.1 Transmedia stories usually
develop from and extend a narrative universe beyond a core story,
creating new points at which new audiences might encounter the work.2
Effective transmedia storytelling might be best represented by works like
the publicity campaign for the film The Dark Knight, which began with the
core story of the film and branched out into an “alternate reality game”
(a related phenomenon described below), and a faux political campaign
wherein participants created videos for fictional district attorney candi-
date Harvey Dent. Increasingly, the expansion of storyworld through
multi-modal fragmentation not only provides new touchstones for audi-
ence members to encounter the narrative universe, but to participate in
its creation as well.
Alternate reality games (ARG) are a relatively new form that emerged
in the early part of the century, originating (though there are some earlier
proto-models) as a marketing campaign for the Steven Spielberg film
A.I. Few developers, researchers, or players are happy with the term, but
it is one with which we’re stuck. In their “Storytelling in New Media: The
case of alternate reality games, 2001–2009,” Kim, et al., cite the multi-
part definition of Sean Stewart (a designer for the A.I. alternate reality
campaign that became known as The Beast,) as their guide on classifying
ARGs as a genre.3 Stewart describes the fragmented story system that
is the hallmark of transmedia, but differentiates that the ARG obscures
the fragmented pieces.4 The player role in the ARG is not just putting
the pieces together but finding the pieces as well. Each fragment of the
story is delivered through a media node that already exists in the life of
the player, from billboards to websites to cell phones to email to social
networks. Each fragment holds meaning only when connected with
others, and the search for these connections leads to the formation of
communities that pool collective knowledge to turn the fragments into
a larger whole. Meanwhile, the “puppet masters,” or those running the
game, take their storytelling cues by monitoring the efforts of the play-
ers. They begin with a flexible framework and can make modifications
to both suit the player experience and enrich the narrative.5 The ARG
exists at the intersection of game/ludic play, narrative, and community
building. That the genre came to wider recognition at the same time as
the boom in “new media” technologies—such as social networks, blogs,
and widespread embedding of multi-media within websites—is no
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coincidence. The digital nature of the web and new media technologies
allowed for a number of utilities that are key to the success of ARGs.
The embedding of storytelling elements into code-driven websites, for
instance, allowed for a reflexivity that cannot be achieved in mass media;
once a film is widely released or a television show broadcasted, they
cannot be recalled halfway through viewing in response to audience
reaction.
The tellings and retellings of the Slender Man mythos represent a
turn to a more transmedia aesthetic in storytelling practices. This new
aesthetic highlights the fluidity of medium, storyteller, and process,
and also privileges a form of storytelling that is always necessarily
incomplete. While the Slender Man phenomenon is not easily clas-
sifiable as an ARG, it was born from a culture where ARGs have not
only become more standardized and acceptable, but expected. Media
consumers now anticipate that they will participate in the process of
storytelling as narrative detectives who uncover and recontextualize
information, and will be rewarded by a richer, more engaging story-
world. These emerging aesthetics helped to establish the Slender Man
as a notable supernatural creature portrayed in immersive digital texts.
But the emergence of the Slender Man mythos from amateur, non-mass
media sources, and the development of multiple, shared core stories
as opposed to a single intellectual property, delineate the Slender Man
phenomenon as something markedly different from transmedia story-
telling that came before him.
Memes, virality, and spreadable media
While in the next section we will describe the creation, development,

and characteristics of the Slender Man, it is important to first connect
the character’s development to qualities and affordances endemic to
digital culture. To fully understand the conditions that gave rise to the
Slender Man myth requires a broader awareness of meme culture and
the value of spreadable media, both of which draw on immediacy and
variability inherent in digital media. The prevalence of meme culture
has fostered the creation of ideas that are easily packaged and spread,
which, in the case of the Slender Man, helped the legend grow beyond
its original author and supported the development of a collective voice
capable of yielding an endless supply of variations.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005
Digital meme culture is an essential concept for explaining the

crowd sourcing and shaping of the Slender Man. Richard Dawkins first
defined the term “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene,6 initially to apply
evolutionary theory to the movement of thoughts and ideas through a
culture. The term was later appropriated by Internet culture to similarly
describe thoughts and ideas as they occur, are repurposed, changed,
and distributed through online spaces. Through this appropriation,
the term shifted in meaning for society at large, sometimes referring
to the Dawkins version, but more often intended to be understood to
solely describe Internet culture. Carlos Mauricio Castaño Díaz sees
some overlap. He explains, “While referring to Internet memes, it is
possible to say that they perfectly fit in the epidemiologic theory of
memes, with certain characteristics that are only proper of its own kind,
allowing the emergence of new patterns of interchange, exchange, and
reproduction.”7 Thus, while the concept of digital memes may overlap
with the original definition, it has carved out meaning of its own. Limor
Shifman defines an Internet meme as: “(a) a group of digital items
sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b)
that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated,
imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.”8 Internet
memes are commonly repeated photos, videos, audio clips, or texts
distributed online with slight variations. Importantly, though, this
variability helps shed light on both the individuals and cultures from
which the variations arise. According to Shifman, “Internet memes can
be treated as (post)modern folklore, in which shared norms and values
are constructed through cultural artifacts such as Photoshopped images
or urban legends.”9 In other words, memes crowdsource cultural values,
fetishes, fears, and anxieties.
The general public conception of memes starts with Photoshopped
images of cats with funny slogans. Indeed, LOLcats are a kind of Internet
meme that has become popular both broadly and narrowly: they are
spread on mainstream web sites but also within smaller communities
using “inside” jokes that are uniquely relevant to the interests and tastes
of the subcultures in which they travel. So while the broad humor of
the LOLcat sits at one end of Internet meme culture, we can under-
stand the spread of Slender Man at the other end—it was created by a
niche community and spread throughout that community. Eventually,
it traversed borders as other Internet communities appropriated the
Slender Man meme. Some of these communities continued with the
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005
legend as it was, while others modified it, transforming it into new itera-
tions while more broadly expanding the meme.
Theorists on memes warn, however, that it is important to not conflate
a meme with the concept of the “viral.” Virality, according to Shifman
implies “person-to-person mode of diffusion,” speed, and broad reach.10
In the next section of this chapter, we describe the development of the
Slender Man on the Something Awful forums and beyond, and while this
narrative certainly became popular at a reasonably fast pace (about four
years), it did not move at anything close to the breakneck speed of other
popular memes. For a long time, the mythos was not known beyond
certain web sites and social media venues. This distinction identifies a
popular Internet meme like “Gangnam Style” as viral—it moved quickly
and spread broadly online. But by Shifman’s definition, the Slender
Man myth was not viral. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green,
in fact, suggest that the concept of virality is itself flawed—imparting
agency to the media and not to audiences who actively distribute digital
materials—and suggest that we not focus on, “a theory of media distribu-
tion that makes a media text sound . . . like a smallpox-infected blanket.”11
Jenkins, Ford, and Green suggest the concept of “spreadability,” wherein
audiences share content through participatory practices, much like one
might spread peanut butter. They explain,
“Spreadability” refers to the technical resources that make it easier to circu-
late some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support
or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a
community’s motivation for sharing media, and the social networks that link
people through the exchange of meaningful bytes.12
This idea of spreadability, as opposed to virality, applies much more

accurately to the case of the Slender Man, where creators, participants,
and audiences all took part in the construction of the legend to varying
degrees, imparting it as they traveled to different locales—digital camp-
fires as we describe them in Chapter 4—of the Internet.
The origins of the Slender Man

To fully explain the Slender Man, it is first necessary to describe the
structure of the Something Awful forums from which he was born.
The forums at the Something Awful website have not been generally
dedicated to storytelling, nor horror, nor any of the factors that would
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005
seemingly spur the creation of a phenomenon like the Slender Man.

The site, a spiritual precursor to similar hangouts like Reddit, Fark, and
4Chan, is an Internet community formed around the common goal of
sharing and creating funny, irreverent, or otherwise strange things and
distributing them online. Users at the site pay a one-time fee of ten
dollars to gain access to a series of forums shared with over 100,000
others. The website, which has long held as its slogan, “The Internet
Makes You Stupid,” has been previously examined as a site of meme
generation,13 antisocial “griefing” behavior,14 and hacker language,15 and
is perhaps most notorious in non-scholarly circles for being the forum
that created and popularized the “All your base are belong to us,”16 and
the Tourist Guy17 memes.
The Something Awful web site, and particularly its forums, is well
known as a collective space where Internet griefers can band together
to mock mainstream popular culture and pick future targets to
harass. According to Julian Dibbell, a griefer is “an online version of a
spoilsport—someone who takes pleasure in shattering the world of play
itself.”18 More broadly, the term describes “willfully antisocial behaviors,”19
primarily in online spaces. Despite being pro-griefing toward the rest of
the Internet, Something Awful simultaneously describe themselves as
being troll-free within their own forums, which they attribute largely to
the ten dollar membership fee. As they explain on their “Forum Rules”
page:
We here on the Something Awful Forums are very elitist and strict assholes.
We pride ourselves on running one of the most entertaining and troll-free
forums on the Internet. This is accomplished by charging a $10 fee to filter
out folks not serious about adhering to the rules, and banning those who
manage to slip through and break them. We are very serious about keeping
our forums clean and troll-free, so please consider your account an invest-
ment and treat it accordingly.20
Additionally, Something Awful lists several rules of acceptable behaviors

for the forums, listing many griefing behaviors within the forum as being
“bannable” offenses. Thus, while Something Awful clearly enjoys a trick-
ster-like persona on the Internet, they simultaneously pride themselves
on having some ability to control behavior within the confines of their
web site. It is important to note that because of the general anonymity of
the forums, it is impossible to know with any certainty any demographic
information about the forum members (including sex, age, ethnicity, or
sexual preference).
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005
Among the regular opportunities for comedy is a weekly thread,

“Photoshop Phriday,” which saw forum members responding to prompts
from forum staff with irreverent image manipulations that would be
humorous to other users. For instance, the week before Slender Man’s
birth, the theme was “Animal Photos That Make You Say F*** Yeah!”
and featured images with such ridiculous content as a huskie dressed as
Hunter S. Thompson, and Luke Skywalker riding a giant cat on the planet
Hoth. Another example was a challenge to create “Jerk Superheroes.”
The forum topic explained, “We knew Superman is a Tool, but it turns
out his Justice League cohorts are just as bad, and then you’ve got those
Avengers assholes. I guess traditional ‘heroes’ just can’t stand up to the
constant scrutiny of the modern media, as evidenced by this candid
assortment of damning images.”21 In response, readers Photoshopped
images such as Catwoman “missing” the litter box and the Bat-mobile
hogging several handicapped parking spaces. While no award is issued
for these challenges, a certain degree of bragging rights and forum noto-
riety comes from efforts deemed by peers to be successful. Out of this
digital domain, collaborative, creative, and compelling work arises, often
in the form of Photoshopped images.
The popularity of the Photoshop Phriday efforts led to other
image manipulation threads in the forums. On June 8, 2009, user
Gerogerigegege started a thread called “Create Paranormal Images,” with
the prompt
Creating paranormal images has been a hobby of mine for quite some time.
Occasionally, I stumble upon odd web sites showcasing strange photos, and
I always wondered if it were possible to get one of my own chops in a book,
documentary, or web site just by casually leaking it out into the web—whether
they’d be supplements to bogus stories or not. So, let’s make a shitload?22
Gerogerigegege followed this with a series of tips and then a few exam-
ples for inspiration, including a creepy child’s doll and a young girl
whose face appeared to be melting playing piano. Other users responded
in the thread with a variety of Photoshopped images—ghost faces peek-
ing in through windows, ghoulish hands pushing up from cemetery
grounds, and mysterious glowing orbs caught on surveillance cameras.
Some users posted the image along with the “original assets” (the image
from which it was modified) in order to show their own talents. Other
users began to post fiction to supplement their images. Often, “paranor-
mal” elements of the photos were so subtle that it took several users to
decode or discover a surprising element embedded in the photo (most
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005
commonly a disembodied and distorted face). Others on the forum

complimented those who created superior doctored photos, and their
images were reposted. Poorly doctored photos were generally ignored.
On June 10—two days later, on the third page of the thread—a then
28-year-old user named Victor Surge (whose name was later revealed
as Eric Knudsen) posted a photo-manipulation of children on a
playground.
figure 1.1 Victor Surge’s first Slender Man image
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005
At first glance, the image seems like a normal black-and-white archive

photograph. A watermark declares it to be the property of the City of
Stirling Libraries Local Studies Collection from 1986. A young girl in the
foreground smiles from the ladder of a sliding board. Only a thorough
inspection of the photo will reveal the suddenly shocking presence of
an otherworldly being, tall and thin, half darkened from standing in the
shadow of a tree in the background of the photo, with what appear to be
tentacles swirling out at the children around him. Beneath the photo, a
caption states: “One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City
Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day when fourteen children
vanished and for what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man’. Deformities
cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later.
Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.”23 The second image, even
more ominous, showed several adolescents all walking in the same
direction, with far more nervous looks on their faces. In the foreground
of this image, an older child stares wearily at the camera.
Behind the large group of children (again, seemingly unseen by
them) is a tall humanoid, lurking languidly. In this version, there are no
tentacles attached to the arms, but the person more clearly appears to
be a man in a suit. The body still looks distortedly taller than anyone
else in the image, and the head is without a defined face. Additionally,
figure 1.2 Victor Surge’s second Slender Man image
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the images were posted with the cryptic text, “we didn’t want to go, we
didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms
horrified and comforted us at the same time.”24
In an interview with the Slender Nation podcast, Knudsen said that the
amount of time to develop the character was minimal, and that he drew
on personal experiences from horror films that had disappointed him.
He collected found images and pictures of the actor Angus Scrimm play-
ing a character called “Tall Man” from a series of 1970s thriller movies
bearing the common title Phantasm, and then he said, “It was literally
ten to fifteen minutes of thought . . . obviously there was some thought,
‘What do I find scary? What do I find creepy, personally?’ ”25
Other posters immediately were taken by the two images and their
accompanying fiction. Three minutes after the first post, another user
remarked that the Slender Man had clearly appeared at other historical
disasters, suggesting that perhaps other users could post similar images.
For the next few days, other users still continued to post “typical” paranor-
mal images, while Victor Surge also posted more images and sightings
of the Slender Man, including child drawings, newspaper clippings, and
other modified photos where the Slender Man was hidden within a larger
forest of trees (his height making him easily camouflaged).
Other users were compelled to contribute to the Slender Man mythos,
interestingly the first few positioning the character as part of a faux folk-
lore tradition. User Thoreau-Up was the first to post:
I’ve been following the signs for quite some time.
There are woodcuts dated back to the 16th century in Germany featuring a
tall, disfigured man with only white spheres where his eyes should be. They
called him “Der Großmann”, the tall man. He was a fairy who lived in the
Black Forest. Bad children who crept into the woods at night would be chased
by the slender man, and he wouldn’t leave them alone until he caught them,
or the child told the parents what he or she had done. Even then, there is this
chilling account from an old journal, dating around 1702:
(Translated from German, some words may be inaccurate)
“My child, my Lars . . . He is gone. Taken, from his bed. The only thing that we
found was a scrap of black clothing. It feels like cotton, but it is softer . . . thicker.
Lars came into my bedroom yesterday, screaming at the top of his lungs that
“The angel is outside!” I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me
some nonsense fairy story about Der Großmann. He said he went into the
groves by our village and found one of my cows dead, hanging from a tree. I
thought nothing of it at first . . . But now, he is gone. We must find Lars, and
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my family must leave before we are killed. I am sorry my son . . . I should have
listened. May God forgive me.”
There is more evidence of the slender man, but this is one of the oldest trans-
latable accounts. Anyone else in the thread found anything like this?26
figure 1.3 Something Awful image of an ancient Slender Man “woodcut”
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Others followed, within the hour, some offering more photo-manip-

ulations, some drawing woodcuts to match Thoreau-Up’s story, and
others telling their own tales through text, like this offering from user
TombsGrave, who again attempts to place Slender Man within a folk
tradition:
I know of an old Romanian fairy tale, highly unpopular even in its earliest
iterations. It might be based on a particular event, or perhaps it is an extrapo-
lation from existing Slender Man stories. The translation I’m most familiar
with goes a bit like this:
***
Once upon a time there were twin girls, Stela and Sorina. They were brave
little girls, and had no fear of the dark, nor of spiders and other crawling
things. Where other young ladies and even young boys would cower, Stela
and Sorina would walk with their heads held high. They were good girls,
obedient to their mother and father and to the word of God. They were the
best children a mother could ask for, and this was their undoing.
One day, Stela and Sorina were out with their mother gathering berries from
the forest. Their mother bid them stay close to her, and they listened, as they
were good children. The day was bright and clear, and even as they walked
closer to the center of the forest the light barely dimmed. It was nearly bright
as noon when they found the tall man.
The tall man stood in a clearing, dressed as a nobleman, all in black. Shadows
lay over him, dark as a cloudy midnight. He had many arms, all long and
boneless as snakes, all sharp as swords, and they writhed like worms on nails.
He did not speak, but made his intentions known.
Their mother tried not to listen, but she could no more disobey the tall
man than she could forget how to breathe. She walked into the clearing, her
daughters shortly behind her. “Stela,” she said, “take my knife, and cut a circle
on the ground big enough to lie in.” Stela, who was not afraid of the tall man,
nor afraid of the quiver in her mother’s voice, obeyed what her mother said.
“Sorina,” the mother said, “take the berries and spread them in the circle,
and crush them underfoot until the juice stains the earth.” Though Sorina
wondered why her mother asked her to do such a thing, she obeyed, because
she was a good girl.
“Stela,” the mother said, “lie in the circle.”
Stela, though she worried she might stain her clothes, did as her mother asked.
“Sorina,” the mother said, and bid Sorina cut her sister open with the knife.
Sorina could not; would not.
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“Please,” her mother said. “If you don’t, it will be worse. So much worse.”
But Sorina could not, and she threw the knife away and ran home, crying.
She hid under her bed, afraid for the first time in her life. She waited until her
father came home from the fields, and told him of the terrible thing she had
found in the woods. Her father comforted her, and told her she would be safe.
He went to the woods, his axe in hand, and as he commanded, she stayed by
the hearth, waiting for his return.
After some time she fell asleep. When she woke, it was to the sound of knock-
ing on her door at the darkest hour of the night. “Who is there?” she said.
“It is your father,” the knocker said.
“I don’t believe you!” said Sorina.
“It is your sister,” the knocker said.
“It cannot be!” said Sorina.
“I am your mother,” said the knocker, “and I told you it would be worse.” And
the door, locked tight before her father left, fell open as if it had been left ajar.
And her mother stepped in, her sister’s head clutched in one bloody hand,
her father’s in the other.
“Why?” wept Sorina.
“Because,” said her mother, “there is no reward for goodness; there is no
respite for faith; there is nothing but cold steel teeth and scourging fire for all
of us. And it’s coming for you now.”
And the tall man slid from the fire, and clenched Sorina in his burning
embrace. And that was the end of her.27
Already, within a week from Surge’s original post, the community of

users at the forum was excitedly discussing the works created so far
and laying the groundwork for future efforts through their support and
critique. Users contributed media according to their own skillsets, in
productive arts—writing, illustration, photo-manipulation, audio and
video recordings—or through the sharing of ideas and participation as
an audience. Even in these early days, Slender Man was freely developed
as a communal property. Surge never stepped in to claim rights over
what was, ostensibly, his creation. Those who followed him never both-
ered to ask permission to stretch the boundaries of the character or the
stories he had created. He was surprised that there was any interest in
something he’d dashed off in an afternoon:
I didn’t expect it to move beyond the Something Awful forums. And when
it did, I found it interesting to watch as sort of an accelerated version of an
urban legend. It differs from the prior concept of the urban legend in that it is
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on the Internet, and this both helps and harms the status of the Slender Man
as one. In my personal opinion, an urban legend requires an audience igno-
rant of the origin of the legend. It needs unverifiable third and fourth hand
(or more) accounts to perpetuate the myth. On the Internet, anyone is privy
to its origins as evidenced by the very public Something Awful thread. But
what is funny is that despite this, it still spread. Internet memes are finicky
things, and by making something at the right place and time, it can swell into
an Internet urban legend.28
The more its users contributed media about Slender Man, the more
popular the thread grew, and the larger the audience became. Then, that
audience melted back into the creative community, making their own
contributions.
By mid-June of 2009, most of the discussion on this forum centered
on the Slender Man, with few other posts or comments about other
paranormal images. On June 13, one user noted that Slender Man had
become “the star of this thread.”29 While Victor Surge was primarily
providing the fiction and photos at this point (with a few exceptions),
other users began to suggest that Slender Man would make a good
horror film or book, and began comparing the myths and images to
other media objects (primarily films, books, and television shows). On
June 15, only six days after the initial Slender Man post—and four forum
pages of Slender material later—user derriere demons summed up the
increasing popularity of the character: “Something about Slender Man
just seems to really hit a nerve with a lot of us, it seems. I love it. It’s
creepy, it’s weird, and it makes me want to expand further on it.”30
The progression of the character began to migrate off of the Something
Awful forums (in part, due to the popularity of the web series and games
discussed in subsequent sections). In 2010, Eric Knudsen/Victor Surge
copyrighted the character with the name “Slender Man,” insisting that
he did so to maintain the artistic integrity of the character.31 This move
prevented mass media versions of the character, meaning that primarily,
the Slender Man has been developed in digital subcultures. While the
character has slowly begun to migrate to the mainstream (discussed in
Chapter 6), amateurs, rather than media professionals, have made the
majority of iterations.
Even before the spread of the mythos from its original home at
Something Awful, several aspects of the Slender Man—specific visual
and personality traits—had consistently emerged in the media being
shared. Several factors also varied and changed from iteration to
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iteration. In terms of visual representation, the Slender Man is always

male, tall, and slender. He is almost always depicted in a black suit with a
tie. His face tends to be blank, blurred out, or non-descript. He is either
bald or wearing a hat (obscuring his baldness). The Slender Man’s arms
vary visually—sometimes he has simply longer-than-usual human arms,
while other times he is specifically depicted with tentacles (several arm-
like, tapered appendages). Sometimes, the tentacles are on his back, in
addition to his already long arms. The Slender Man’s body type often
has him hidden in trees and in the woods—the long arms or multiple
appendages camouflaging him against the fractal patterns of branches,
forcing the audience to look harder to find the location of the lurking
character.
His motives are generally left to mystery, although many of the early
stories have him specifically targeting children or young adults. Often,
noticing the Slender Man in some way ignites his attention, and he then
stalks the person who has noticed. In general, the Slender Man is a stalker
character whose primary interest is in taking children. While some varia-
tions involve young adults who have been driven insane by the Slender Man
(and act on his behalf), many do not. In some variations, the Slender Man
is capable of teleportation, and in some versions, nearby humans become
violently ill. It is important to note that few of the retellings identify exactly
what kind of monster the Slender Man might be, and what his specific
intentions are—these points all remain mysteriously, and usefully, vague.
Major iterations and web series

While early posters immediately suggested that the Slender Man would
make a good film villain, the resources to make a film were not necessarily
immediately available to the forum’s users. Creation of even an Internet-
based movie or web series takes careful thought and detailed planning,
so it was surprising that it only took a few weeks for the creation of the
first major web series about the Slender Man, Marble Hornets. Since
Marble Hornets, many other major web series have been created about
the Slender Man. In this book, we primarily focus on the most popular
series—Marble Hornets, TribeTwelve and EverymanHYBRID—primarily
for the sake of space, but also because these early series stabilized many
aspects of the Slender Man mythos. Many series are still ongoing, and
new web series are constantly popping up.32
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The web series are significantly responsible for expanding the popu-
larity of the Slender Man on the Internet. Marble Hornets and other web
series allowed the Slender Man to slip the borders of Something Awful and
become something else entirely. By moving off of the marginally popular
web site to YouTube and Twitter, the web series storytellers became
traveling bards, taking the story from the local village to the wider world.
While the major series have distinct plots, they are all strikingly similar
in several details. While early myths involving the Slender Man involved
or implied the stalking of children, each of these series involves young,
primarily male, adults. The narrators of the series are generally college-
aged and arouse the attention of the Slender Man through similar experi-
ences. They are often stalked by the Slender Man, but also by proxies who
have been driven insane by their own obsession by with the Slender Man.
As the web series establish them, proxies are humans who become so
obsessed with or mentally confused by the presence of the Slender Man
that they lose their minds and begin to commit violent acts. While the
word “proxy” implies that these acts are done on behalf of the Slender
Man, the web series provide no actual evidence that violence is done at
his behest. It seems equally possible that, after being driven insane by his
presence, the already violent tendencies of a proxy come to the surface.
The shows often tell their story across multiple media—YouTube videos,
Twitter feeds, Instagram, and other forms of social media collectively
function to convey the horror of the lead character or characters who are
inevitably being stalked. All of the series are currently ongoing, except for
Marble Hornets, which completed in June 2014.33
Marble Hornets
Marble Hornets began several weeks after Victor Surge’s original post.
The series was introduced on the Something Awful forums by a user
with the handle ce gars [sic], on June 19, 2009. This post described
the premise of the series: the poster’s film school friend, Alex, was
working on a student film project titled Marble Hornets. ce gars
explains that during filming, Alex became antisocial and “distant”
and, after abandoning the project, gave all of the tapes to the poster
with instructions to “burn them.” ce gars promised to go through the
tapes and post anything that he found on the forum. Additionally,
he explained that the tapes were unnumbered and out of order—there
was no means of knowing the proper time frame of the entries.34 Notably,
ce gars did not identify this as a Slender Man story during this initial
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post. But on June 20, ce gars posted links to an “introduction” video, and
by “Entry 1” of Marble Hornets, audiences clearly saw a character who
appeared similar to previous depictions of the Slender Man.
The web series35 followed “J,” a long time friend of Alex’s, using the
premise that had been posted on the Something Awful Forums. As J worked
his way through the tape collection, he found larger and more complex
mysteries, as it became apparent that Alex was being stalked and had begun
to film himself all of the time. Others who had worked on the student film
project, Brian and Tim, appeared to have become erratic, as well. Several
characters (including J) began to suspect that they were “losing time” and
often didn’t know where they were or how they had gotten there. The series
culminated at episode 87, after using a variety of ominous, but familiar,
locales such as woods, abandoned hotels, and empty homes as settings.
Episodes were primarily narrated through on-screen text that hinted at
some of J’s conclusions regarding Alex’s mysteries. J integrated footage
from Alex’s film, personal footage taken by Alex, and his own footage
and commentary about what was happening as he got wrapped up in the
same mystery that ultimately swallowed his friend. The Slender Man made
several appearances throughout the series as a taciturn, yet ever-lurking,
villain, as we learned that the young men might have committed villainous
and horrendous acts. The series did not refer to the creature as the Slender
Man, but rather, as the “Operator.” This version of the Slender Man was
always in the background of frames, barely visible.
figure 1.4 Image from Marble Hornets
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In addition to videos, comments and notes were posted on Instagram.

Importantly, a “response” account called “totheark” accused J of being an
unreliable narrator, and often provided counterpoints to the conclusions
that were being made in the primary posts.
The series built on the initial Slender Man mythos in a number of
ways. First, Marble Hornets added a component of technological interfer-
ence. Because audio and video are integral to the process of document-
ing the Slender Man, it becomes increasingly significant that audio and
video recording are less reliable when the Slender Man is nearby. The
viewer is cued that there will be a Slender Man incident when there are
audio distortions or visual tearing. Often, if the Slender Man approaches
directly, the video will cut out completely, and the episode comes to
an end. Thus this added a new factor to the Slender Man mythos: that
his supernatural presence naturally distorts recording devices. Second,
Marble Hornets introduced the possibility that the process of being
pursued by the Slender Man causes his victims to become mentally
unstable and ultimately murderous. Third, Marble Hornets introduced
the idea of “slender sickness,” where characters who encounter the
Slender Man have violent coughing fits. Additionally, the series began
use of what is referred to as the “operator” symbol— a circle with an x in
the center, which has been since used by others to reference the Slender
Man. Finally, Marble Hornet’s version of the Slender Man suggested that
it is not only children he is interested in—the character might also have
an interest in young adults.
TribeTwelve
As Marble Hornets became increasingly popular, others began to make
Slender Man web series as well. A second important series is TribeTwelve.36
Like Marble Hornets, TribeTwelve follows a single protagonist’s YouTube
channel: that of the young white male, Noah Maxwell. The channel is
called “TribeTwelve” because it had supposedly originally been created
to as part of a school assignment on the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Noah
decides to dedicate the channel to his cousin Milo, who had allegedly
died of a suicidal overdose of pills. As Noah posts old videos of Milo, he
discovers that the Slender Man, whom Noah had not previously noticed
on the film, had been stalking Milo. At the start of the series, Noah, like J
from Marble Hornets, uses title cards as his primary tool of narration. But
as Noah gets pulled deeper into the mysteries of what happened to Milo,
he begins to narrate his emotions and fears more directly to the camera,
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often creating long, paranoid monologues. While Marble Hornets func-

tioned more as “found footage,” TribeTwelve feels more like a video blog
of someone who is being stalked while unraveling a mystery.
TribeTwelve has a significantly larger cast of characters than Marble
Hornets, including appearances—and information—from Noah’s
parents and grandfather. Through the course of the series, we learn that
Milo’s mother was also apparently driven insane by the Slender Man.
Noah connects with the “fans” of his video blog on several occasions,
and even meets up with the cast of other Slender Man web shows,
EverymanHYBRID (discussed in the next section) and DarkHarvest00
to “compare notes.” But most importantly, Noah is constantly at war
with humans in TribeTwelve—a cult of Slender Man followers called
“The Order” that is led by an ominous young man who goes by the name
“The Observer.” In fact, Noah seems to have more violent encounters
with the members of The Order than he has with the Slender Man. The
Order sends him clues, strange technologies, and outright threats in the
hope that they can use him to connect with the Slender Man.
Many elements of the Slender Man mythos used in Marble Hornets are
replicated in TribeTwelve. Audio and video distortions during encoun-
ters with the Slender Man are also present in TribeTwelve. Similarly,
TribeTwelve, like Marble Hornets, used the idea of time slippage and the
suggestion that those who are aware of or stalked by the Slender Man
may be driven to a point of insanity. One new element added to the
mythos in TribeTwelve is the use of nosebleeds to visualize the “slender
sickness” that characters experience during or after encounters with the
Slender Man.
EverymanHYBRID
Another popular web series featuring the Slender Man is
EverymanHYBRID.37 Without question, EverymanHYBRID is the most
playful of the three, making use of expectations established by the web
series that preceded it. The series starts out not as a mystery but as a
fitness web show, hosted by three college-aged males: the host (Vincent),
the nutritional expert (Evan), and the cameraman (Jeff). As a joke,
they add Slender Man Easter Eggs into their series—fake Slender Man
appearances—but then quickly get stalked by the real thing. The series
does not use title cards or found footage. Instead EverymanHYBRID tells
its story in real time, maintaining the video blog format even after the
premise of “fitness” is long gone from the show.
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Like the other series, the show integrates several social media platforms
to integrate several story elements. As EverymanHYBRID progresses, and
the fitness themes dissipate, like the other web series, the characters
appear and disappear, seem to know too much, and receive ominous
mystery packages. Additionally, the series integrates another legend with
Internet horror origins, known as “The Rake”: a hybrid of human and
canine that attacks humans. This new addition to the Slender Man myth
integrates other elements of Internet lore, while primarily maintaining
most of the myths of the previous two series.
Video games
Many independent games and apps exist that are based on the Slender
Man myth, but the best known and most popular is the Slender series. At
the time of writing, there are two games in the series: Slender: The Eight
Pages38 and Slender: The Arrival.39 Their popularity has encouraged other
independent game developers to attempt Slender Man games as well, but
none have been as popular as the original series, designed by independ-
ent game developer Mark J. Hadley. The narratives are straightforward in
dealing with the Slender Man meme, and do not shift any of the previous
qualities or lore of the character.
Slender: The Eight Pages is a relatively simple game. Players play as
themselves, in a first-person perspective, wandering alone through a
wooded area with only a flashlight for protection. The player is tasked
with simply collecting eight pieces of paper located in various places of
the game. The avatar is able to run, but will become easily winded, and
the flashlight has limited battery power. As pages are collected, (s)he is
stalked by the Slender Man, and with each new page submerged deeper
and deeper into the fog of the woods.
Slender: The Arrival has similar game mechanics to Slender: The Eight
Pages, but the narrative is more involved, and sequences are ordered into
different chapters. In this version of the game, the player assumes the
role of Lauren, who is looking for her missing friend Kate. Just as in the
original game, the player must recover objects, but the specifics of what
must be done and what must be recovered varies by the chapter.
Though the video games did little to push the boundaries or expand
the mythos, they played a role in expanding the audience, and therefore
the potential creator base, of the series. The migration of the Slender
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Man stories from web-based forums and social media to gaming plat-
forms also brought in younger audiences, of the age that the Slender
Man would have pursued in the first iterations of his story.
The Slender Man is everywhere
The Slender Man myth seems to somewhat stabilize at the point of

Marble Hornets and through the other web series. While variability still
occurs in different version of the Slender Man online, his story seems
to have found a certain level of consistency through these web shows,
which are then maintained in the video game versions. While the myth
is certainly not ossified and still has capacity to shift and mutate, consist-
ent functions have been established through the telling and repetition of
several important iterations.
Of course, the myth of the Slender Man and the creative output of its
fans is by no means limited to the web shows. Fans have self-published
novels and written blogs, and versions have appeared in video games
and web apps. Versions of the Slender Man meme have been turned
into parodies, which critique both the ominous nature of the character
and the recurring visual themes used in the web shows. Iterations of the
Slender Man have been found on mainstream television shows such as
Supernatural and Doctor Who.
Variations of the Slender Man abound. Many Slender fictions follow
the formulas popularized by the web series, but others offer their own
versions. Some versions have a more violent Slender Man who captures
victims to suck their life force or teleport them into alternate dimen-
sions. Others focus instead on the violence of proxies. Some versions of
the Slender Man avoid portraying him as a violent or nefarious character
altogether, characterizing him as a romantic interest or father figure. As a
component of meme culture, all of these versions and iterations become
valid and validated by the communities and individuals who produce
the stories. Different Slender memes continue to circulate, telling the
stories that are most culturally relevant to that community. Because each
version is tied to specific groups, the faceless villain wears many faces,
yet they still bear certain similarities among them.
The lack of completion—the constant potential for evolution—is part
of what makes the Slender Man myth so powerful. As already noted, as a
mode of transmedia storytelling, it has some commonality with ARGs in
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terms of often expecting viewers to function as detectives. In writing about

Marble Hornets, Bryan Alexander remarks that, because the web show
began with an existing social media context (the forums of Something
Awful), it functions as a response that, in turn, elicited more responses. “In
other words,” he explains, “this storytelling approach presupposes social
media, draws from it, and depends on that world. Marble Hornets is the
next stage, or a second order, of social media storytelling and YouTube
video narrative in particular.”40 By thinking of the web shows, blogs, and
video games as second-order forms of storytelling, we can begin to think
of the storytelling process as necessarily incomplete and always evolving
in online spaces. The Slender Man thrives in this potential for evolution—
the more retellings and variations on his myth, the more real he appears,
and the more pervasive the myth becomes. The Slender Man serves as a
result of a turn toward a transmedia aesthetic and expands the potential of
storytelling through its open sharing and development.
Notes
1 Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide; Kinder,
Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games.
2 Ibid.
3 Kim et al., “Storytelling in New Media: The Case of Alternate Reality Games,
2001–2009.”
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.
7 Díaz, “Defining and Characterizing the Concept of Internet Meme,” 102.
8 Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 7–8.
9 Ibid., 15.
10 Ibid., 54.
11 Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a
Networked Culture, 16.
12 Ibid., 4.
13 Bauckhage, “Insights into Internet Memes.”
14 Dibbell, “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the
Sociopaths of the Virtual World,” 3.
15 Heineman, “Searching Something Awful: Gleaning Meaning from
Leetspeak.”
16 A popular Internet catchphrase that spawned from poorly translated broken
English in the 1991 video game Zero Wing.
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17 Images of an unfortunate tourist Photoshopped to imitate the moment

before a tragedy, beginning with an image of the man standing on the Twin
Towers observation deck with a plane behind him on September 11, 2001
18 Dibbell, “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses,” 3.
19 Ibid.
20 “Forum Rules.”
21 “Jerk Superheroes.”
22 Gerogerigegege, “Create Paranormal Images.”
23 Victor Surge, “Create Paranormal Images,” June 8, 2009.
24 Ibid.
25 “Slender Nation Podcast #2: VICTOR @#$%ING SURGE.”
26 Thoreau-Up, “Create Paranormal Images.”
27 TombsGrave, “Create Paranormal Images.”
28 Slender Nation Podcast #2: VICTOR @#$%ING SURGE.
29 Nurse Fanny, “Create Paranormal Images.”
30 derriere demons, “Create Paranormal Images.”
31 Vogt and Goldman, “#13 – Managing a Monster – On the Media.”
32 At the time of this writing, the current web series dealing with the Slender
Man mythos include DarkHarvest00, MLAndersen0, CaughtNotSleeping,
compileTRUTH, StanFrederick BTS, The west records, 5zero2, TheAbbeyDiaries,
CloverInChicago, MyDarkJournal, TEA13TIME, TulpaEffect, Osiris Chronicles,
and MHunter0012.
33 Though a coincidence, the series ended only weeks after the incident in
Waukesha, Wisconsin.
34 ce gars, “Create Paranormal Images.”
35 MarbleHornets, Marble Hornets.
36 TribeTwelve, TribeTwelve.
37 EverymanHYBRID, EverymanHYBRID.
38 Hadley, Slender: The Eight Pages.
39 Hadley, Slender: The Arrival.
40 Alexander, The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media,
88–89.
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2
Here There Be Monsters
Abstract: This chapter positions the Slender Man as a

monster character in the genre of horror by contextualizing
him through a mix of pre- and post-digital anxieties and
cultural connotations: fear of blankness and the uncanny,
faceless monsters of pop culture, “men in black,” patriarchal
father figures, fairies and child kidnapping creatures, and
selfie culture. This chapter also notes that the Slender Man
was born in a similar web space and culture as the Occupy
social movement and the hacktivist group Anonymous, and
identifies the mutual anxieties that spurred the creation of all
three.
Keywords: Anonymous; fairies; horror; monsters;

Occupy; patriarchal; selfie culture; the uncanny

doi: 10.1057/9781137491138.0006.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0006 39
The stories we tell have meaning. Our human tales represent our
dreams, our anxieties, our faults, and our sense of purpose. We tell both
fiction and non-fiction stories (and sometimes, tall tales that combine
the two) and are drawn to those that resonate with our lives both on
personal and cultural levels. Our stories remind us of our humanity and
connect us to one another, regardless of the medium through which they
are told. Storytelling both makes us human and illuminates those aspects
of humanity we admire or revile.
And, yet, not all of our stories are about humans—they feature both
the natural and the supernatural. Horror falls into the latter category,
as a necessarily fictional form of storytelling that connects us with the
unknown. It often functions on a metaphorical and allegorical level—
the fears that we see play out in horror stories convey larger anxieties of
the unknown, fears of our nature and ourselves, and fears of the Other.
Horror’s metaphor affords us the pleasure of seeing these anxieties with-
out having to deal with their implications directly or overtly. Horror’s
power exceeds the confines of a single mass medium—popular horror
storytelling occurs in novels, film, television, comics, the Internet, and
countless other forms.
The Slender Man is no exception. As a horror character, the Slender
Man is a reminder of current cultural anxieties in a multitude of ways.
In this chapter, we explore the many meanings of the Slender Man,
acknowledging and considering a spectrum of possible ways of under-
standing this new monster of horror. While many of the other horror
monsters we encounter—vampires, werewolves, and the undead—
are familiar and we see them rise again with each new medium, the
Slender Man is unique in that he was born in online spaces. Yet, the
Slender Man also has non-digital predecessors. The goal of this chap-
ter is not to define one possible meaning that the Slender Man repre-
sents, but rather, to demonstrate the fluidity of this horror character.
Many possible complimentary meanings of the Slender Man become
apparent when considering the time and space in which he developed.
Additionally, the many meanings of the monster help to highlight
his instability—as a creature of the Internet he is, by his very nature,
constantly changing. By exploring all of these possible meanings we
hope to illustrate the power and potential of this horror monster,
illustrating how and why the character has achieved popularity so
quickly.
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Here There Be Monsters 41
The definition and uses of horror
At its heart, the Slender Man is a work of horror and, further, a monster
story. As a monster, he is Other, but he also turns his victims into a kind
of Other, in the sense of the term developed by Lacan, Levinas, and
many who followed to describe something unknowable, outside of the
Self. The Slender Man stories that reference the use of “proxies,” wherein
characters become obsessed with the Slender Man, in many ways turn
those characters into monsters as well, making previously non-violent
people violent in ways that we don’t ordinarily identify with humans. The
vagueness of the storytelling, as well as the many variations, means that
the Slender Man is exponentially interpretable, depending on the version
of the story being told. Tina Marie Boyer, in discussing the complexities
of the Slender Man, explains that he
is a prohibitive monster, but the cultural boundaries he guards are not clear.
Victims do not know when they have violated and crossed them. At times it
is enough to have seen the creature to become its victim. This makes Slender
Man intensely threatening and intimidating to the protagonists of the various
stories. Loss of control, uncertainty about yourself and your environment,
and the menace of impending death are established themes in all narratives
to date.1
In order to clarify the set of possible meanings, it is necessary to consider

his place in the larger genre of horror and as a monster. Monsters are
necessarily Other—often functioning on a metaphorical level that sees
characteristics, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities imparted onto a
monster character, whose abstracted evil would not be as acceptable if
directly portrayed in a human counterpart.
In order to understand the meaning(s) of the Slender Man, it becomes
valuable to break down the genre of horror and what makes its content
so horrific. Several elements seem to consistently come into play in
our horror storytelling. According to Kendall Phillips, horror must
be shocking—not only in terms of “gotcha!” moments with ghouls
popping out of closets, but in terms of a kind of shock that challenges
our understanding of the world.2 Similarly, Rick Worland suggests that
horror necessarily must tap into our sense of taboo at a cultural level:
“Horror often achieves its greatest impact when it exposes or flaunts
cultural taboos.”3 Thus, well-made horror is not only about terrifying an
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audience, but also in doing so in such a way that is shocking, unnerving,

and in alignment with deeper cultural fears.
The genre is defined almost entirely by its obsession with fears revolv-
ing around life and death. Worland defines the horror film as a genre
meant to evoke anxiety and fear, but differently from genres such as
war, disaster, or crime films. He explains that the “most basic fear in the
horror story is the fear of death.”4 He expands:
The fate of horror’s most unfortunate characters usually comes down to two
possibilities, which a given story may or may not consider synonymous—
death, the physical fact of the end of life; and damnation, a meta-physical
conception that describes a state in which the immortal “soul” is condemned
to eternal suffering and punishment. Creatures in horror stories, as well as
their victims, often straddle these two domains in a horrible state that is
neither death nor life.5
Thus, the actual death of a victim is less horrific than both the potential
threat of death, and a possible state of damnation that occurs when a
character is irrevocably altered by encountering an unnatural creature. In
our horror fictions, we tend to be obsessed with ontological issues both
in terms of what it means to be human and what it means to cease to be
human. Stephen Prince also contends that horror deliberately taps into
existential anxieties: “The anxiety at the heart of the genre is, indeed, the
nature of human being. Within the terrain of horror, the state of being
human is fundamentally uncertain. It is far from clear, far from being
strongly and enduringly defined. People in the genre are forever shading
over into nonhuman categories.”6 Prince identifies an inherent tension in
all horror with the “unnatural” as well as with “a violation of the ontologi-
cal categories on which being and culture reside.”7 Horror is therefore full
of binaries: natural vs. unnatural; us vs. Other; living vs. dead.
The Slender Man myth, as explored in the first chapter, plays into
these horror binaries in a variety of ways. Of the dead versus the undead,
the power position of the Slender Man, himself, offers the immediate
potential threat of death. As people in Slender Man stories commonly
go missing—although are rarely specifically found dead—the threat of
death that the supernatural villain offers retains a quality of uncertainty
that heightens the sense of horror. Characters in the stories often know
that a victim has gone missing, but may never know the ultimate fate of
the missing person, nor the extent to which, if it at all, they suffered at
the hand (or tentacle) of the Slender Man. This ambiguity, unto itself,
is certainly powerful. But also powerful is the threat of Slender Man’s
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proxies—the characters who commit violent acts while under the power
of the Slender Man. The proxies, in many ways, inhabit the place of the
undead—while still living, they cease to be functioning by their own will
and are in a state of purgatory wherein their lives are no longer normal.
Similarly, binary themes invoking the Other as well as “the unnatural”
are also present. The Slender Man constantly plays with an otherworldly
theme, and, although readers are rarely given many hints about what he
is, we are told quite clearly that he is not like us. Yet, at the same time, the
Slender Man makes nature his home, as most accounts have him living
in wooded areas.
Importantly, though, horror’s meanings often exceed the content of
the specific story being told, conveying larger themes at play in a culture.
Kendall Phillips writes specifically about horror films and genres as
exceeding individual fear and being “a touchstone of fear for an entire
generation.”8 He continues, “It is as if, at certain points, a particular film
so captures our cultural anxieties and concerns that our collective fears
seem projected onto the screen before us.”9 Phillips argues that these
cultural anxieties and their relationship to horror does not necessarily
function on a conscious level of intentional representation but rather
on an allegorical level. He explains, “An influential horror film does not
necessarily create a certain pattern of anxiety or fear within a culture;
instead, elements within the film resonate—connect in some sympa-
thetic manner—to trends within the broader culture.”10 For instance,
Phillips writes about how the 1931 telling of Dracula can be read in
terms of post-World War I fears, fears about the increasing “science” of
eugenics and as it applied to Eastern Europe, as well as anxieties about
sexual norms.11
The Slender Man is not only a horrific story, though—it is a story of
monstrosity. The monster, according to Edward J. Ingebretsen is a means
of othering and represents “deviations from a presumptive natural
order.”12 Monstrosity functions, therefore, not only in horror fiction but
as a means of social repudiation. Ingebretsen explains, “Monstrosity
became a flexible tool for civil repudiation—sometimes literal, some-
times metaphorical.”13 The monster functions as a scapegoat in both
fictional horror and nonfictional true-crime, where we are able to ques-
tion the most horrific aspects of human nature. The monstrosity of the
Slender Man is embedded not only in his nonhuman form, then, but also
in the proxies that he necessarily others—those he turns into monsters
to commit the very acts that he cannot or will not.
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Blankness and the uncanny
The horror experienced on encountering the featureless face of the

Slender Man can be tied to age-old anxieties that guided some of the
earliest American horror and monster stories. These anxieties can be
seen in the final lines of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, wherein
the characters of the novel encounter, “A shrouded human figure, very
far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue
of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”14 But
perhaps Melville, who sent his Ahab in monomaniacal pursuit of the
white whale Moby Dick, best demonstrates these anxieties. In the famous
chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the narrator, Ishmael, opines on
why the colorless whale offends the very nature of man:
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immen-
sities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of
annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it,
that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of
colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons
that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of
snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?15
Melville had identified descriptions of colorlessness, darkness, and
blankness in earlier works by Coleridge and Hawthorne as having last-
ing resonance. He contends that more than other horrors and monsters,
the concept of the blank void that stood outside the natural order had
horrific portent. Katalin G. Kállay writes that, “For Melville, the most
painful and most important dichotomy could be something versus noth-
ing, and the ‘horror of the unknowable’ could be paraphrased as ‘horror
of annihilation,’ a kind of horror vacui.”16 This latter comparison to
horror vacui—a psychological reaction to a blank canvas that sees artists
attempt to cover every millimeter in detail—suggests that whether, like
these affected artists, we attempt to fill it, or like Ahab, we attempt to kill
it. An encounter with blankness has the potential to disturb the mind.
That this blankness comes in the form of a face elevates the horror of
the Slender Man to the “uncanny.” Nicholas Royle writes that this some-
what nebulous term describes “a peculiar commingling of the familiar
and the unfamiliar. It can take the form of something familiar unexpect-
edly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or of something strange
and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context.”17 In seeing a
face atop a body, we expect to see the features that normally go along
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with it. We expect regular proportions of limbs. We certainly don’t

expect tentacles. By visually establishing the Slender Man as almost
human, but with unfamiliar qualities, Victor Surge and those who
followed avoided the overt horrors of, for instance, the gaping maw of
a werewolf or the blood-soaked teeth of a vampire, in favor of some-
thing uncanny, something more psychologically troubling. There is no
bloodletting here—only a discomforting feeling that something is very
wrong.
Because of the elements of familiarity, humans already somewhat
know the uncanny when they encounter it, but can never fully under-
stand it. Sudden awareness of this untraversable gulf triggers the feel-
ings of horror. To come to terms with the feeling, those who encounter
him might see themselves in the void of the Slender Man’s face (or
lack thereof), suggests Sigmund Freud’s account of the uncanny. In a
foundational work identifying the term, he writes that it “is that class
of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once
very familiar.”18 Freud traces his definition of the uncanny back through
psychologist Ernst Jentsch to a work by E.T.A. Hoffmann, titled “The
Sand-Man,” in which, according to Freud, a man, Nathanael, recalls his
boyhood fears of the titular “wicked man who comes when children
won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they
jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack
and carries them off to the moon to feed his children.”19 For Freud, the
physical depiction of disembodied eyes that recurs throughout the story
represents for both Nathanael and the reader a fear of castration, which
he described as a basic anxiety over potential punishment following
violation of social norms, connecting it to earlier stories, like Oedipus,
where the act of being blinded served as a metaphor for a deeper, or
lower, punishment.20
Jentsch and Freud both identify another aspect of the uncanny—the
inability to determine whether something is real.21 This definition origi-
nally described Hoffman’s stories where automatons were depicted as
so incredibly lifelike that they were almost indiscernible from humans,
and lends itself now to the term “uncanny valley,” describing a variety
of instances from robotics to computer generated imagery, wherein the
closer a nonliving representation comes to having the appearance of life,
the more horrifying they seem. This definition applies not to the Slender
Man as a character, but to the stories that contain him. Coming in the
form of websites, social networks, and video streams that bring other,
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nonfictive media to audiences, digital horror storytelling exploits the

aesthetics of new media vérité to blur boundaries of reality and elevate
fears. Even if audiences acknowledge the fictive nature of the Slender
Man stories, the show of reality through storytelling techniques arouses
a feeling of uncanny—a horror that is the unfamiliar bound up in the
familiar.
Though the Slender Man stories do not normally contain what might
be thought of as gore or body horror, through this facelessness, we
approach some measure of abject horror, a condition often linked with
the uncanny. The facelessness of the Slender Man makes those that expe-
rience it acutely aware of their own eyes, mouth, and other features. Julie
Kristeva defines the abject as those elements that we encounter that cause
a breakdown in understanding the boundaries of our inner selves and
our outer, corporeal, mortal bodies. Seeing a corpse reminds us of our
own mortality. Seeing the spilled bodily fluids of others reminds us of the
tenuousness of our own bodily intactness.22 The abject arouses repulsion,
as in these moments, too much attention is drawn to our flesh-and-bones
physicality and concepts of inner self are fractured and disordered. Yet,
Kristeva writes, we are drawn to it: “One thus understands why so many
victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not its submissive and
willing ones.”23 We seek out stories like those of the Slender Man because
the horrors contained within them make us aware of our own anxieties,
the conflicts of our own inner selves, our own mortality.
Slender’s familiars
While the Slender Man is certainly a uniquely Internet villain—one that

was born on the Internet and one that, as we illustrate below, often is a
response to emerging digital culture—he owes many of his character-
istics and some of his behaviors to fiction and folklore characters that
preceded him. Several participants in the original Something Awful
thread acknowledged this, identifying similarities between the character
and other similar fictional characters. In this section, we contextualize
the Slender Man in terms of how he compares to other villains, horror
and otherwise. While several popular television shows and video games
have referenced the Slender Man with thinly veiled similar characters,
the comparisons discussed below all pre-date the Slender Man and help
contextualize him as a monster villain.
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As noted in the previous chapter, when Victor Surge initially posted

the images, he has admitted that he used a character from the 1979
horror film Phantasm. This film features a character called, “The Tall
Man” who is an evil, supernatural, zombie-making undertaker.24 The Tall
Man has several physical attributes similar to the Slender Man: he wears
a black suit, is a white man, and is tall and thin. Additionally, the Tall
Man clearly is referenced in the Slender Man’s name. That said, other
attributes are not present: he has a voice, he has a face, and he appears to
be human25. His modus operandi is not the same as the Slender Man, but
his visual appearance clearly is paid homage by the new character.
Another common comparison is made between the Slender Man and
“The Gentlemen”: a monster-type from the television show Buffy the
Vampire Slayer. An episode of the show titled “Hush” involves tall, slen-
der, suited, supernatural “men” who steal voices from victims in order
to remove their hearts.26 The Gentlemen have even more physical simi-
larities to the Slender Man—being far closer to “faceless” as well as bald.
Like the Slender Man, there is an uncanny quality to the Gentleman,
particularly in that they leave their victims voiceless and literally unable
to respond to the horror before them. As with the Slender Man, the
Gentleman seem to offer a physical mockery of adulthood and patriar-
chy, dressed as fully grown adults but in a monstrous and horrific way.
Their suits create a sense of irony—as adults they should be protecting
rather than harming people.
The modern folklore of “men in black” (MIB) also creates an interesting
comparison to the Slender Man. Men in black are often associated with
UFO sightings, and (depending on the version) may be alien or govern-
ment affiliated. According to Peter M. Rojcewicz, men in black have
several consistent descriptions within legends dating back to the 1950s:
Often dressed in black clothing that may appear soiled and generally unkempt
or unrealistically neat and wrinkle-free, MIB have on occasion displayed
a very unusual walking motion, moving about as if their hips were swivel
joints, producing a gliding or rocking effect, often with the torso and legs
seemingly moving off into opposite directions.27
Additionally, men in black have distinct speaking styles and may appear
“Oriental.”28 Importantly, like the Slender Man, men in black seem to be
observers of humans, yet with supernatural characteristics; their pres-
ence leaves witnesses “confused and disoriented.”29 Rojcewicz addition-
ally argues that the role of the men in black is to bear witness, which
increasingly has moved beyond UFOs to other supernatural sightings,
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and ultimately suggests that there are similarities between men in black
and folklore versions of the Devil.30 The Slender Man and the men in
black carry the same sense of the uncanny behind their almost-normalcy.
On the surface, they could almost be a person, but with a closer look,
they are clearly very wrong.
With featureless face and suit and tie, Slender Man also bears a physi-
cal resemblance to several comic book characters, predominantly The
Question, a hero written and illustrated by Spider-Man creator Steve
Ditko. While other superheroes disguised their identity with masks that
supplemented their faces and provided extra features, The Question—
whose real name, Victor Sage, is only a few letters different from the
pen name of the Slender Man’s creator— obscured his with a featureless
mask that made him appear as if he had no face.31 The Question followed
several other men in suits with featureless faces—the Dick Tracy villain
The Blank, and Batman villains Dr. No Face and Charles Maire. The
Question was the direct inspiration for the later character Rorschach
in Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Like The Question,
Rorschach wears a suit and fedora, but his mask has one feature—an
inkblot pattern that changes according to his mood or emotion.
Finally, and most importantly, it is worthwhile to compare legends of
the Slender Man to fairy folklore. Ordinarily, mention of “fairy” brings
to mind sprightly small characters such as Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell. Fairies,
of course, cover a far larger category of supernatural beings, which may
include pixies, trolls, elves, mermaids, gnomes, and other beings that are
not human. Often, there is vagueness about the appearance of someone
from a fairy realm, which generally is described as “otherworldly” but
may involve the ability to shape-shift and change physical appearance.
D.L. Ashliman explains, “Taking all available reports into account,
essentially the only conclusion one can reach concerning the appearance
of fairies is that they look like what they want to look like, or perhaps,
they look like what we want them to look like.”32 This otherworldly
description fits nicely with the ever-shifting descriptions of the Slender
Man, who has some consistent and some changing physical characteris-
tics. His ability to blend with nature, to gain tentacles, and to magically
appear and reappear makes him possibly a subset of fairy lore.
Similarly, while many children’s stories feature good fairies as
godmothers, other legends are replete with malevolent fairies wreaking
havoc on individuals and towns. The lore of the Slender Man kidnapping
children sparks clear comparisons to fairy lore of child abductions.33,34
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Often, fairy folklore would attribute misfortune to fairy people: “These

were not random, impersonal events but rather intentional acts by will-
ful beings against whom protective measures could be taken.”35 Often,
acts committed by humans were blamed on fairy possession, not entirely
unlike the state of proxies in the Slender Man folklore.
The Slender Man’s comfort in wooded areas—a common home base
for fairy people—connects him to fairy lore as well. In many ways,
the woods create a contrast to modern technologies. William Indick
explains:
Technology and industry are notably absent from the woods of Faërie.
Although there are people in the woods, the woods are not dominated by
people. In essence, the woods of Faërie represent a primeval age, a figurative
Garden of Eden, in which humankind is at one with Nature, having not yet
learned to dominate Nature through technology and industry.36
The Slender Man, in most tellings of his story, is most powerful in

the woods. He blends in to trees—even, occasionally, becoming a
tree himself. Characters in Slender Man stories often first encounter
the monster in the woods, where he thereafter stalks them. The fairy
woods contrast with modern technology, which is often rendered
useless in many versions of the Slender Man stories. Parallels between
fairy folklore and the Slender Man stories are evident and abundant,
even if these parallels are only rarely (if ever) acknowledged in Slender
Man fictions.
The Slender Man as patriarch
One of the most basic and obvious readings of the Slender Man involves
the conservative and blatant masculinity of his appearance. The most
consistent aspects of the Slender Man, the most common visual indica-
tors that occur from story to story, place him as a tall, slender white man
in a black suit. He is faceless, and his height is overwhelming. His cloth-
ing is almost timeless, to a point that other than images that take place
in medieval settings, the Slender Man almost always wears the exact
same thing throughout both the 20th and 21st centuries without varia-
tion. The only slight variations in terms of clothing apply to whether or
not he wears a hat—generally a bowler.37 The Slender Man’s timelessness
gives the character an inherent conservatism—particularly a patriarchal
conservatism. He fits in as easily terrorizing a 1950s domestic American
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household as he does in 2014. His form could blend into a crowd for the
last century. The suit implies a kind of conformity and convention. A
faceless white man in a suit is ubiquitous and always in style.
While the physical description of the Slender Man tends to provide a
point of recognition between stories, the accounts of his personality are
vague. The Slender Man is a lurker and, beyond his menacing presence,
rarely interacts with his victims. He is both foreboding and withhold-
ing. The Slender Man’s constant lack of emotion indicates a kind of tacit
disapproval with those he is observing or stalking. Thus, the Slender
Man can easily be read as a threatening patriarchal father figure who
passive-aggressively denies his subjects emotional catharsis.
While other horror monsters have also embodied the role of father
figure, the Slender Man distinctly differs in his occupation of that posi-
tion. For example, Frankenstein is a horror story that plays off of the horror
of technology, creating the doctor as an illegitimate father. Alternatively,
Slavoj Zizek refers to Freddie Kruger of the Nightmare on Elm Street films
as the “obscene and revengeful figure of the Father-of-Enjoyment” who
is “split between cruel revenge and crazy laughter.”38 The Slender Man
maintains a horrific and menacing vision of fatherhood, but one that
has neither created his children nor explicitly seeks “revenge”—comedic
or otherwise. Instead, the early stories of the Slender Man indicate that
his modus operandi is simply collecting children. We do not know his
purpose for collecting a “family” nor the ultimate fate of those he has
collected—only that children occupy his interest more than adults and
that they often disappear once he has interacted with them. As a loom-
ing stalker, his desire for fatherhood is threatening; he seeks to remove
children from their legitimate parents to adopt them into new spaces.
The Slender Man is an othered, monstrous father pulling children from
the known world into the unknown.
Yet, not all iterations of the Slender Man stories involve children.
Certainly the early stories on Something Awful had a stronger focus
on the abduction of young children. But the web series, such as Marble
Hornets, TribeTwelve, and EverymanHYBRID, primarily feature young
adults who are college-aged or in their early twenties. The primary
protagonists on these three web shows are all male. More importantly,
the protagonists often live alone, in large empty homes that would seem
to be out of their financial means, with no clear source of income. The
protagonists are often unkempt, disorganized, and do little but follow
their obsession with the Slender Man. They are a caricature image of
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young millennial males, seemingly existing without purpose or long

term goals. Even the EverymanHYBRID series, which starts off with
a sense of purpose—making a fitness video blog—very quickly goes
down the rabbit hole into the pure chaos of being stalked by the Slender
Man. And while we briefly meet Noah’s parents during the first season
of TribeTwelve, it is an interview meant only for the parents to elaborate
whatever information they might have on his dead cousin. It is clarified
that his parents do not live with him, and they are only in town for a
visit. Parents do not exist beyond the periphery in these stories.
In essence, these most popular of web series about the Slender Man
feature characters who are at the edge of adulthood yet not fully accept-
ing the obligations or implications of careers, families, and other trap-
pings of a grownup lifestyle. And in this denial or delay of adulthood, the
looming presence of the Slender Man, watching over them and waiting,
seems to take on a new kind of potential eerie significance. If taken to
be a father figure, the Slender Man’s role is one of discipline. On the one
hand, the Slender Man punishes the young men in these series for their
denial of adulthood—after all, had the characters simply gotten real jobs
and families, they would likely not have become video bloggers obsessed
with a supernatural character. But, on the other hand, the Slender Man
also provides a physical reminder for the male characters of each of the
three popular web series: His black suit and tie and fatherly presence
looms over the protagonists as the thing that they are inevitably expected
to achieve if they are to be successful members of society. His sharp,
dark, suited clothing sits in contrast to the sloppy jeans, t-shirts, and
sneakers worn by the heroes. Had the web series taken place in an office
on Wall Street, the Slender Man probably wouldn’t have provided such
a threatening contrast to the other characters: he would have blended in
with his generic garb. Similarly, his facelessness and hairlessness contrast
to the sloppy grooming styles seen in the web series. The presumption
of each of these shows is, of course, that the Slender Man, if he catches
them will bring them into a state of insanity (at best) or (at worst) kill
them or take them to another dimension. But maybe the Slender Man
is just trying to offer them jobs; instead of a specter of death, he is the
Ghost of Employment Future. The Slender Man may not only be stalking
them, but perhaps inviting them into the mainstream lifestyles that they
seem to be desperately avoiding.
While it does not quite utilize the same intensity of horror as the web
series, one variation that provides the clearest indication that we can
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understand the Slender Man as a patriarchal father figure is the reinter-

pretation of the character as he appears in fan fiction on FanFiction.net.
We will go into more detail about these stories in Chapter 5, but many
of the stories that are featured on the fan fiction web site reconstruct the
Slender Man as a clear father figure, often to young girl protagonists. In
one story series, titled “Cold and Dark,” the protagonist is a blind teen
girl who runs away and meets the Slender Man in the woods. In this
story, and others like it, the Slender Man adopts the girl and is given a
literal voice, often using the word “child” to refer to the protagonist.39
These iterations of the story illustrate the potential paternal nature of the
Slender Man.
All of these examples help to establish that as a modern monster, the
Slender Man taps into specific fears about growing up, parentage, power
differentials, and patriarchy. While most horror is in some way existen-
tial and deals with the life/death binary, death is not always necessarily
a literal state. Just as much as death can mean the end of a life, it can
mean the end of a state of being—the transformation from childhood
to adulthood. The horror in several of the Slender Man stories clearly
emerges from these anxieties.
Technology, self-surveillance, and the Slender Man
The Slender Man is a product of the Internet and digital technologies.

Thus, his horror often reflects the anxieties of a digital age. In many
ways, we can see the Slender Man as an analog character in a digital
world. His penchant for nature and wooded areas, and his timelessness
establish that he has no business in the world of emerging and mobile
technologies. This becomes most notable on web series where his pres-
ence itself is disruptive to newer recording devices, leaving recordings
forever corrupted and artless. His existence in many ways represents a
challenge to the new culture of the digital by something older and more
primal.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas identifies the web series that propelled
the Slender Man into wider notoriety as being part of the “found foot-
age horror” genre, citing films such as The Blair Witch Project40 and
Cloverfield41 as being categorically similar. But unlike these mass-market
films, Heller-Nicholas says, “in the case of Marble Hornets, this approach
is not a marketing strategy but rather a wholly organic, naturalized
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approach to contemporary storytelling.”42 The “found” video that Jay

attempts to piece together—the low-budget Marble Hornets film and
the accompanying documentary footage—is the same as the footage
that audiences encounter on YouTube. Just as Jay attempts to order and
structure the footage to make meaning, so do audiences construct their
own meaning and interpretation from the fragments of video shared in
segments across the YouTube channel. A video glitch that announces
the Slender Man’s presence similarly obscures the audience’s view, and,
just as for Jay, inhibits or enhances our understanding of the material.
Throughout the series, it becomes easy to see Jay and others as less actors
or authors, and more as allies—fellow users navigating the same digital
world and discovering darkness within it.
That those who are stalked by the Slender Man are generally unaware
of his presence until they point their cameras at themselves sparks the
question of whether the Slender Man has always been there lurking in the
lives of his victims, or whether the presence of a camera, the capturing
of his image in archival form, somehow attracted his attention. Though
the Slender Man stories began with Victor Surge’s photo manipulations,
which were not evidently self-portraits, the number of Slender Man
encounters grew rapidly as, in Marble Hornets and many stories after,
masses of young people started chronicling and sharing the details of
their own lives online. The Slender Man emerged from being filed away
on the black and white photographs in a library archive into a ubiquitous
hunter of oversharing young adults. Many of the current stories feature
characters “discovering” the Slender Man—or in the very least tracking
him—through the process of self-documentation.
The fear of what we might discover if we look too long and too hard
at ourselves is age-old, but magnified in an era of digital self-surveillance.
The term “selfie”—meaning the sort of photograph that is taken, usually by
a smartphone or digital camera, at arm’s length while pointed at oneself—
was first added to Urban Dictionary a mere two years before the birth of
Slender Man. The rise of ubiquitous cameras that allowed for uploading
of photos led to an abundance of self-portraits appearing across online
spaces. But the selfie is set apart from traditional forms of self-portrait—it
is instantaneous, like a mirror, but broadcast. The selfie is defined by the
nature of sharing—its purpose is to both turn our gaze upon ourselves and
to invite others to do the same. According to Bent Fausing,
There can be an almost disturbing intimacy in the presence displayed in a
selfie. We are not used to focusing on a face so closely and for such a long
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0006
time. When our eyes fasten on something (especially, a face in a selfie), it

deviates from the eyes’ natural, sporadic pattern of movement in which focus
is always moving and cannot be fixed on a particular thing for a long time. It
also deviates from our cultural and moral norms, which tell us that it is not
nice to stare or gape. These norms are dissolved with the selfie.43
By drawing direct and steady focus on our own faces, the selfie violates
cultural taboos and draws prolonged and intimate attention to our
faces. These can be used for political purposes—the coordinated
display of women’s faces without makeup in selfies that spread across
social networks, for instance, pushes back against societal expecta-
tions of beauty. But more often, Fausing says, the selfie is an attempt at
connection: “It is precisely this project that is in every selfie: kiss me,
consume me, include me, and recognize me!”44 Slender Man stories are
shared in digital social spaces—forums, social networks, video sharing
sites, etcetera—where tellers are necessarily inviting this sort of gaze.
Encompassed in the act of the selfie is a greater phenomenon in which
average people have suddenly found themselves capable of reaching size-
able audiences through digital-based, inexpensive, low-threshold media.
In the world of new media, power rests in the hands of whomever is
self-selectively publishing, but also in the hands of audiences who can
recontextualize through comments, remix, or redistribution. This form
of self-surveillance leaves us vulnerable, open to the scrutiny of others.
In stories told in various forms, from blogs to web video to video games,
The Slender Man often appears for the first time, apparent to audiences,
but unknown to the author-character.
What does it say then, that from the culture of selfies and self-surveil-
lance on social media that we see a monster rise who appears when we
turn the camera on ourselves, and reveals no face? When we take selfies
and invite others to study the results, anxieties arise about what might
be found there—and who might find it. We fear that we might discover
a visage that does not allow for the sorts of connections we’d hoped for:
the otherworldly Slender Man, in whose featureless face we cannot make
any human connection at all. In this horrific context, Fausing’s “consume
me” lends itself to a darkly literal interpretation.
In these ways, the Slender Man is born out of technological anxiety. He
is, at heart, a lurker—the potential audience that exists but does not make
its presence directly known. The Slender Man’s lurking presence has a
chilling effect, just as a web-based lurker does. We monitor our language
and hold our words for fear of what the invisible onlooker, the unknown
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presence might think or say. The lurker is the real life boogeyman of the
Internet because his or her unknown status is always necessarily a threat.
Just as we do not know the true intentions of the Slender Man, we never
really know the intent or purpose of the lurker.
Slender Man, Anonymous, and the

Occupy movement
When considering the meaning of a monster, it is important to reflect on

the sociopolitical (and anti-political) movements that are happening at
the time the monster was created. The time that the Slender Man began
lurking through the bowels of Something Awful forums also saw the
birth of the hacker group Anonymous. As the character developed in
popularity, the Occupy movement became an important anti-political
collective voice. While there may be no direct link between the Slender
Man and Anonymous/Occupy, these entities developed simultaneously
and were born from the same set of cultural anxieties. It therefore
follows that we can connect the anti-corporate sentiments of Occupy/
Anonymous, as the imagery they use maps neatly to the imagery and
perhaps the sentiment of the Slender Man.
Anonymous is a loose group of hacker/activists that first began in
2003 on the anonymous “imageboards” of 4chan, a website similar to
and often in unofficial competition with Something Awful, the site which
birthed the Slender Man. The creator of 4chan, Moot, was a frequent
poster on Something Awful. E. Gabriella Coleman explains the difficulty
in defining the deliberately nebulous Anonymous, but offers several
potential identities:
A name employed by various groups of hackers, technologists, activists,
human rights advocates, and geeks; a cluster of ideas and ideals adopted by
these people and centered around the concept of anonymity; a banner for
collective actions online and in the real world that have ranged from fear-
some but trivial pranks to technological support for Arab revolutionaries.45
While Anonymous existed for several years, mostly engaging in hijinks

for the “lulz,”46 several targeted attacks on groups and individuals that
many in Anonymous viewed as corrupt began to be orchestrated in
the latter half of the decade. For example, Project Chanology in 2008
involved a concerted attack on the Church of Scientology, and 2010’s
Operation Payback targeted Sony, MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, and
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Amazon with denial of service attacks47 for their part in failing to release
funds to Wikileaks. Anonymous was, and still is, an anti-political move-
ment, often focusing their attention on corporate culture—in other
words, men in suits.
While many of the attacks by Anonymous were web-based, several
manifested as real world protests—notably those associated with
Scientology. Because Scientology was often known to personally target
those who spoke out against them, many members of Anonymous chose
to maintain their online anonymity by wearing masks. Many members
of Anonymous wore Guy Fawkes masks—popularized by the graphic
novel and film V for Vendetta—when appearing in person at protests.
Because Anonymous’ modus operandi involved targeting large corpo-
rations or organizations that many felt were particularly corrupt,
many members of Anonymous participated in the Occupy Wall Street
movement of 2011, an undertaking that saw large crowds (both from
Anonymous and otherwise) actively occupying Zuccotti Park, which
neighbored the Wall Street area, in protest for what was believed to
be widespread corruption in corporate and stock trading culture. Guy
Fawkes masks were often seen in photos of protesters at Zuccotti Park
and worldwide.48
There is a striking similarity between Anonymous’ self-depiction and
group imagery with that of the Slender Man. Similar to Occupy imagery,
the Anonymous image generally depicts a male in a black suit with a
tie, either wearing the Guy Fawkes mask or with his head otherwise
represented by a question mark. The original Anonymous icon bears
even more similarity to the Slender Man—a green-faced faceless man
with only an open mouth, wearing a suit
The result is that the ensuing image is, essentially, a tall, faceless man in
a dark suit. While the birth of this image in 2008 predates the first occur-
rence of the Slender Man by a year, the similarity is uncanny. Because
4chan and Something Awful were developed in such close proximity,
it seems unsurprising that this imagery would bleed between them.
Essentially, the image of the Slender Man and the image of Anonymous
came into existence at the same historical moment and even, perhaps,
involving some of the same individuals.
The similarities between the imagery of 4chan and the Slender Man
mythos has not gone unnoted by many of the web series, which are
occasionally playful with this potential comparison. In TribeTwelve,
members of a Slender Man cult (The Order) don Guy Fawkes masks in
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0006
figure 2.1 Original Anonymous image
order to hide their identities. Similarly, in Marble Hornets, one character

wears a plain white mask. While this is not a Guy Fawkes mask, per
se, it creates a similar visage to the effect of the mask popularized by
Anonymous.
As already noted, the Slender Man functions as a lurker, and in this
capacity, he is infinitely terrifying, particularly because of his anonym-
ity. Just as the group, Anonymous, the Slender Man is foreboding and
may be anywhere and everywhere. At the same time, it would be absurd
to suggest that the Slender Man, as a monster, is specifically represent-
ing the group Anonymous. Instead, we offer that the Slender Man is a
monster of ubiquity and industry, and represents the same anxieties as
those that helped to foster the culture of Anonymous.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0006
Anonymous was a response to Big Business and corporate culture. The

suit of the Guy Fawkes Anonymous icon clearly articulates this. By using
this costume, they ironically don the clothing of their enemy in order to
dismantle the structures that the suit and tie represent. The Slender Man,
too, can be seen as an articulation of anxiety over corporate culture.
As noted previously, often victims are on the edge of, but denying the
transition to adulthood. And, in this, the Slender Man becomes a repre-
sentation of the ominous, lurking adulthood of an ultimately malevolent
corporate culture.
It is not possible to identify all of the potential meanings of the
Slender Man character, whose story is currently still in the process of
being developed. New versions and new understandings of the Slender
Man continue to be written, filmed, photographed, and drawn. Because
the Internet-born character is ever-mutating, it becomes important to
not only study the meaning and purpose of the monster, but also look at
the process of co-creation and collaboration. Moving forward, our focus
moves from interpretations of the creature, himself, to understanding
the communities from which he came.
Notes
1 Boyer, “The Anatomy of a Monster: The Case of Slender Man,” 252.
2 Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture.
3 Worland, The Horror Film: An Introduction, 3.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 Ibid.
6 Prince, “Introduction: The Dark Genre and Its Paradoxes,” 2.
7 Ibid.
8 Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, 3.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 6.
11 Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture.
12 Ingebretsen, At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture, 6.
13 Ibid.
14 Poe, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 175.
15 Melville, Moby Dick, 192.
16 Kállay, Going Home Through Seven Paths to Nowhere: Reading Short Stories by
Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and James, 70.
17 Royle, The Uncanny, 1.
18 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 76.
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19 Ibid., 81.
20 Ibid., 84.
21 Ibid., 80.
22 Kristeva, Pouvoirs de L’horreur.
23 Ibid., 9.
24 Coscarelli, Phantasm.
25 This is the status quo through the first two films. In the second sequel to
Phantasm, The Tall Man is revealed to be from an alternate dimension.
26 Whedon, “Hush.”
27 Rojcewicz, “The ‘Men in Black’ Experience and Tradition: Analogues with
the Traditional Devil Hypothesis,” 151.
the Traditional Devil Hypothesis.”
29 Ibid., 155.
the Traditional Devil Hypothesis.”
31 Ditko, The Question.
32 Ashliman, Fairy Lore: A Handbook, 9.
33 Ibid., 9
34 Obviously, this comparison is not necessarily explicitly the same. In fairy
lore, abductions often involve the replacement of human children with a
“changeling”—a fairy child who is different-yet-similar from the original
child. That said, the interest in abducting children embedded in the earliest
versions of the Slender Man lore allows for some comparisons to changeling
folklore.
35 Ashliman, Fairy Lore: A Handbook, 29–30.
36 Indick, Ancient Symbology in Fantasy Literature: A Psychological Study, 31.
37 Comparisons—and fan art—have tied the bowler-wearing version of the
Slender Man to René Magritte’s famous 1964 painting Son of Man, suggesting
that no face but a blank one hides behind the apple. Other Magritte artwork
has been cited as an influence, including 1928’s The Lovers.
38 Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, 23.
39 Massive Times, “Cold and Dark.”
40 Myrick and Sánchez, The Blair Witch Project.
41 Reeves, Cloverfield.
42 Heller-Nicholas, “Found Footage Horror #2: Textures of Silence and Decay:
Marble Hornets and the Haunted Archive.”
43 Fausing, “Become an Image: On Selfies, Visuality and the Visual Turn in
Social Medias,” 10.
44 Ibid., 11.
45 Coleman, “Our Weirdness Is Free: The Logic of Anonymous—Online Army,
Agents of Chaos, and Seeker of Justice,” 1.
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46 Internet-based amusement, usually based in schadenfreude.

47 Denial of service, or DoS, attacks coordinate large numbers of people or bots
to consume computing resources at target sites or services to prevent access
by other users.
48 Montes, “The V for Vendetta Mask: A Political Sign of the Times.”
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0006
3
Open-Sourcing Horror
Abstract: This chapter states that the communal construction
of the Slender Man demonstrates genre negotiations in online
spaces, and identifies the influence of the open-source software
movement as a guiding ethos in those negotiations. Story
elements and assets were openly shared, reused, modified, and
debugged by the Something Awful community, with iterations
being both built from and contributing to the collective story.
Thus, the early mythos of the Slender Man was built not by a
single author, but collectively negotiated through social action
and exigency.
Keywords: digital rhetoric; genre negotiation; open-

source; Something Awful

doi: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007 61
The Slender Man has much more value than as simply an archetype.
Much can be learned about digital storytelling from how the character
was created and developed online. While the previous chapter offered
several possibilities of what the Slender Man means in terms of both
digital culture and older traditions in horror, this chapter shifts our focus
to how the forums of Something Awful co-developed and crowdsourced
his existence, as well as the implications of this form of collaborative
storytelling.
The development of the Slender Man character can be understood as
an “open sourcing” of generic horror conventions. Open source software
is cheap or free, is modifiable, and involves distributed, voluntary labor.1
Thus, those who participate in the open-source process necessarily
involve themselves in “the voluntary participation and voluntary selec-
tion of tasks” in all facets of production.2 Just as in software development,
the debugging of online storytelling also involves voluntary participatory
negotiations. In this way, the Slender Man was established, debugged,
and negotiated through a complex set of generic, yet evolving, expecta-
tions. This chapter, specifically, deals with the time range of the initial
forum posts, which began on June 8, 2009, through a continuation of
posts in the thread ending in February 2010.
Within this process, the communal construction of the Slender Man
demonstrates genre negotiations in online spaces. Carolyn Miller refers
to genre as a form of “social action” where individuals communally
negotiate generic expectations, themes, and styles.3 These genre negotia-
tions resonate even more in online spaces where content and form are
constantly shifting with new technologies.4 Horror, as a genre, is particu-
larly well established and robust, and the history and past traditions of
horror helped those involved in the open-sourcing process to understand
and establish both known and new conventions. The Something Awful
forums maintained both traditional mass media genre expectations of
horror (citing references to the film Phantasm, as well as to the written
works of H.P. Lovecraft), while simultaneously debugging and reform-
ing the creation of the most horrific and terrifying monster they could
collectively conceive. In fact, often this process of collective construction
was so frightening that collaborators confessed to being frightened of
the very fiction they had created.
By exploring how specific (yet mostly anonymous) individuals
construct, debug, and deconstruct a newly forming horror monster, we
examine ways that generic form can be negotiated both through social
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007
Open-Sourcing Horror 63
action and pre-established expectations. While the most popularized

iteration of the Slender Man—his appearance in Marble Hornets, other
web series, and the video games—stabilizes the character, it is through
the participatory process that the character was initially born and
developed. Building on the debugging work of the community, then,
Marble Hornets allowed participants of Something Awful to see their
horrible construction come to life. While new versions of the Slender
Man continue to be negotiated online, the iteration established by the
web series has stabilized the character of the Slender Man more than
any other. At the same time, through examining the open-sourcing of
the Slender Man, we can better understand how genre (in general) is
collectively negotiated and debugged by participants.
Open-sourcing fiction
The open-source movement, which began in the 1990s was an offshoot
of the free software movement of the 1980s, attempting to develop the
ideologies of free software into more of a business model—while at the
same time remaining a counter-space to traditional software production
models.5
In Two Bits, Christopher Kelty explores five elements that character-
ize open-source software development: movement, sharing source
code, openness, copyrighting, and collaboration.6 Kelty explains that
by “movement,” he means “the practices of argument and disagreement
about the meaning of Free Software.”7 Other aspects—the sharing of
source code, the desire to create an open infrastructure, the process of
copyrighting (or “copylefting”8) the licenses, and the desire to collabo-
rate and coordinate “hundreds of thousands of people volunteering their
time to contribute to the creation of complex software”9 — are more self
explanatory. Further, Kelty suggests that all of these characteristics are
based on the main ideological goals of the free software movement: reuse
and modification of previously created work. These ideological goals and
characteristics are at the core of the open software movement.
While there are many compelling aspects to the open-source move-
ment, open-source software has been discussed and dissected in many
previous books and academic articles. This chapter does not explore the
open-source movement in depth, but instead considers the Slender Man
as a specific affectation of an open-sourcing style. In this, we focus on
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007
ways that the open-source movement and open-source software have

affected other aspects of culture (in this particular case, the horror
genre-building of the Slender Man). Of course, not every attribute of
open sourcing is necessarily applicable to the development of the Slender
Man, notably the desire for copyrighting (or copylefting) licenses, or the
intentional “movement” aspects of free and open-source development—
explained in more detail below. At the same time, however, many tradi-
tional open-source philosophies can be applied to the development of
the Slender Man.
In general, this should be unsurprising. As Joseph Reagle Jr. explains,
several aspects of the open-source process have transferred to other
kinds of cultural production on the Internet.10 According to Reagle,
“This model of openness has extended even to forms of cultural
production beyond technical content. For example, the Wikipedia
is a collaborative encyclopedia and the Creative Commons provides
licenses and community for supporting the sharing of texts, photos,
and music.”11 In other words, as open-source has become more impor-
tant and prevalent in both mainstream and Internet cultures, its style
and ethos have been embedded as an important part of creative proc-
esses online. In this way, open-source can be used in a broader sense
to describe the “open sourcing” of non-technical products. Because
the open-source model has become so prevalent in certain Internet
circles, the process of open sourcing has become a natural way of
mediating content. For example, in many ways meme culture—with
its spreadability, reuse, sharing of images and themes, and collabo-
rative nature—is a by-product of open sourcing in Internet culture.
An image meme is constructed, built upon, rebuilt, shared, and then
restructured over and over.
In a similar way, through the open sourcing of horror, Something
Awful provided a fertile ground for communal storytelling. Like open-
source software, the open sourcing of storytelling thrives on reuse,
modification, sharing of source code, an openness (and transparency) of
infrastructure, and the negotiation and collaboration of many individu-
als. Additionally, like open-source software, the Slender Man mythology
and its iterations (including Marble Hornets, the other web series, blogs,
novels, and other fictions) are positioned outside of, and constantly in
response to, mainstream media.12 While other aspects of open-source
software are missing, cultural open sourcing does not necessarily have
to represent a one-to-one ratio—different products have different
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007
attributes.13 Though not every aspect of this kind of cultural production

is identical to the process of open sourcing, it retains a firm spirit of
the open-source ethos. Open-sourcing in this case becomes a mode of
storytelling and (ultimately) genre creation.
Kelty discusses two interconnected aspects that are integral to both
open-source and free software: reusability and modifiability. He explains,
“Modifiability includes the ability not only to access—that is, to reuse
in the trivial sense of using something without restrictions—but to
transform it for use in new contexts, to different ends.”14 In other words
open-source and free software are infinitely transformable, depending
on the needs, interests, or desires of both the developer and the audi-
ence. Versions can start in one direction and be transformed into entirely
different cultural objects. Because this is an accepted aspect of open
sourcing, creators do not necessarily contest it; each modified version is
as valid as the last, so long as it is of use.
Similarly, in open sourcing of non-software, those involved in the
cultural production are constantly reusing and modifying the objects
that have already been put out there. The cultural production of the
Slender Man on the Something Awful forums began with Victor Surge’s
initial stories and pictures, as discussed in Chapter 1. The majority of
the posts analyzed occurred in the period of the first few months on
the forums, while the character of the Slender Man was still being
designed and negotiated by forum members. As members were swept
up in the storytelling, they began to pick up on this molecular narra-
tive and expand it in slightly different directions with new iterations
and features of the Slender Man. Because these submissions often took
different formats, such as fake news releases, art, stories, and woodcarv-
ings, the iterations all considered similar-yet-different aspects of the
Slender Man. Different versions of the Slender Man in different tellings
focused on distinctive aspects of his physical being, with some dispute.
For example, according to retellings on Something Awful, the Slender
Man may have tentacle arms, may have been noticeably tall and out of
proportion to others, may have been wearing a suit, may have been face-
less, and may have been bald. While not all of these characteristics are
present in all versions, every version uses at least one or more of these
aspects to identify itself as part of the legend. Additionally, the Slender
Man is always depicted as Caucasian and always male. For example,
in a “police report” posted by user ScottyBomb on June 18, “Based on
Tuscone’s description and a photograph found in her home, her alleged
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kidnapper is believed to be a Caucasian male, bald, standing 6 feet or

higher. He was last seen wearing a black suit and tie.”15 This description,
notably, makes no mention of tentacle arms, unearthly proportions, or
facelessness. Nonetheless, other users are able to identify this as part of
the Slender Man mythos because he is a tall man (although six feet is
not exceptionally notable), bald, and wearing a suit and tie. In this initial
phase of storytelling, each participant on Something Awful modified
older versions of the myth until it became a new version. Each version
and “sighting” of the Slender Man became infinitely modifiable, so long
as it retained a few basic recognizable traits.
In the most established version of the Slender Man story, Marble
Hornets, many (but not all) of these traits exist. This version of the story
uses a tall, bald, Caucasian man in a suit, who appears to be faceless on
camera. While the character is tall, he is not represented as tall beyond
earthly proportions, and does not have tentacle arms. Additionally,
Marble Hornets adds new traits to the character: for example, his pres-
ence distorts audio and video recordings, proxy-type characters, and a
coughing “slender sickness” with which characters were afflicted. In both
TribeTwelve and EverymanHYBRID, the modifications are pushed even
further. The subsequent web shows used Marble Hornets as source mate-
rial, continuing with ideas like distortion of recorded material, proxies,
and slender sickness, but also adding new aspects. For example, proxies
in the later shows seemed to be slightly more organized and cult-like
than in Marble Hornets. Additionally, “slender sickness” became more
than the violent coughing seen in the original web show, and progressed
to dramatic nosebleeds and headaches. The modifiability and open
sourcing of the original Slender Man allowed each of these iterations to
make these adjustments for their newer versions of the story, while still
keeping the character recognizable to members of Something Awful, and
later, other web sites such as Creepypasta Wiki (discussed in more detail
in Chapter 5).
In the original negotiations of the character on Something Awful, the
reusability and modifiability of the Slender Man went beyond the use
of the Slender Man as a narrative element. Part of the speculation that
occurred in the original forum also involved comparing the Slender
Man to other characters in popular culture: many compared him to the
Tall Man from the Phantasm films, the Gentlemen from the television
show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, urban legends of “men in black,” The Blair
Witch Project, and Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007
Forum member GWBBQ even remarked, “This is like Lovecraft without

all the racism.”16 Another, 21st Century, suggested that the story would
make a “nice horror novel” comparing it to House of Leaves. He or she
explained: “Essentially, make the novel a collection of witness statements,
newspaper clippings, pictures, drawings, articles discussing evidence.”17
By pulling in older stories from more established media, members of the
Something Awful forum were able to contextualize their story within a
larger fiction (that might have involved any, or all, of these characters),
and also use these characters as part of the source material. In fact, at one
point in forum posts, Victor Surge admits to having used Phantasm’s Tall
Man as his own source material for the original photos that he posted on
June 10. On a June 14 post, he breaks the fourth wall, explaining,
The Slender Man as an idea was made up off the top of my head, although the
concept is based on a number of things that scare me. The name I thought
up on the fly when I wrote that first bit. The asset I used for a couple of the
pictures was the creepy tall guy from Phantasm, which sadly I have not seen,
and other various guys in suits.18
Here, even the ostensible creator of the story admits that his original
post is based in reusing older stories and modifying older images.
According to Kelty, another aspect of open sourcing is the sharing of
source code. In other words, part of the ethos of open sourcing involves
not only the reuse and modifiability of others’ source code, but the desire
to show others that source code to allow them to use it in slightly different
ways. At the same time, this aspect is closely linked to the / openness and
transparency embedded in open-source culture. Kelty muses that within
the rhetoric of open-source software, “it is never clear whether being open
is a means or an end.”19 Similarly, Dale Bradley writes that a driving utopian
and ideological impulse for openness is at the center of all open-source
development.20 Regardless of whether it is part of the ends or means, shar-
ing and openness of source code is central to both open-source software
development, as well as a community framed around open sourcing.
The iterative process of storytelling on Something Awful forums, in
itself, is a form of source code sharing and openness. The thread title,
“Create Paranormal Images” encouraged users not to “find” paranormal
images, but to construct them out of previously found pictures. Because
of this initial acknowledgement of artifice, members of the forum often
posted not only the image itself, but also the source of the modified
image. This allowed for discussions on technique and styles that could
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007
be replicated by other forum members in their own attempts to alter

images. By not only showcasing their handiwork, but also revealing how
that handiwork was created, members of the thread were fostering an
ethos similar to the code sharing of open-source software communities.
Even Victor Surge’s initial post of the Slender Man encouraged a large
degree of openness in how the story was understood by other members.
On subsequent days following his initial post, he continued to add new
photographs and entries—new iterations of his Slender Man story—that
sustained his fictional legend. This cued other users to understand that
this particular story was meant to be continued—was not meant to
be single-authorship—and that the “code” (the initial components of
the story) was open to modifications, iterations, and new versions. As
already noted, these other forum members then re-coded the Slender
Man myth, continuing to keep the storytelling open.
Another means of openness on the thread occurred when users
publicly helped other users find the Slender Man in the image. Because
not every image was well conceived or constructed, often users needed
help in identifying what was actually paranormal within the paranormal
photo. Users often added tips, circles, retouched versions of the photo,
or advice in finding the Slender Man in an image. As forum member
VR Native American mused, “This is like the worst kind of Where’s
Waldo.”21
At the same time, users did not always necessarily agree with each of
the iterations of the Slender Man story. As the forum developed, users
reviewed, discussed, ignored, or praised versions of the story on the
Something Awful Forum thread. Per Kelty’s analysis of open sourcing,
this would align with the process of collaboration. While Kelty refers to
this collaboration process as necessarily “coordinated” within this case
of cultural open sourcing, the development of the Slender Man character
was entirely collaborative, iterative, and involved community debugging
(in other words, when people posted versions of the story that did not
comply with the community idea of who the Slender Man was, they
would be gently guided in the right direction).
Once the idea of the Slender Man caught on, several people posting to
the thread collaborated and expanded on the idea with original fiction,
transcripts, news clippings, fake urban legends and fairy tales, poetry,
and (of course) more images. Other users spent time not only making
new things, but suggesting that others collaborate with new stories and
objects. For example, after one user posted the Der Großmann story,
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007
discussed in Chapter 1, Victor Surge responded that someone should

make woodcuttings or illustrations to go with the story. Here, the origi-
nator of the Slender Man story not only is embracing different versions
of the story, but suggesting that others continue going down alternate
paths and creating different aspects of the legend. Rather than making
the woodcuttings or illustrations himself, Victor Surge was suggesting
a collaborative effort. In turn, a user did eventually make an illustration
of a woodcutting to go with the story. Those involved with the thread
felt compelled to collaborate because of a love of the project—similar
to the logic that goes into open-source development. One user, geek-
chic, commented, “I can’t photoshop, which is a shame, as I have lots
of pictures ripe for it. I might write a story and get someone who can
photoshop to do something with the images with me, if that’s alright?”22
In this post, geekchic is remarking on a desire to be included in the larger
development scheme, even without the proper skill set. This compulsion
to collaborate (and to check with others about the limitations of that
collaboration) illustrates the open-source collaboration style. Similarly,
others volunteered skills like voice-acting, sound engineering, and creat-
ing source photography for others.
Not all of these iterations were necessarily accepted or embraced
equally, though. Part of the collaborative process was not only accept-
ing new iterations, but also rejecting ones that people felt were subpar.
As already noted, part of the debugging process that occurred on the
Something Awful thread involved both approving and rejecting ideas
that the majority felt were worthy or unworthy of the developing set of
stories. One of the biggest criticisms was that the Slender Man’s tentacles
(in general) shouldn’t be quite as obvious as many of the people posting
Photoshopped images were making them. At the same time, others criti-
cized that there needed to be more tentacles (as opposed to traditional
arms). For example, Mr. 47 posted, “Hmmm . . . I hate to sound like a
Japanese hentai director but . . . needs more tentacles.”23 Another forum
member, MooseyFate, remarked upon how the background should
appear in photos of the Slender Man: “The Slender Man should appear
in seemingly innocent pictures (bright colors, happy people, etc.) some-
where in the background for realism.”24 Other users gave more specific
criticisms to other forum posters, remarking specifically that they
could or could not see the specifics of the Slender Man in the image, or
that animated gif files tended to loop improperly, killing the suspense.
Finally, other forum debugging was concerned specifically with format
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0007
and presentation: how the story was being presented overall. User
Kitten Cakes, for example, demanded “Less words, more Photoshop.”25
Another user, Blobone remarked, “People should really stop trying to
come up with all these strict ‘rules’ and ‘backstory’ and ‘methods.’ It’s
better to leave it all ambiguous with only a couple of hints as to what
he is.”26 These trial and error processes of debugging the forum-created
story helped establish the open-sourcing atmosphere, overall.
On June 16, perhaps the most important collaborative suggestion was
posted to the forum thread. User Captain Schlork posted the comment,
“Jesus, Slender Man needs to be made into a horror ARG [alternate
reality game] or something. This stuff is brilliantly creepy.”27 While we
cannot ascertain if this comment is what encouraged the creators of
Marble Hornets to make their web show, they began to post episodes four
days after Captain Schlork’s suggestion. In many ways, Marble Hornets
ended up being one result of this negotiable, open style of storytelling,
although the code of that specific story was neither transparent nor as
negotiable as the previous versions of the story that had appeared on the
forum. In part, this was clearly because the creators of Marble Hornets
did not reveal themselves during the first season and continued to post
on the forums under the name “ce gars.” This lack of transparency and
group collaboration, to some extent, stabilized a specific version of
the story (the Marble Hornets version of the Slender Man, which then
affected subsequent web series), but future iterations elsewhere both on
and off of the Internet continue to revise what the Slender Man is, with
both subtle and non-subtle variations. That said, the original composite
of the Slender Man and its generation on Something Awful remains an
important moment in terms of the character’s generation and how he
became open sourced.
Genre, horror, and social action
One way to understand the complexities of the collaborative negotia-

tions that occurred on the Something Awful forum thread is to view it
in light of Carolyn Miller’s analysis of rhetorical genres. In her essay,
“Genre as Social Action,” Miller proposes that new and changing genres
are developed through social exigency (and the subsequent social
actions that arise from that exigency). To this point, Miller posits that
genre is constructed purely out of situation and need. She explains that
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the classifications used to understand the development of these genres

be situated around discourse that is, “open rather than closed and organ-
ized around situated actions (that is pragmatic, rather than syntactic
or semantic).”28 Further, she suggests that exigence is an entirely social
practice and a form of social knowledge: “a mutual construing of objects,
events, interests and purposes that not only links them but makes them
what they are: an objectified social need.”29 Thus, in order for something
to have exigency, it must also have motives from within the social group
in which the genre was constructed. Most notable in this description is
the idea that generic discourse is open and shifting, and develops out of
social need. This development is precisely in line with the open sourcing
of the Slender Man described in the previous section.
While, for the most part, Miller’s theories have been used to under-
stand and describe the development and changes in rhetorical genres,
she later broadens what a rhetorical genre might mean by co-authoring
(with Dawn Shepherd) “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of
the Weblog,” which explores the emerging digital genre, again, in terms
of exigency and rhetorical opportunity. Miller and Shepherd conclude,
“We see the blog, then, as a genre that addresses a timeless rhetorical
exigency in ways that are specific to its time.”30 This research sets prec-
edence for use of Miller’s original theory in digital spaces that might not
have been part of earlier interpretations of rhetorical genre. And while
her theories have not regularly been applied to film or literary genre, one
can argue that—to a similar effect—fictional genres respond to rhetori-
cal exigence (in other words, a desire for viewers and readers to see that
kind of fiction occur) and involve an open and ever-emerging set of
generic conventions that are negotiated by both authors and audiences—
the social sphere in which they occur.
Horror certainly fits into this notion of genre construction, and has had
precedence for many years—long before digital media and the birth of
Slender Man. One can just as easily understand and categorize emerging
generic and social conventions by considering more specific villain types
within the horror subgenre style. In this way, one can see the competing
social and negotiated generic conventions of a horror villain such as the
vampire. Within vampire legends, there are known variations in what
makes a character a vampire: it might turn into a bat or a fog of smoke
(or might always retain human form); it might be vulnerable to sunlight,
crucifixes, holy water, stakes, or none-of-the above; it might be caused
by biting or by disease. All of these things are acceptable variations of a
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vampire’s generic conventions, and at the same time certain consisten-

cies allow the vampire to be recognizable from one version of the story
to the next: a penchant for biting and killing victims, immortality, and
a bloodlust. What we do not get from the vampire myth (or similar
longstanding horror villains) is the ability to watch in real time as these
generic conventions become negotiated, accepted, or rejected. Similarly,
other regional myths (such as Big Foot or the Jersey Devil) might morph
through the nature of word-of-mouth retelling, but we do not get to see
these generic conventions shift in a traceable, real-time way.
Because the Slender Man is a more recent addition to the horror
genre, it becomes quickly apparent how the conventions emerged
and were negotiated in its original iterations on the Something Awful
forums. In this way, it becomes easier to fully visualize the way that
genres are negotiated socially. Additionally, time stamping on forums
allows researchers a tool that other media have not: real-time responses,
discussions, and additions are traceable and can be applied to genre
theory. It is through the aforementioned open sourcing of the material
that negotiations, collaborations, iterations, and conventions are part of
a constantly socially changing set of conventions of the Slender Man.
Thus, there are specific conventions within the subgenre that (similar to
vampires) are entirely negotiable—the specifics of whether he has long
arms or tentacles, the details of whether he has a face or is faceless, his
precise motives, and whether there is one Slender Man or many Slender
Men are all socially negotiated by the group collaboration. Yet, over the
few weeks when the character first emerged, certain conventions became
most prominent: the Slender Man’s masculinity, his clothing, his height
and weight, and his whiteness. Interestingly, the parts of the myth that
seems to have remained most consistent, are (to some extent) the most
ordinary details—a large part of the legend seems to have centered itself
around a fear of an featureless, white man wearing a suit. As discussed in
Chapter 2, this one spot of stability helps to clarify some of its meaning—
wherein the least negotiated aspects were the ones that resonated the
most with creators.
At the same time, during the weeks when the story construction took
place (from the point of Victor Surge’s original post through the begin-
nings of Marble Hornets) there is a constant slippage between those who
are creating (and open sourcing) the conventions of the Slender Man,
and the audiences who are consuming it. Because many of those on the
forum were both designers and consumers of the mythology that was
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being constructed the forum contributors and audiences often became

terrified by their own tales. Horror, of course, is meant to be frighten-
ing. Many of those on the Something Awful thread, then, confessed fear
of the very things they had created. For example, forum member Phy
commented, “Jeez. Slender Man’s been entirely made up by this thread,
but he’s already having an effect. He steals your sleep.”31 Several other
forum members similarly showed that while they understood they were
the ones to create the story, the open-sourcing process that led to group
collaboration created just as much fear as a mainstream horror film,
television show, or novel. Many members would confess specific fears
(such as a newfound fear of wooded areas) caused by the emerging story.
For instance, Death Sandwich confessed, “Thanks to this thread I now
hate trees, windows, and tall people.”32
The Slender Man: past and future iterations
When mythologies of the vampire (or similar oral-based legends) began,

developed, and mutated, the process would have been impossible to
track. While the Slender Man is similarly a horror villain, the Something
Awful forum created a keyhole to watch how this myth was generated—
not by a single author but collectively negotiated through social action
and exigency. Because the open-sourcing process has become so integral
to Internet cultures, the collaborative process of group creativity and
development is as relevant for Internet-based character development as
it is for software development. This process is, by no means, particular
to the Slender Man (or even the Something Awful forums), but provides
a perspective into how myths and genres have similarities to the open-
source model. In effect, the online spaces created a hyper sped-up version
of storytelling that took place over weeks what might have ordinarily
occurred over centuries. The initial forum thread on the Slender Man
helps to indicate how the character was generated through open-source
style culture. As we illustrated in this chapter, the process helped tell a
story that was (and is) uniquely built around Internet culture.
But while the initial period of open sourcing may have concluded, the
versioning and re-versioning of the Slender Man has not. New versions
of the story that are now no longer directly associated with Something
Awful, Marble Hornets, or the other web series show how other interpre-
tations of the story might thrive. For example, in Dexter Morgenstern’s
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novel self-published novel The Slender Man, a small North Carolina town
is victim to the Slender Man, who exists in a tree and convinces children
to follow him by pretending to be loved ones. The children who become
his captives are stuck in an extra-dimensional space in his tree, and
each child that he acquires becomes a branch on this tree. It is only pure
“joy” that can free the children.33 This version of the Slender Man, while
still similar in appearance, varies in behavior. The open-sourcing of the
original character may have stabilized, but new versions constantly allow
for reinterpretations of that character.
Notes
1 Lerner and Schankerman, The Comingled Code: Open Source and Economic
Development; Weber, The Success of Open Source.
2 Weber, The Success of Open Source, 62.
3 Miller, “Genre as Social Action.”
4 Miller and Shepherd, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the
Weblog.”
5 Reagle, “Open Content Communities.”
6 Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.
7 Ibid., 14.
8 Copyleft is an alternative to copyright, allowing for different kinds of reuse,
depending on the specific parameters of a creator.
9 Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, 15.
10 Reagle, “Open Content Communities.”
11 Ibid., 10.
12 As evidenced in the Introduction, it would seem that mainstream media is
often at a loss in parsing this kind of media.
13 For example, Reagle’s previously noted example of Wikipedia being a
form of open-source cultural production notably does not have these
attributes either. Nonetheless, the spirit of open source is still alive in their
development process.
15 ScottyBomb, “Create Paranormal Images.”
16 GWBBQ, “Create Paranormal Images.”
17 21st Century, “Create Paranormal Images.”
18 Victor Surge, “Create Paranormal Images,” June 14, 2009.
20 Bradley, “Open Source, Anarchy, and the Utopian Impulse.”
21 VR Native American, “Create Paranormal Images.”
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22 geekchic, “Create Paranormal Images.”

23 Mr. 47, “Create Paranormal Images.”
24 Mooseyfate, “Create Paranormal Images.”
25 Kitten Cakes, “Create Paranormal Images.”
26 Blobone, “Create Paranormal Images.”
27 Captain Schlork, “Create Paranormal Images.”
28 Miller and Shepherd, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the
Weblog,” 27.
29 Ibid., 30.
30 Ibid., 11.
31 Phy, “Create Paranormal Images.”
32 Death Sandwich, “Create Paranormal Images.”
33 Morgenstern, The Slender Man.
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4
The Digital Campfire
Abstract: This chapter positions the Slender Man in the
lineage of traditional storytelling, identifying key elements of
oral folklore that the stories recall: variability that leads to
shifts and changes in the story according to teller, performance
that defines each telling as a mutually communicative event
between teller and audience, and community that draws the
parameters of each telling according to the culture and tastes of
the digital campfire around which it is told. Just as in folklore,
the Slender Man stories are considered in the specific contexts
and milieus of the communities who tell, consume, and share
them.
Keywords: digital campfire; digital folklore; performance

in storytelling; variability in storytelling

doi: 10.1057/9781137491138.0008.
76 DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0008
The Digital Campfire 77
The Slender Man, from the nature of his creation to the traits that
continue to define him, have unmistakable, unbreakable ties to the digital
world from which he has sprung. And yet, just as many of the anxieties
and facets of terror that influence his creation are pre-digital, so too are
many of the storytelling practices and processes that yielded him. The
process of mythos development and the creation of stories demonstrates
communal testing of ideas, variation among tales, the direct and recur-
sive engagement of storytellers and audiences, and the desire to base
the mysterious character in common fears, experiences, and traditions
that mark Slender Man as distinctly folkloric. Though the storytelling has
moved from traditional storytelling places to online spaces, the folkloric
qualities remain when stories are told around digital campfires.
The open-source software movement described in the previous chap-
ter influenced the creation of the Slender Man mythos: collaboration,
shared ownership, continuous development. These practices also recall
how scary stories have always been told: passed from person to person,
with details, embellishment, and style being added here and there by
tellers as the stories spread. To retroactively apply the term, the creation
of folklore is, through its encouragement of dissemination and lack of
ownership, an inherently open-source process. Slender Man creators
and audiences often spoke of the resemblance to traditional forms of
storytelling, including members of Slender Nation, the community
forum devoted to discussion and distribution of Slender Man stories.
User Harlan Phoenix, for instance, wrote in January 2011 that:
There’s something eerie about the fact that it changes from writer to writer.
Much like a campfire story, really. Slenderman has that horror element
because of his ability to fit anywhere . . . while at the same time retaining
certain iconography beyond that suit. You never really know what he’s going
to do, because each story is technically a new motive. So even if you manage
to pin down, say, the Operator’s motive . . . what about [EverymanHYBRID]
Slendy? Or the GM of the Angel’s Game? You wouldn’t be anywhere closer to
an answer. Slenderman is ultimately an amorphous campfire story and what
probably makes him scary is the fact he has the ability to pin himself down
(in theory) but never stick to one identity for too long. Someone else always
has a story to tell. Which is a very human thing, I think.1
The genre of the campfire story to which Harlan Phoenix refers means
more than just scary stories. It implies a specific locale for which the
primary purpose is the telling of stories, the participation of a teller and
an audience, the potential for all to take a turn at telling. While much
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of the process involved an open-source style of genre generation, the

stories themselves slowly migrated across the Internet, with new digital
campfires igniting as tellers encountered new and different audiences.
In much the same way, the term “digital campfire” as used in this
chapter is not intended to be a cutesy metaphor that intimates only that
scary stories are now being told in digital spaces. Instead, we intend it to
draw attention to the specific contexts in which the Slender Man stories
were told. A digital campfire is an online arena where users gather for
the specific purpose of story swapping. Stories are told there with an
acknowledged awareness of the presence of an audience and the poten-
tial for recursive feedback, with an eye toward pleasing the audience who
is present in the moment of telling, with the potential to change the story
depending on that audience and the teller’s tastes and abilities, with the
expectation that all may participate in telling, and with the result that
community bonds are forged and reinforced through the sharing of
stories.
The digital campfire
The lasting cultural image of the ancient storyteller sees him or her
standing, illuminated by the wild flicker of a fire, populating the beats of
their story with broad gesticulations as those gathered in a circle around
the warmth and light of the take in the story, wide-eyed and audibly
responsive. Carolyn Handler Miller theorizes that, though she suspects
this image might be a modern construction, the idea of the fire reflects a
basic desire for community and interactivity in storytelling. She writes,
“The prehistoric storyteller, according to this theory, would have a
general idea of the tale he planned to tell but not a fixed plot. Instead,
he would shape and mold the story according to the reactions of those
gathered around him. This model evokes an inviting image of a warm,
crackling fire and comfortable conviviality.”2 In more recent years, the
front porch temporarily replaced the campfire as a locale for storytelling,
but in the middle of the twentieth century, faced with widening roads,
the noise of traffic, the advent of air conditioners, porches began to
disappear from the architecture of newly built suburban homes. Instead
of the warm, crackling fire, families instead turned to the warm flicker
of the cathode ray tube as television took over post-dinner storytelling
traditions. Cecelia Tichi writes of the advertised notion of television as
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an “electronic hearth,” saying that, “The television assures the consumer

that this technology . . . does not disrupt tradition but acts, on the
contrary, as an agent of continuity in America whose values remain
intact over centuries.”3
But the stories provided by televisions were not a direct Mass media,
though they could represent folklore, could never truly be folklore, writes
folklorist Richard Bauman. Media such as television and film
use oral language but in ways that contrast significantly with face-to-face
spoken interaction. The mass media are disqualified on three counts: (1) they
are not rooted in community life, but commodified and imposed from with-
out, (2) they are not participatory but are meant to be consumed by a mass
audience, and (3) as with print, they are not variable but fixed by the media in
which they are communicated.4
In other words, they are not collective, they are not performed, and they
are not variable. Television, by its nature cannot be folkloric.
Bauman and the folklorists who followed him identify these three key
features (variability, performance, community) in folklore. These features
can be applied to the Slender Man, helping to distinguish it as a kind
of digital folklore. “Variability” refers to the ability of a teller to modify,
change, or otherwise personalize the details or the manner of telling of
a story to suit the needs of the context in which that story is told. In the
previous chapter, we discussed how the ethos of the open-source software
movement influenced the processes of creating digital texts, suggesting
that open sharing of the basic materials of the Slender Man stories led to
“iterations”—progressive and cumulative developments to the story that
consciously built upon existing material. Here, we additionally suggest
that the folkloric nature of the Slender Man also allows for variability,
with changes ranging from subtle to wildly disparate that stem not from
a desire to extend the mythos as a whole, but rather from the specific
context of the storyteller and the audience for that particular telling.
“Performance” refers to the event in which a storyteller tells a tale in
a space permitting mutual interaction with the audience. The concept
of performance in scholarship has multiple meanings and has been
appropriated by multiple disciplines and interdisciplinary fields that
utilize the language of drama to describe communication, identity
creation, and social exchanges. The academic world of performance
studies is too widespread and imprecise to adequately describe or cite
here, but a start could be made in looking at the writings of Barbara
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Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Richard Schechner. For our purposes, we

take the much simpler folkloristic definition of performance that identi-
fies the space of folk communication as necessarily interactive and shifts
focus from text to context. The resulting story is the product of teller
and audience interactions, and the mediation of the milieu in which the
story is told.
Finally, “collectivity” means the communal creation of a tale through a
number of performances that meet the needs and tastes of the commu-
nity who serves as its audience. When mainstream media anchors and
audiences expressed confusion over the Slender Man after the Wisconsin
stabbings, they did so partially because these stories are not often writ-
ten for mainstream audiences. To judge them as strange, of poor quality,
or illegitimate is to judge them outside of the context of their telling,
from the point of view of someone who is not a member of the Slender
Man storytelling community. Stories come to represent communities,
which are often called into being now for the sole purpose of telling and
experiencing stories. As folklorist Linda Dégh writes, “Thus, the author-
ship, originally individual, has become communal. The individual has
vanished, and the community has slipped into his shoes . . . Every narra-
tor is the vessel for the tradition of the community which he represents.”5
To understand their meaning, stories must be studied in the context of
the communities by which they were created.
The mass adoption of the Internet returned to us agencies and abilities
for storytelling that were seemingly lost during the age when, as John
Fiske describes, television became, “our own culture’s bard,”6 or the
primary voice of cultural concerns and values. The ubiquity of “Web
2.0” technologies that allowed for interactions not with computers
or static websites, but with other users, paved the way for more active
efforts. In the age of the participatory Internet, we utilize the affordances
of new media to create stories that are, as Bauman identifies, variable,
performed, and collective.
Variability
Vladimir Propp, the Soviet folklorist whose work contributed to the field
of structuralism, saw the variation of folk stories amongst tellers as a
natural consequence of being human.7 The subjective experience and skill
of the teller inevitably transform the story with every new transmission:
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Anyone listening to folklore is a potential future performer, who, in turn,

consciously or unconsciously, will introduce changes into the work . . . .Not a
small (though not the decisive) role is played by the narrator’s personality,
taste, views on life, talents, and creative abilities. A work of folklore exists in
constant flux, and it cannot be studied in depth if recorded only once.8
In his work, Propp gathered as many variants as possible and compared

their basic functions. He did not seek to trace or limit the scope to
an original or a perceived authentic story. By doing so, he was able to
describe emergent versions of tales that arose from multiple, varied tell-
ings. Propp utilized the botanical term “morphology,” which describes
the study of the structure of a living organism, to classify the dynamic,
living nature of the folktale.9
One advantage in approaching a storytelling effort like the Slender
Man as digital folklore is that, unlike traditional lore, you can directly
follow the metamorphosis of the tale and cite where specific tellers made
contributions to the story. This can be seen in the honing of the Slender
Man character as a lurker. As noted in Chapter 2, the fears evoked by
the Slender Man aren’t the sorts normally triggered by monsters, or
the psychopathic costumed slasher villains that have populated most
horror films in the decades since Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween
created the formula. We seldom see the results of attacks by the Slender
Man. No one winds up eviscerated or even maimed at his hands. In
most tellings, he doesn’t have claws, or teeth to bare. He doesn’t often
growl or usually speak at all. In the earliest image creations by Victor
Surge, we get the sense that the Slender Man is barely noticeable, always
existing at the periphery. Only upon close examination can he be seen
in pictures of dark wooded areas. His tentacular arms and thin body
camouflage themselves against the trees. In most videos, he’s seen for
only seconds or even just frames at a time. Marble Hornets built on this
idea of the Slender Man at the periphery to suggest a trait of voyeurism
in the character. In the Marble Hornets web series, we see him as a sort of
supernatural stalker, following Alex and his crew as they explore places
at the edge of nature and civilization for filming locations. He never steps
into plain view. He peers into a window, appears around a corner, can be
seen briefly in a background shot, and then he’s gone—obscured by an
edit, a glitch in the video, a cut to black, or disappearing from the frame
as a result of the players running in fear. Similarly, many of the other web
series maintain this relationship of distance between the Slender Man
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and his victims. And so, across multiple tellings, formulaic plot patterns
and adoptions of certain styles that link the Slender Man stories began to
emerge. Variability only functions as a corollary of repetition. Audiences
must be familiar with the functions of a story for the teller’s variation to
have impact.
Early efforts like Marble Hornets and EverymanHYBRID established a
formula for many of the stories that followed. The repeating elements
seen in these stories are similar to the “Functions of Dramatis Personae”
that Propp introduces in his Morphology of the Folktale, but instead of
Propp’s Russian folktales, which give us functions like “ß. ONE OF THE
MEMBERS OF A FAMILY ABSENTS HIMSELF FROM HOME,”10 we
might instead have “ß. A YOUNG MAN DECIDES TO CHRONICLE
HIS LIFE USING DIGITAL MEDIA.” From there, we could create
additional subcategories, as Propp does, such as “ß1. A student shares
candid video related to a class project” (Marble Hornets, TribeTwelve), or
“ß2. A paranoiac starts a video journal to prove his suspicions are true”
(DarkHarvest00, MLAndersen0), or “ß3. A person with a sleep disorder
finds a creative outlet to help cope with his sleep issues” (Just Another
Fool, CaughtNotSleeping). Functions and patterns would proceed from
there for each—mysterious symbols appear; protagonists feel the pres-
sure of being watched; protagonists take part in auto-writing or record
video of themselves without memory; protagonists briefly encounter the
Slender Man and escape; protagonists grow ill with headaches or nose
bleeds, or they black out; protagonists seek out but fail to find answers by
returning to the site of the encounter; the Slender Man appears near or in
the protagonists’ homes; protagonists disappear, and so forth. As Propp
writes, “It is possible to establish that characters of a tale, no matter how
varied they may be, often perform the same actions. The actual means
of the realization of functions can vary, and as such it is a variable . . . But
the function is constant.”11 As with traditional folktales, the Slender Man
stories develop as variations guided by the teller’s tastes and talents,
but they have their roots in prior versions. Everyone who encounters a
Slender Man tale is a potential teller of his or her own variation, and
permissions are seldom sought, expected, or needed for those who wish
to utilize these functions, styles, details, or even, in some instances,
characters from other stories. This latter scenario can prove interesting,
as, for instance, some blogs will develop variations on characters who
elsewhere are played by real people, sometimes under their own names,
in video-logs.
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Years after the first appearance of the Slender Man on Something

Awful, we now have thousands of variations, many of which are going
farther afield of the original model. With time, we could likely trace their
lineage back to the Victor Surge posting at Something Awful, but this
is indicative of the folkloric nature of the stories—they change slightly
as they are spread, retaining some qualities but abandoning others at
the taste of the individual teller. These introduced changes snowball
over time so that we find clusters of tales with features in common. A
folklorist might identify variations according to the part of the world
from which they arose—for instance, Germany’s Aschenputtel versus
the Appalachian Ashpet as variations of the Cinderella story. Instead, we
might classify digital folk stories according to their digital geography—
the media or location on which it is found, not the region in which it
was created. For instance, this would help catalogue the variation of the
Slender Man as a benevolent father figure unique to FanFiction.net, as
discussed in the following chapter.
Performance
The act of telling a story is not the same as the act of writing a story.
Experiencing a story as part of a performance is fundamentally different
from experiencing a text that’s been written. It’s different for the teller.
It’s different for the audience. It even produces a different type of story.
These terms—telling and writing—represent broad, general categories
but get at the heart of the reasons behind those differences. Stories that
are told are implicated by the presence of both a teller and an audience.
They include the front porch tall tale, the water cooler conversation, the
amateur storyteller speaking at a Moth session, and those on theatrical
stages whose performances are enlivened or hampered by the reactions
of a live audience. Stories that are written are created by an author or
authors in a separate time and place from the audiences who will receive
them. This category includes the bulk of what we think of as mass media
narrative: novels, film, television shows.
Bauman writes of performance as a method of communication, in
which the teller and audience are co-present and aware of the situation
of storytelling:
The essence of [performance] resides in the assumption of responsibility to an
audience for a display of communicative skill, highlighting the way in which
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communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content.

From the point of view of the audience, the act of expression on the part of
the performer is thus laid open to evaluation for the way it is done, for the
relative skill and effectiveness of the performer’s display.12
This evaluation comes to the performer in multiple forms: from the audi-
ence speaking directly back to the stage, to gestural and meta-linguistic
cues like grunts and eye contact. For Bauman, a complete study of
performance examines “participants’ identities and roles, the expressive
means employed in performance, social interactional ground rules,
norms and strategies for performance and criteria for its interpretation
and evaluation, the sequence of actions that make up the scenario of
the event.”13 Each performance event is a unique encounter. The story
told there is a product of that event and the combination of factors that
precipitated it: the culture in which it takes place, the identities of the
teller and the audience, the dialogue between them, the strategies that
the teller uses to engage, the feedback the audience provides to shape the
telling, the familiarity and nature of the story being told. As De Fina and
Georgakopoulou write, “In this respect, context is not a list of situational
and cultural elements that determines the structure and shape of narra-
tive, but an orchestration of those elements that come alive in specific
communicative situations.”14
Digital communication brought about the potential for reciprocal,
impactful, two-way communication between author and audience,
sender and receiver, system and user, often leading to the limiting or
dissolution of boundaries between each. We call this “interactivity.”
Cover, writing in 2006, notes that the desire for interactivity challenges
the supremacy and often even the intentions of the author:
The sort of interactivity that impacts most on the author-text-audience rela-
tionship and that allows us to expand our understanding of communication
is that which cultivates some element of user control over narrative content
in a media or new media text . . . While interactivity often entails a built-in
capacity to transform, shape or customize the text in accord with an author’s
wishes, it spurs on and sometimes encourages a desire to transform the text in
ways that are out of the hands of an author and in accord with the individual
wishes of an audience member or user.15
Reciprocity and the ability to transform a text through interaction is

part of what makes digital folklore unique. As a counter, mass media
producers for media such as television or film may hear about the wishes
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and desires of that audience—and occasionally comply with them—but

ultimately the producers have the final say. Around the digital campfire,
everyone has the capacity to contribute.
In the arena of performance, the teller and audience become partners
in developing the storytelling event. Responsibility for the success of the
story shifts away from being solely the realm of an author and is a mutual
effort. As Rafe Martin writes, “Interaction by the teller ‘outward’ toward
the audience draws the listeners in so that they actively participate in
the story, adding words or phrases at the proper times. The distances
between teller and audience in such moments disappear. All work
together.”16 This cooperation has led to a shift in some folklorists viewing
the audience as having an active hand in the creation of story, in seeing
the process of performance as one of co-construction. For instance,
Harris-Lopez writes, “Where folklorists once spoke of call and response,
they now speak of co-performance. When once there seemed to be
tellers of tales and listeners, everyone involved in a folklore event these
days seems to have equal value to, and responsibility for, the success of
the performance.”17 Additionally, Kapchan explains that the co-presence
of an audience means that the story is never told in isolation: “Indeed,
inherent in the concept of audience or audition is the sound wave,
which, traveling invisibly, affects everyone with whom it comes in
contact . . . But the waves do not travel in only one direction. Rather, they
spiral in a dialogic dance of interactive forces. Performance is always an
exchange—of words, energy, emotion, and material.”18
Through the interactive affordances of the tools through which
they’re published, the Slender Man stories are necessarily performed.
Traditional storytelling techniques to draw in the audience like weighty
pauses, call-and-response, or direct confrontation with audience
members have been supplanted or replaced by nested comments, alter-
nate reality puzzles, and messaging through social networks. One of the
earliest story blogs19 related to the Slender Man was a simple one, hosted
on Wordpress and called Just Another Fool. The blog, as with many of
the Slender Man tales, starts innocuously, normally, almost boringly.
The first entry contains a picture of the author Logan’s new watch and
a simple description: “Sometimes I stay up late and for some reason feel
like I have something interesting to say. Most people would just go to
sleep at this point, because we all know that no one is really interested in
what we have to say at three in the morning. I, however, decided to make
a blog.”20 However, the next entry a week later describes the suicide of a
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former friend of Logan, an Iraq war veteran named Matt who suffered
from post-traumatic stress disorder. The doctors at the mental hospital
where Matt resided after he returned give him a Moleskine notebook in
which Matt has written Logan’s name and address. Inside, Logan says,
are all manner of strange drawings that Matt did while at the hospital.
Logan is putting them up on his blog “in hopes that other people might
at least find them interesting as well and some good can come out of this,
rather than me just sit here and stew over everything.”21
As one might guess, these drawings eventually reveal themselves
to be of the Slender Man. As the statement is made on a blog, Logan’s
“hopes that other people might at least find them interesting” is a call
for dialogue. Feedback on the Wordpress site is open, and so subsequent
entries, wherein Logan communicates with the doctors who saw Matt at
the hospital, and wherein he scans pages of sketches from the Moleskin,
contain beneath them comments from readers. This feedback makes for
a fascinating, sometimes confusing, sometimes riveting series of conver-
sations that saw readers either communicating with Logan diegetically as
though they believed in the Slender Man or commenting on the story as a
story. The comments also featured communications between Logan and
one who becomes a character in the story, Dav Flamerock of Miskatonic
University.22 These dialogues influence the meaning and direction of the
story of Just Another Fool for those freshly encountering it, even in the
form of comments still being posted years after the first entry. The story
continues on the blog as Logan disappears and a friend, Joshua, gets
access to his account. The blog entries eventually conclude with Logan’s
body being found. Joshua writes of his plans to take a brief motorcycle
ride to distract from his grief, promising to return to post afterward.
The entries stop there, though the comments continue—almost 600 of
them—some again commenting diegetically, some offering commentary
on the tale as a tale, some bringing in information about the teller from
other sources to question the validity of the ending, and some attempting
to start stories of their own to take advantage of the audience gathered.
The performance goes on, even though the original storyteller has left
the stage.
The Slender Man stories are often described as alternate reality games,
(ARGs) and a thriving forum devoted to their study can be found at the
ARG site Unfiction. However, the amount of actual game involved, or,
indeed, the amount of interactivity with audience, varies greatly from
storyteller to storyteller. The creators of Marble Hornets, for instance,
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disabled comments on their YouTube site to prevent conversations

among viewers from distracting from their work. Their communications
with viewers are housed on other social media sites that offer supple-
mental information rather than open mysteries for audiences to solve
the way a traditional ARG might. Troy Wagner, the director of Marble
Hornets who also plays Jay in the series, says he doesn’t even watch other
Slender Man works because he prefers to focus on his own work:
For some reason, I just can’t get into them. They kind of—not weird me out
in like, they’re creepy—but weird me out in that it just feels like I’m kind of,
I don’t know . . . looking into a mirror . . . one of those . . . circus mirrors where
everything is distorted. ‘Cause it’s like, ‘Well, I’ve done this, too,’ and now I’m
reading how someone else would have done it. Not saying they’re trying to be
the next Marble Hornets or anything like that, but it is related content. So it
just kind of feels off to me to follow them . . . .It feels masturbatory.23
Other Slender Man storytellers openly communicate with their audi-

ences, as well as interacting with other series—also, presumably part of
their audience. For instance, the creators of EverymanHYBRID regularly
appeared in character on UStream to talk about the events of their
ongoing story with viewers. Input taken from the audience during these
interactions was folded into the series as it continues. Many Slender
storytellers strove to build that interaction into their stories but encoun-
tered difficulties in negotiating authorial control and audience agency.
In a post on a Slender Man board on the website Reddit, users sought
suggestions of series that had done well with interactivity, and user
Arunei prescribed the following formula:
Definitely try to strike some kind of ratio between [prepared story and inter-
activity]. I wouldn’t say anything like 50/50 . . . more like 75% plotted story and
25% viewer interaction, maybe even 80/20. Having a plot to follow is a good
idea, but having little side plots that viewers can help with will make your
audience feel like this is something that’s actually happening in real time,
rather than being something like a scripted movie that’s just being posted in
parts.24
Part of the unique aspect of Slender Man as performance is the nature

of the fourth wall in the horror genre. Horror stories are most effec-
tive when they are perceived as real or where the listener finds him- or
herself immersed in the world of the story. Audiences of Slender Man
stories go out of their way to protect that wall or to, as Jane McGonigal
says, “suture”25 the illusion in the case of real life leaking through.
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The spread of a story called The Tutorial and a series of variations that
followed introduced new rules to the Slender mythos. The protagonist
was not the frightened, reactionary college kid of previous tales but a
sensei named M who was on the offensive. M described the purpose of
his Blogspot blog as “I’m trying to teach people how to beat this thing.
Get up high, keep moving, and keep your eyes open.”26 For some time,
The Tutorial, which offered methods of fighting back against Slender
Man—always stay above the third floor, wear a mask to disguise your
face—complicated the ability of audiences to interact with other tales as
though they were about the same Slender Man. Commenters convers-
ing with the protagonists of other stories on blogs, social media, and
YouTube would provide links to The Tutorial, which forced storytellers
to make the choice whether to absorb the information and use it into
their stories, or pretend it didn’t exist and that those conversations didn’t
happen.27 As Omega, the author of Encyclopedia Slenderia, writes:
For the characters, it created a common trait of genre savviness. With M’s
Tutorial, there was now a place where characters could learn the basics of
this creature who was hunting them, and how to stay alive. For some time,
commentors [sic] would often post a link to The Tutorial whenever a char-
acter realized they were being stalked. Barring the “Why are you posting a
broken link?” excuse, it would be hard for the character to continue to act in
such a confused manner after being introduced to the Tutorial.28
There quickly arose among Slender audiences an unwritten rule against

purposeful disruption of others’ stories, though this was not the only way
it was seen to happen. Others included readers/viewers attempting to write
themselves into or forcing the logic from other tales on the conditions of
the story at hand against the wishes of the teller. This practice became
known as “gamejacking” and, though speaking back to the stage was often
encouraged, loudly pointing out the presence of the stage was not.
Collectivity and community
Daniel Ben-Amos cites the desire of folklorists to attribute authorship

“to some creator, be he divine or human. So, in the absence of any indi-
vidual who could justifiably and willingly claim paternity of myths and
legends, the entire community was held accountable for them.”29 Early
folklorists were in constant contact with storytellers and singers who
could not trace the lineage of their tales and songs beyond the collective
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tradition of the community to which they belonged. Even those who did
claim authorship described their creative process in terms of how it drew
or descended from traditions outside of themselves. Thus, folklorists like
Ben-Amos asserted the notion of communality over that of originality:
“In fact, communality has become a central attribute, rivaled only by
‘tradition,’ in the formulation of the concept of folklore. There was no
room in folklore for private tales and poems. Any expression had to pass
through the sieve of communal approval before it could be considered
folklore.”30
Our discussion of the open source movement in the previous chapter
focused on ways that the open sharing and spread of Slender Man story
materials contributed to the growth of the mythos, the content of the
Slender Man stories. The story has continued to grow since the initial
forums, though, and a folkloric perspective illuminates ways that contin-
ued participation contributes to the development of community. The
Slender Man stories spread throughout the Internet and helped to ignite
and maintain distinct communities with specific milieus and customs—
digital campfires—that informed the telling and development of stories
over time.
In many ways, the ability to form communities is enhanced by digital
communication technologies. Whereas before the Internet, communi-
ties were mostly grouped by geography, now transnational communities
are formed digitally based on any number of cultural commonalities.
Pierre Lévy, in 1997’s Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Evolving World in
Cyberspace, predicted the coming of communities in cyberspace that
would challenge mass media notions of production and believed that
there would be a natural shift from focus on the “message” to “the means,
processes, languages, dynamic architectures and environments used for
its implementation.”31 Lévy predicted a shift from an artist’s focus on
product to a collective of artists’ commitment to the process of creation:
Rather than distribute a message to recipients who are outside the process
of creation and invited to give meaning to a work of art belatedly, the artist
now attempts to construct an environment, a system of communication and
production, a collective event that implies its recipients, transforms interpret-
ers into actors, enables interpretation to enter the loop with collective action.32
In this shift from product to process, we see the storyteller reemerge

from the shadow of the author to embrace the role of audience as
co-creator through performance. Over time, these audiences take up
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the stories themselves, tell and retell them, honing, polishing, and trans-
forming, and communities arise from the collective effort.
What is thought of as the Slender Man community is actually
constructed of multiple collectives—each gathered to tell stories in the
context of their own digital campfires. Participation is how one shows
buy-in to a specific community. Unlike the novelist who writes for an
unseen audience, the digital storyteller, as noted in the previous section,
engages their audience in dialogue. Tellers and audiences can be fiercely
protective of the stories that serve as the bond that unites their commu-
nities, the raison d’être of their digital campfires. When, in August 2011,
a filmmaker named Steven Simmons pitched his desire to make a film
based on Slender Man starring the actor Doug Jones (with whom he’d
allegedly had some contact), he was met by resistance from Slender Man
fans who opposed any form of Slender Man mass media. Chief among
the objections was a sense that the solidifying of the Slender Man mythos
into a mainstream film would limit the ability to participate, and there-
fore, destroy the community. Slender Nation forum member Broeckchen
wrote in response:
We are making a fuss about the Mythos being changed from a flowing, flex-
ible, free-for-all internet entity to a static object. Probably also to putting
rocks in the way of future authors on that field, but I think even that is
secondary. Please understand that by transitioning Slender Man to a movie,
you influence the very nature of the mythos instead of just adding something
to it. This is the reason for people being upset about it. Especially since this
transition can only work one way—once done, it can’t be reversed ever.
The real fear is that the masses grab him. We’re fine with the trickle of
newcomers, but if tens of millions of people suddenly jumped on board, than
the shit would hit the proverbial fan. We would be inundated with newbies
who know nothing. Sure, there’d be a few nice people out there, but majority
would be, to put it in the most succinct and possibly offensive manner, idiots.
There will be people who have no respect for what’s come before, and what’s
come after. You may see a shining future where everyone knows about the
Slender Man, but we see a heaving mass of Mythos Death(tm) heading our
way.33
In this argument and others that followed, the health of the mythos and
the health of the community who were actively creating it were inextri-
cably linked. At the same time, this comment presumed a single-voiced
community. But, as noted above and expanded upon in the next chapter,
different communities built around different digital campfires have
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different qualities, customs, and needs. As such, the individual articula-

tions that appear to speak for an entire Slender Man community may
only be speaking for one portion.
One obvious difference between the Slender Man communities and
communities that spawned traditional folklore is that the latter existed
as collectives from which tales grew organically, whereas the former are
collectives that grew organically around the tales. Even as traditional
folk communities came into contact with and were assimilated by the
kind of civilization that spread from the cities, folklorists still turned to
well-delineated groups to mine for new lore. Secretarial pools, church
congregations, firefighters, prison inmates, even academics—scholars
still found folklore being spread in groups of like people. However,
the situation of communities growing around the story is not unprec-
edented in contemporary times, as Joseph Daniel Sobol describes in his
The Storytellers’ Journey: An American Revival. In the late 1960s, as various
folk movements were being fashionably revived, traditional front porch
storytellers began gathering in Jonesborough, Tennessee for an annual
storytelling festival. The function of the community that grew from
that gathering was to promote storytelling.34 Consequently, many of the
stories told there supported that function in a meta way, by being about
storytelling itself, much in the way that efforts like The Tutorial described
above serve as both stories and guides for the community on how other
stories should be told.
Sobol draws a distinction between traditional communities and
those that sprang up around a series of nationwide storytelling festi-
vals: “Certainly, we are not talking about a community in the quaint,
endangered sense of a place one shares with others. Rather it is a form
of virtual community, an extremely low-tech theme park, which was
easily packed up and carried to every region of the country—a carnival
of performative rides.” And yet these “alternative models of community,”
the network of storytelling enthusiasts who sponsor, attend, and perform
at storytelling festivals, became, to Sobol and others, “A revitalized story-
telling world.”35
In the formation of the Slender Man communities, we see a similar
alternative model, one that often privileges participation of both teller
and audience over the literary qualities normally prized in mass media
texts. As Janet Murray writes, “Orally transmitted stories often have a
stronger resonance for members of their originating culture than they can
ever have for outsiders. The stories that people make up collaboratively
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in virtual environments are of this tribal nature; they may seem trite or
derivative to an outsider, but they can be riveting and emotionally reso-
nant for the participants.”36 A rich study could be made in exploring the
non-digital lives of Slender Man storytellers to examine their motives for
participation and creation. But seldom do these outside lives intrude on
the stories or communal communication. Each community, each digital
campfire, as we see in Chapter 5, has their own specific audiences, norms,
rules, and tastes that can affect the internal reception, and external
perception of a work. But in considering the Slender Man stories from a
folkloric perspective, we shift the analytic emphasis away from looking at
the stories themselves as a fixed and finite text to be dissected, to consid-
ering these digitally told stories in the dynamic context of community.
Through this lens, the quality of the stories matters less, and we instead
are able to understand the collective creative processes that fashioned
them, their ever-changing nature, and the roles the stories serve in the
communities that make them.
Digital folklore
The Slender Man mythos has been referred to as “fakelore”37 and indeed
serves as the only contemporary example on the Wikipedia page for the
subject, but this is a false application of the term as created by Richard
Dorson, who coined it in response to American legends like Paul Bunyan
and Pecos Bill that passed themselves off as genuine lore, stories of the
folk, but were actually the creation of companies to market products.38
The Slender Man, as seen in the arguments over a potential film version
above, does belong to the folk of the Internet, continues to be molded by
them, and does not have roots in commercial exploitation.
But can a mythos such as this, which can be traced back to one person,
and for which the shifts in formula and content can be observed and
identified over time, truly be called folklore? We hold that it can. As
early folklorist William Wells Newell said, “We can only say that the first
reciter was the author, in the same sense as we may say that this or that
rill is the source of a river. The presumptive inventor himself formed the
tale only by a re-arrangement of preexisting elements.”39 As new creators
tell Slender stories, they tell them in the context of their first encounter
with the mythos. For some, this might be having seen the original works
by Surge. For others, it might mean a chance viewing of Marble Hornets
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at a friend’s house. For yet others, tellings might emerge from the specific
enhancements made by video games like Slender: The Eight Pages, blogs
like The Tutorial, or whatever new contribution to the Slender mythos
is being made at the moment. The development of the Slender Man
mirrors that of how traditional folklore has been told and performed,
and the community surrounding it resembles the folk communities that
created traditional tales. The difference is that these tales are mediated
and distributed through digital technology, and being part of a commu-
nity no longer means being co-located. Slender Man-themed forums
and communities serve as jumping off points for storytellers to distribute
their tales. Audiences follow, using the affordances of the digital media
to talk back, participate, or step in at the end and contribute their own
piece of the legend.
Notes
1 Miller, Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment, 6.
2 Ibid.
3 Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture, 53.
4 Bauman, Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A
Communications-Centered Handbook, 37.
5 Dégh, Folktales and Society: Storytelling in Hungarian Peasant Community, 52.
6 Fiske, Reading Television, 65.
7 Propp, Theory and History of Folklore.
8 Ibid., 8.
9 Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale.
10 Ibid., 26.
11 Ibid., 20.
12 Bauman, Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A
Communications-Centered Handbook, 3.
13 Ibid., 4.
14 De Fina and Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and
Sociolinguistic Perspectives, 61.
15 Cover, “Audience Inter/Active: Interactive Media, Narrative Control and
Reconceiving Audience History,” 141.
16 Rafe, “Between Teller and Listener: The Reciprocity of Storytelling,” 151.
17 Feintuch, Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, 113.
18 Ibid., 133.
19 Or “slenderblogs,” as they’re known in the Slender mythos community
20 Logan, “This Is What Happens.”
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21 Ibid.
22 Miskatonic U., of course, being the fictional school from the horror stories of
H.P. Lovecraft, whose works have directly and indirectly influenced various
portrayals of Slender Man.
23 Ner0bellum, “Marble Hornets Radio Interview (Full Audio).”
24 Arunei, “Interaction with the Community.”
25 McGonigal, Reality Is Broken.
26 M., The Tutorial.
27 The Tutorial also introduced the term “proxies” to describe human agents of
the Slender Man.
28 Omega, “The Tutorial.”
29 Ben-Amos, “The Idea of Folklore: An Essay,” 58.
30 Ibid.
31 Pierre, Collective Intelligence, 121.
32 Ibid.
33 Broeckchen, “Slender Man Feature Length Film.”
34 Sobol, The Storyteller’s Journey: An American Revival.
35 Ibid., 156.
36 Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, 278.
37 Parkinson, “The Origins of Slender Man.”
38 Dorson, Folklore and Fakelore: Essays Toward a Discipline of Folk Studies.
39 Newell, “Individual and Collective Characteristics in Folklore,” 5.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0008
5
The Slender Man
Who Loved Me
Abstract: This chapter describes stories that seem to break
with the standard formula and functions of the Slender
Man stories as housed on sites like Creepypasta, Slender
Man-related subreddits, and Fanfiction.net. Often, these are
abstracted in the form of fan fiction or parody, or used to
represent certain marginalized viewpoints, such as through
romanticizing or eroticizing the horror character. The telling of
these stories imparts to their creators new media literacies, and
the perception of their legitimacy is considered in terms of the
culture of the communities that created them.
Keywords: Creepypasta; fan fiction; new media literacy;

parody; Reddit

doi: 10.1057/9781137491138.0009.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0009 95
In one Slender Man variation, “Cold and Dark,” a young blind girl named
Aurora flees to the woods to escape an abusive father and finds herself
in the presence of the Slender Man. He offers to return Aurora’s sight
to her, and only asks in exchange that she become his proxy. Soon after
their meeting, Aurora shares her impression of the imposing figure:
I listened to Slenderman and the stories of his brothers and the creepypastas.
I became addicted to the tales and soon enough desired to be a part of their
dysfunctional family. The undead, the Slenders and their proxies hand in
hand living together under one roof. I wanted that understanding, that feel-
ing of being accepted. It’s everything I never had.1
Aurora moves into the Slender Man’s elaborate and well-decorated

mansion, where he lives with his other Slender siblings—Splendorman,
Trender man, Offenderman—as well as the proxies who, in this version
of the story, are willing participants. Characters from web series (partic-
ularly, Marble Hornets) and other Internet-based horror stories such as
“Jeff the Killer” and “Eyeless Jack” are also present at the mansion. The
Slender Man asks Aurora to change her name to “Insanity” to define her
“new identity.” Although Aurora witnesses the Slender Man committing
murder and realizes he intends for her to do the same, the relationship
between them grows nonetheless. At one point in the story, Aurora sits
on the Slender Man’s lap crying, and he dries her tears with his tendrils.
Aurora thinks to herself: “I realized something. He might be a gruesome
killer, a ruthless monster but he has a heart. A dark one. But I also real-
ized . . . he’s the father I never had.”2 Aurora eventually discovers that she
has it within her to kill people herself, and that the eyes given to her by
the Slender Man can kill people with rage. While the story eventually
takes an even darker turn, as Aurora goes on several killing sprees, it also
continues to deal with her parentage, love life, and personal feelings.
Stories discussed in the chronology of our book so far seem only
remotely linked with the incident in Wisconsin. Yet, the variation of the
story found in “Cold and Dark,” written a half a decade after the origina-
tion of the Slender Man and bearing only a vague resemblance to the
versions that preceded it, represents the Slender Man as a father figure.
This version of the Slender Man lives in a mansion, just as the girls
implicated in the Wisconsin attack described to police. Additionally, this
version of the Slender Man requires willing proxies to commit murder.
The similarities suggest that this story, or some related variation, helped
fuel the fantasy the girls needed to justify their crime. Many of these
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The Slender Man Who Loved Me 97
stories clearly indicate the Slender Man as either a father figure or an

obvious love interest. New rabbit holes and interpretations of who the
Slender Man might be are constantly appearing in addition to the many
versions of the Slender Man stories already online. Because of the unfin-
ished, folkloric nature of the tales in which he appears, the Slender Man
will always be in flux. As we see with “Cold and Dark,” not all of these
emerging variations are purely based in the horror genre.
“Cold and Dark” and other stories like it are, at this point, outliers—
many fans of the Slender Man mythos do not acknowledge (and perhaps
are not even aware of) the romantic or non-horror based stories. These
and related stories have not spawned web series and have not become
novels or novellas distributed by Amazon or other digital publishers.
Stories of the “Cold and Dark” variety are often considered by Slender
Man audiences to be fan fiction. Fan-made versions of the Slender Man
story can be found on FanFiction.net, Creepypasta Wiki, and other
online places where people share variations of him that are alternately
horrific and tender. Yet, boundaries are difficult to draw when discussing
a digital storytelling “canon;” the stories in this category are defined by
their very lack of canon. Regardless, many Slender Man communities
have established hierarchies that tout the legitimacy of some variations
over others. Owing to the brief nature of Victor Surge’s primary text,
and the subsequent collective development of the mythos, canon is, in a
sense, entirely fan-created. Thus, fans themselves get to determine which
versions are deemed canonical or legitimate. A listing on a Tumblr blog
has a list of ongoing inactive stories, blogs, and video blogs relating to
the Slender Man.3 No romantic or melodramatic versions of the Slender
Man are listed here, nor any ongoing stories from FanFiction.net—only
those primarily based in horror genres are authorized on this list of rabbit
holes. Other rabbit holes similarly omit stories such as “Cold and Dark.”
This creates a gendered binary in Slender Man fiction, wherein melodra-
matic versions, which often feature female protagonists, are considered
less legitimate and more narrowly circulated than horror versions with
male protagonists. This is not surprising—according to Kristina Busse,
fandom often develops a gendered hierarchy wherein female fan prac-
tices and product are often valued less than those practices and products
made by males.4
Technically, all versions of the story following Victor Surge are
fan fiction, but only some seem to be labeled as such. While previous
research on fan fiction focuses on its role as ancillary to the primary
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text, variations on the Slender Man are based in minimal primary

text—two Photoshopped images and accompanying captions—making
all subsequent versions more-or-less equal in terms of relationship to
the original. Stories like “Cold and Dark” might be easily dismissed as
misinterpretations of the Slender Man myth. Yet, the democratization
of Slender Man storytelling allows for no authorized or unauthorized
version or storyteller—communities, rather, shape their concepts of
legitimacy based on the preferences and culture of their specific digital
campfire. The border of what is considered fan fiction is therefore in
flux—the audience and creators are all emerging from the same modes
and fandom, and therefore their versions of the stories should have equal
weight and credibility in relation to the original. Thus, in the situation of
the Slender Man, weighing fidelity to the first Something Awful posts in
defining subsequent variations as fan fiction is a failing effort. The author
is not dead, to reference Barthes, but rather acknowledged as a distant
ancestor of whichever storyteller is currently plying their craft.
Each community therefore locally defines legitimacy on a basis of
context, location, style, and audience. In much of what is labeled Slender
Man fan fiction, we see breaks from previously established functions,
styles, and patterns. In addition to modifying the nature of the Slender
Man character, we also see creators whose work is labeled as fan fiction
working in more static media. Slender Man fan fiction is often prose:
short stories, serialized chapters, or novels. On sites like FanFiction.net
authors are not seeking to advance the mythos as a whole, but to carve
out a corner for themselves to fashion a divergent or irreverent take on
it. If we consider all Slender Man storytelling fan fiction, then stories
of the “Cold and Dark” variety are fan fiction once removed, or fan
fiction written by fans of fan fiction. These works remain participatory as
authors seek and incorporate feedback from audiences. The goal is not,
however, to build the lore of the character, but to create a polished, often
finite story that represents the author’s personal take on it. Fan fiction
stories might not necessarily return the Slender Man to the communal
pool in a form that can be used again, for instance, in the case of parody
discussed later in this chapter.
With this in mind, Chapter 5 focuses on web sites—numerous digital
campfires—where fans, writers, readers, and other participants can create,
read, and comment on one another’s fiction. Drawing from research on
fan fiction and participatory culture, we consider the power and potential
of the Slender Man to push the boundaries of fandom and fan fiction.
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Fandom, fictions, and literacies
Fan studies is a well-established field that contextualizes how fans

reinterpret and repurpose film, television, and other forms of media
to better understand primary texts, community actions, sociopolitical
implications, and audience reception of media objects.5 According to
Henry Jenkins, fan fiction writers use methods of “textual poaching” (as
originally described by Michel de Certeau) to appropriate a fictional text
and “reread them in a fashion that serves different interests, as specta-
tors who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and
complex participatory culture.”6 For years, scholars have studied fan-
created writings, artworks, and mash-up videos that further define or
sometimes completely revise the original intentions of the producers of
popular media. While there is often a stigma to fan-created work, many
have defended the creativity and value of fan fiction. Matt Hills explains,
“Fans interpret media texts in a variety of interesting and perhaps unex-
pected ways. And fans participate in communal activities—they are not
‘socially atomised’ or isolated viewers/readers.”7 Studying fan-created
works is an essential part of understanding the primary text, and those
who feel an affinity toward that text. More importantly, fan studies have
established frameworks for understanding participatory communities
both online and offline.
Fan communities continue to morph and grow through the rise of
digital media. Fans are now able to connect with each other from distant
locations and are no longer bound to their localities to find other fans.
Additionally, digital media has helped fans create, distribute and consume
media at a much faster pace. According to Paul Booth, digital fandom has
added a new game-like quality and playfulness to fan practices:
One key characteristic we can witness in Digital Fandom is how fans’ use of
technologies brings a sense of playfulness to the work of active reading. The
work that fans put into creating fan fictions, fan blogs, fan videos, fan wikis or
other fan works can all be boiled down to the fact that they are fun to share.
What these examples illustrate is an approaching trend in contemporary
media to ludicize texts, or for audiences to create a philosophy of playfulness
in their writing to each other.8
In many ways, the surplus of fictions and distribution methods, as well

as the ability for communities to connect is what makes this playfulness
possible in the growing number of fan communities.
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As previously noted, difficulties arise when placing the “fan fiction”

label on Slender Man stories. On one hand, we might consider a
Slender Man fiction original storytelling based on the character—each
new fiction told about the character in many ways stands on its own.
But on the other, many stories that have been written about the Slender
Man have been based primarily on popular, highly circulated versions
of stories about the character such as Marble Hornets or the game
Slender. One might argue that the popularity of these texts makes them
“primary”—but both creatively and legally, they are still derivative of
the post made by Victor Surge. Because of this, the boundaries of fan
fiction are almost necessarily fuzzy. Works labeled as fan fiction are
often identified as such to distinguish them from what communities
consider more legitimate works. For instance, melodramatic works
that feature the Slender Man as sympathetic are often less legitimized
than those based in horror. Similarly, stories that feature male protago-
nists tend to be more legitimized/popularized than those with female
protagonists. As noted previously, these distinctions ultimately create
a gendered binary when considering fan-made creations, based on
the Slender Man mythos. Thus, some communities use the term “fan
fiction” diminutively, suggesting that some Internet works about the
Slender Man do not have the gravity or importance as others. For exam-
ple, while Marble Hornets and TribeTwelve are not necessarily original
fiction—these series were riffing off of the Victor Surge original post as
much as anyone else—they are considered more legitimate than stories
such as “Cold and Dark.”
As discussed in the introduction to this book, after the stabbing in
Wisconsin, many reporters and pundits questioned the value of online
horror writing, regardless of whether it was considered fan fiction
or original fiction. Those who raised the moral panic in mass media
blamed the writing and distribution of this material as the cause of
the horrific event, suggesting that fandom had instead given way to
dangerous fanaticism. However, literature on fan fiction and literacy
establishes value in fan-based writing. Regardless of their chosen
subject matter, creators both young and old are using fan fiction spaces
to learn their voices and writing styles. Henry Jenkins relates an inci-
dent in his Convergence Culture wherein Warner Brothers prohibited
a young girl from writing Harry Potter fan fiction in order to protect
their copyright. Jenkins explains that the complexity of the work being
done by the young woman—as well as the community she worked
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with—yielded a more productive education than what many children

receive in schools:
Through online discussions of fan writing, the teen writers develop a
vocabulary for talking about writing and learn strategies for rewriting and
improving their own work. When they talk about the books themselves, they
make comparisons with other literary works or draw connections with philo-
sophical and theological traditions; they debate gender stereotyping in the
female characters; they cite interviews with the writer or read critical analyses
of the works; they use analytic concepts they probably wouldn’t encounter
until they reached the advanced undergraduate classroom.9
As a result, Jenkins argues that the value of this play-work for young
people was far more relevant than the copyright laws that tried to
prohibit it.
Similarly, Rebecca W. Black studied adolescents writing fan fiction
online, and concluded that new media and information and communi-
cation technologies create opportunities to expand classrooms through
fan fiction.10 Her subjects used it to understand and resituate existing
media in exciting ways. She explains, “Rather than using language and
text solely to reproduce existing genres and participate in concretized
social patterns, these adolescent fans are creatively making use of a
range of representational resources to design new, hybrid genres of fan
fiction that allow them to enact specific socially situated identities.”11 The
relationship between literacy, pedagogy, and fan fiction demonstrates
some of the value and usefulness of Slender Man writings. Both children
and adults seem to write this fiction,12 using the Slender Man mythos
to explore their voices as writers, connect with communities, and work
through their own individual anxieties.
Creepypasta and horror writing online
Several community web sites, each with different styles and parameters,
house regularly posted Slender Man fan fiction. As noted in the previous
chapter, communities form around the telling of stories, and the stories
told around each digital campfire reflect the particular needs and interests
of that community, with each establishing its own canon. The collectively
defined expectations of each of these digital campfires determines the
style of writing and, to some extent, how legitimate that fiction is seen
in relation to more popular versions of the story. The following identifies
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several web communities, explaining the parameters, the writing styles,

and audience expectations in terms of both horror writing and Slender
Man writing.
Creepypasta
Many examples of horror fiction are born on the wiki at creepypasta.

com. Creepypasta specifically focuses on horror fiction, but being the
original source for a text is not privileged—the Creepypasta community
expects stories to be shared, cut and pasted, and passed around online
without a clear record of authorship. Creepypasta derives its name from
the practice of “copy pasta” where people cut and paste anecdotes and
fiction around the web, mixing and remixing them without citation or
explicit links to the original. The site has a similar ethos of cutting and
pasting stories found on the web, but focuses entirely on scary stories.13
The term “creepypasta” predates the web site, originally coming from
4chan, where the /x/ community often posted and reposted horror
fiction, characterizing it as “creepypasta.” Because posts on 4chan are
impermanent, creepypasta.com was founded to be a repository for texts
copied and pasted from 4chan or elsewhere in the web. The primary
forms of creepypastas, according to the web site, are anecdotes, ritual
lists of instructions, or “lost episodes” of a popular television show that
take on a newer, creepier tone.
Several popular horror fictions have been posted over the years on
Creepypasta, many of which have achieved notoriety similar to the
Slender Man. For example, the story “Jeff the Killer” tells of a grade
school-aged boy who is bullied and subsequently turns into a serial
killer.14 Versions of this story and others like it are copied, pasted, revised
and posted on creepypasta’s wiki and elsewhere. Slender Man stories
were a popular and frequent post on creepypasta. As a kind of “pasta”
though—something cut and pasted from elsewhere online—versions of
the story have often been duplicated and reduplicated, losing all sense
of authorship. For example, the “Tall Man” Romanian legend from
Chapter 1, which originally appeared on Something Awful, eventually
migrated to Creepypasta. While it may sound as though, through this
process, anyone can post anything, specific guidelines governing content
do exist, and pieces can be rejected by moderators for bad grammar,
obvious trolling, or content that is based too closely on obvious urban
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legends. While Creepypasta used to accept submissions that cannibal-

ized existing Slender Man or similar Internet-born horror characters
(such as Jeff the Killer), they are no longer accepting these submis-
sions. According to the home page of the Creepypasta wiki: “Sorry, we
no longer accept spinoffs or fan sequels of existing pastas (i.e. Jeff the
Killer, Slenderman, The Rake, BEN and such) to be directly uploaded to
this wiki, unless you wrote the original story yourself.”15 This language
suggests that fan fiction is considered a less legitimate form of pasta, and
validates a hierarchy of certain kinds of fiction over others.
The Creepypasta community also has quality control methods: fiction
posted to the Creepypasta web site must go through wiki editorial review
that checks against deliberate “quality standards” as listed on the web
site. Creepypasta that fails to meet the standards of the community is
banished to the sister website, Crappypasta, and is thereafter described
using that site’s derisive moniker. Often crappypastas feature bad gram-
mar or general lack of context. A famous example of a crappypasta was
posted on 4chan in 2008:
So ur with ur honey and yur making out wen the phone rings. U anser it n
the voice is ‘wut r u doing wit my daughter?’ U tell ur girl n she say ‘my dad is
ded’. THEN WHO WAS PHONE?16
This example, though it predates creepypasta.com and crappypasta.

com, perfectly characterizes crappypasta, with poor grammar and strange
jumps in logic.17 That said, the existence of crappypasta also suggests
strong content policing in the Creepypasta community. Despite the use
and reuse of similar themes and materials, the community holds some
expectation of both originality and coherence in what is posted on the site.
The Slender Man has initiated many crappypastas as well as creepypastas.
For example, one punctuation-less story, “slenderman vs commando,”
sees a nine-year-old commando defeating the Slender Man.18
Reddit and subreddits
Reddit is a social networking web site where registered users can submit
to topic-specific forums and write comments on existing posts. The
platform is primarily anonymous, and ranks the interest of articles and
posts by “karma”—how many people like or dislike the post. Reddit
is organized by what are called “subreddits”—specific topic areas of
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interest. People might post links to news articles, YouTube videos,

images, personal thoughts, questions, and in some subreddits, fiction.
Moderators of subreddits are empowered to delete or ban posters that
do not obey specific subreddit rules, and this maintains strict style and
expectations for posts and comments in terms of both forum etiquette as
well as relevance.
Fictions involving the Slender Man can be found on several loca-
tions throughout Reddit, though primarily are housed in one of a few:
/r/Slender_Man, /r/slenderman, /r/Marblehornets, /r/slenderart, /r/
slender, /r/slendermanARGS, /r/nosleep, and /r/creepypasta. This
chapter does not allow for analysis and commentary on each of these
subreddits, but, instead, considers some of the prevailing ways that
subreddits structure and discipline the kinds of writing that appear in
the forums.
Authorial expectations on Reddit are often more explicit than on
Creepypasta. Several Slender Man or horror-related subreddits require
a suspension of disbelief. Participants, posters, and commenters are
all expected to post in specific ways, primarily establishing that the
horror they are recounting is real. For instance, the sidebar of the /r/
Slender_Man subreddit stipulates its rules:
This subreddit is dedicated to Slenderman, a mysterious being that has been
stalking and ruining the lives of various people around the world. These are
their stories. . . .
The Golden Rule- Don’t Be a Skeptical Twat!!
Please do no post your Slender “Let’s Play” here. We get it.
Yes, we’re aware that mannequins often are wearing suits and also lack faces.
Please stop posting pictures of mannequins.
Also, don’t be that guy who spams the comments pretending to be
Slenderman. We don’t like that guy.
Memes shall be highly regulated and subject to mod review on an individual
basis.19
This sidebar demonstrates the kind of regulation of the Slender Man

fiction that appears on this particular subreddit. This sidebar also
demonstrates cynicism—it implies that those involved have played with
Slender Man fan fictions enough that they know the specific trolls and
overused themes, and want to keep it from their subreddit. The ability to
designate what is inappropriate and to delete inappropriate posts allows
for a specific kind of quality control on Reddit.
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One of the most interesting subreddits for horror content is /r/nosleep,

a subreddit not specifically dedicated to the Slender Man, but for horror
fiction in general (although the Slender Man occasionally makes
appearances in posts there). /r/nosleep rules of posting stipulate that
participants treat everything as though it were real—posts are required
to be written in the first person, as in “this happened to me,” and must
be at least marginally believable (in other words, no surreal dream-like
posts):
NoSleep is a place to share your original scary story. This is not a place for
you to post creepypasta or any stories which you did not write yourself.
Remember: everything is true here, even if it’s not. Stories should be believ-
able, but realistic fiction IS permitted. Readers are to assume everything is true
and treat it as such. These stories are here for your entertainment. If a story is
too unbelievable, please report it for mod review.20
As such, readers/commenters are not permitted to question the veracity

of claims on /r/nosleep—everything must be treated as though it were
true, and those who question the original poster in out-of-character
ways will have comments deleted.
This desire to enforce an enclosed storyworld is, in many ways, unique
to Reddit horror storytelling. Believability is important, but even more
important is that the audience and readers behave as though the story-
telling is true. It requires a certain degree of storytelling on the part of the
readers/commenters who inevitably perform the story back to the teller
saying things like, “Tell us more about X” or “Get out of your house right
now!” As discussed in the previous chapter, this performance playspace
turns fiction into a cooperative act, where audiences modify and return
the fiction back to the storyteller. At the same time, this playfulness with
reality helps to legitimize Reddit fictions in the Slender Man genre. Most
of the stories play off of the Slender game or Marble Hornets universes,
helping to maintain the legitimacy of the fictions within the larger scope
of Slender Man fictions.
FanFiction.net
FanFiction.net does not specifically encourage horror fiction. Yet,

Slender Man fan fictions have found their way to the web site, garnering
regular writer- and readership. FanFiction.net houses the largest quantity
of fan writings online, and is grouped by the category of media type:
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books, movies, television shows, comics, games, etc. Within each of

these categories, there are subcategories specific to a television show or
film. For example, under the “Movies” category, the subcategory “Star
Wars” has 32.5K entries at the time of this writing. Interestingly, though,
there is no real primary category for fan fiction of online creations and
writings. Thus, stories about Slender Man or Marble Hornets that eschew
such classifications might initially be seen as unwelcome. Because there
is a category for “games,” though, around 2012, a small number of people
began to submit fan fiction based on the video game Slender. While early
posts on FanFiction.net based their writings purely on the game, other
fan fiction for the Slender Man based in the wider mythos soon emerged
in this category, and then authors started posting fan fiction that related
to other popular creepypasta characters. Others have posted Slender
Man and Creepypasta fan fiction in the “mythology” category.
Fanfiction.net does not limit or fix content or grammar, so what
appears on the web site is fairly broad in both quality and style. This
lack of limitation and ability to post everything means that versions of
fan fiction found on the web site have been both more creative and also,
sometimes, more divergent from the actual story. This divergence has
allowed for stories that might seem less “legitimate” by the standards of
Creepypasta or Reddit. Some versions of stories have several chapters’
worth of material, while others clearly intended to finish a story with
future chapters and stopped short. Some have grammatical problems
and would probably be characterized as “crappypasta” elsewhere. For
example, one story titled, “Slendy Y U No take Justin Bieber” posted the
following story:
This is a question I have for Slendy
“This has been bugging me for a while Slenderman. Why haven’t you
taken Justin Bieber?” I asked as Slenderman slowly approached me. A note
appeared. On it was a picture of music notes and Slendy covering his ears.
“Oh. Now it makes sense.” I said before I died.21
While this story would likely never been posted on Creepypasta, and
might possibly be deleted on a subreddit, the story fits in reasonably well
on FanFiction.net. This web site, more than the others, is a place where
anything goes, and writers can experiment with their voices and writing
styles. Commonly, people post comments on stories. For the most part,
the Justin Bieber story got “LOL” comments, though it also received
critiques such as, “I don’t get it. Can you please elaborate?”
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A certain recursiveness is built into the FanFiction.net community.

Many of the people posting popular stories have clearly read a lot of the
fictions posted on the Creepypasta web site and make reference to them
in ways that were not originally intended. Many of the stories make
reference to dozens of other Creepypasta characters, treating them as
though they are all friends, despite the fact that legitimate creepypasta
never has them appear in stories together. For instance, a story might
feature the Slender Man, Jeff the Killer, Eyeless Jack, and others who
otherwise exist in different fictions and universes. There is playfulness to
these combinations. In this way, the fans are building on previously told
stories from other web sites (particularly Creepypasta) and combining
them in non-standard ways. At the same time, authors of these fictions
are building on one another in ways that distinguish the digital campfire
of Creepypasta as unique. For example, some versions of the Slender Man
on FanFiction.net have the character using the word “child” frequently
when speaking to humans. This Slender Man attribute is only found on
FanFiction.net. Those who tell stories around this digital campfire are
clearly the audience of others there and—to some extent—emulate one
another.
Laughing at the Slender Man
An alternative mode of fictionalizing the Slender Man in fan communi-

ties has been the production and spread of parodic works. In an essay
on fan practices, Paul Booth suggests that parody highlights the playful
aspects of fan communities. Fandom, he explains, is a type of parody:
Parody and transgression are two sides of the fannish coin, both a literal
breaking of (textual) boundaries. Ultimately, parody works through innate
cultural knowledge, for to parody a text, one must use knowledge of that text
to exceed the boundaries of that text. To transgress a text, one must also know
the boundaries of that text. Both the acts of parody and transgression firmly
cement these boundaries.22
Given this connection between fandom and parody, and the already play-
ful nature of Slender Man fan communities, it is unsurprising that some
fan-produced work occurs in the form of parody. There are two primary
modes of parody at play: first, parodying the character himself by suggest-
ing that the Slender Man has equally absurd siblings, and second, parody
of the web shows, many of which use the same visual and stylistic cues.
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The two most popular parodies of the Slender Man himself are what
have been contextualized as two of his “Slender Siblings”: Trender Man
and Splendorman. The Trender Man meme originated on Tumblr in
July 2012 when a user with the handle “Conjured Charisma” posted an
image of a faceless mannequin in a brown sweater with the caption,
“Slenderman’s casual Friday.” Many users on Tumblr and elsewhere
have used the image to combine the myth of Slender Man with fashion
critique, using text such as, “I WILL GET YOU . . . some khakis to wear
with that vest”23
Splendorman is also a viral meme, though this one based on a
YouTube video. The Splendorman video features two young women
who are being stalked by a tall man, in all black but with colorful dots
figure 5.1 Trender Man meme
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figure 5.2 Splendorman
on his suit. With a big smile, Splendorman hands flowers to the women
and dances.24
It is significant that both Trender Man and Splendorman, while they
began as parodies, have entered the milieu of fan fiction and have been
featured as characters in several of the stories on FanFiction.net. Many of
the stories found on FanFiction.net use Trendorman and Splendorman
as actual characters in their stories of Slender Man. Similarly, other
authors on FanFiction.net have integrated the siblings into fictions,
legitimizing the parodies. Thus, the parodies are interpreted in differ-
ent ways, depending on the community. While fans of the Slender Man
might view a Trender Man meme as funny, and pass along to others,
those on FanFiction.net are willing to welcome any possible character
into the tales told at their own digital campfire. On FanFiction.net, the
parody is reabsorbed into the subject of its ridicule. The use of these
alternative characters shows the flexibility of the Slender Man myth in a
way that ultimately humanizes him—after all, he can’t be so bad if he has
delightful siblings.
Occasionally, the character is parodied in fan material, but not through
his alternative “siblings.” For example, “SLENDERMAN vs GANGNAM
STYLE” a YouTube video with currently over six million hits, shows
someone dressed as the Slender Man (though without tentacles) wander-
ing through streets, dancing to the song “Gangnam Style” while alterna-
tively teasing and terrorizing random passersby,25 subverting audience
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expectations. Similarly, one parody known as “Gimme $20” uses a clip

from an early episode of Marble Hornets, but adds to the soundtrack
the Ron Browz song “20 Dollars” when the Slender Man appears.26 The
implied joke is that the Slender Man is only there because he needs 20
dollars, and has been expanded on by others.27 Again, this kind of parody
is primarily about subverting audience expectations of the character, as
well as the horror he inherently suggests in most other tellings.
The second mode of popular parody parodies the web series them-
selves. As discussed previously, the web series often have similar visual
themes: distortions of audio and video, and looming characters barely
visible in the background. One of the cleverest parodies of the web series
is a video titled, “Slender Man is a Crappy Roommate.” In the video,
two young filmmakers struggle to film their movie because their room-
mate, the Slender Man, keeps distorting the video with his presence and
teleporting into shots. At one point, one of the disgruntled roommates
yells, “DAMN IT, SLENDER MAN. This is our allotted time that we said
we would be filming every week. And all you had to do was stay in your
room.”28 The aforementioned Splendorman video also makes reference
to the visual styles and themes of the web shows, but as Splendorman
brings happiness, his video distortions involve happy things such as
kittens, ice cream, and bunnies.29
These parodies help to establish flexibility and malleability in how
audiences and storytellers understand the Slender Man as well as the
flexibility of the canon, itself. Rather than simply a horror character
who has one possible mode of retelling, the parodies highlight that audi-
ences are able to control and modify the character in unexpected ways.
Sometimes, these parodies can even become part of the “real” versions of
the stories, though only around specific digital campfires.
Sympathy for Slender
The legitimized and most popular versions of the Slender Man story
are enmeshed in traditions of horror. While many authors have main-
tained the horrific tone in their portrayals of the Slender Man, many
versions have diverged from it. At the beginning of this chapter, we
described the story “Cold and Dark” which treated the Slender Man
as a father figure, protecting a girl while asking her to commit violent
crimes on his behalf. This, and numerous other romanticized versions
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of the Slender Man mark his transition on many fan fiction forums
from menacing villain to sympathetic character and, occasionally, love
interest.
Sympathy for the devil is not uncommon in any genre—horror in
particular. For years, now, vampires and werewolves have been featured
as sympathetic characters, love interests for human protagonists, and
having generally compelling internal struggles. Given that, it should be
of no surprise that a few years after Victor Surge introduced the Slender
Man on the Something Awful forums, sympathetic stories began to
pop up on at least some of the aforementioned fan fiction web sites.
One story appearing on Creepypasta in 2012 titled, “The Slender Man:
Misunderstood” recontextualizes the Slender video game, considering
the events from the perspective of the Slender Man. In this version of
the story, the Slender Man has a son who had drawn a picture of him.
The Slender Man, like any proud father, posts the picture where it can
be seen—on the trunk of a tree. When a man wanders by and steals the
picture (a required player task in the Slender video game) the Slender
Man responds by stalking the trespasser until he has retrieved the it.30
This story, while it does not turn the Slender Man into a romantic char-
acter, manages to assign sympathetic human desires and qualities to the
supernatural figure.
Additionally, several fan fictions question the Slender Man’s overall
motivations. For example, the FanFiction.net story “Shaun Vs the
Slenderman” is also set in the game world of Slender, where Shaun is
collecting the papers from the game until he realizes that the Slender
Man is following him around just because he is lonely. Shaun suggests
that the Slender Man is an “experiment gone wrong” and is merely
misunderstood:
‘Well I don’t think you’re so bad. I’ll bet the only reason you follow people
around is because you’re lonely, right?’ The Slender Man nodded enthusias-
tically. Shaun got the feeling he was thinking something along the lines of
Finally! Someone who understands!31
The story has a certain sweetness to it, which might have an obvious
appeal to younger people who might feel bullied or misunderstood.
Rather than simply a stalker of all children, this depiction of the Slender
Man reconsiders him as just as lost and confused as many who might
write about him. Rather than a villain, the Slender Man becomes a
patron saint of the lonely and misunderstood.
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Other sympathetic stories attempt to place him in the context with other
misunderstood monsters, or even try to contextualize his own family. In
the FanFiction.net story “Monsters with Morals,” the Slender Man spends
time with other famous villains, in particular having a series of arguments
with the Boogieman.32 In “A Slender Tale” one author contextualizes the
entire “Slender Family” into a series of stories. The author’s description
of the series is, “Basically a story about the Slender family! How Slender’s
parents met, how their lives were as children and how they are as a family
now.”33 These kinds of stories help to romanticize and humanize the
Slender Man, even within their monstrous context. By imagining that the
Slender Man had a home life, much like them, full of siblings, rivalries,
and other trials, the character becomes more relatable, understandable,
and ultimately less frightening. He is, after all, just misunderstood.
We began this chapter with the story “Cold and Dark,” which specifi-
cally imagines the Slender Man as a paternal, father figure. Stories such
as “The Slender Man: Misunderstood” maintain this possible representa-
tion of the Slender Man as a misunderstood father figure, who is only
chasing humans in order to protect and please his young son. Other
stories, too, use this theme of the Slender Man as a fatherly character,
and, given the discussion of patriarchy in Chapter 2, this is unsurprising.
The character is portrayed as a patriarchal figure and interpretations that
sympathize with him and seemingly yearn for him as an idealized father
are not pulling nearly as far from the original text as one might suppose.
Yet, many writings and fan fiction works on the Slender Man roman-
ticize him—not as a father figure—but as an actual romantic character.
Sometimes there is a certain subtlety to the relationship between the
Slender Man and the protagonist love interest. For example the story
“Slender Puzzle” involves a young woman named Kathleen who had
an “imaginary friend” (the Slender Man) as a child, and a jigsaw puzzle
she puts together is used to magically get Kathleen to run away with
him, presumably as lovers. At the end of the story, it is revealed that the
puzzle was actually titled, “Searching for Kathleen.”34 While this story
does not overtly involve romance between Kathleen and the Slender
Man, it is certainly implied. The very short story “SlenderSass” involves
the Slender Man using telepathy to control a conservative young woman
named Sassy Sparks and then marrying her. The story ends with Sassy
declaring that she could never leave the woods without her “beautiful,
wild man.”35 It seems notable that the author has used his or her own
pseudonym as the protagonist in this Slender romance.
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One of the most striking stories is a series titled “A Slender Chance.” In

this elaborate multi-chapter story, the Slender Man first befriends a young
woman named Sky Steele whom he finds “interesting.” Subsequently, they
have an increasingly deepening relationship, which involves the Slender
Man saving her from being raped and later introduces her to the Slender
Siblings, who refer to Sky as his “girlfriend.” At one point in the series,
the Slender Man asks Sky what she wants for her birthday and then ulti-
mately gives her a locket with the “Operator” insignia on it,36 referencing
the web show Marble Hornets. At a different point in the story, Sky makes
pancakes for the mouthless Slender Man.37 This story pushes the limits
of the romanticization of the Slender Man. Not only does the author
make the protagonist a romantic interest for the Slender Man, but almost
reshapes him into the perfect boyfriend: patient, thoughtful, and heroic.
Other Slender Man fictions have more overtly turned the story into
erotica. Most notably, “Savaged by the Slenderman”38 and “I Slept with
Slender Man”39 both go beyond the notion of Slender Man as a good
boyfriend, and turn the character into a sexual creature. These stories do
not tend to romanticize the monster, so much as sexualize him. In one
of these stories, “I Slept with Slender Man,” the protagonist, Virginia,
dies at the end. In this way, the Slender Man fan erotica seems to more
neatly enfold into traditional Slender Man stories, where the character is
monstrous and unforgiving.
Similarly, fans have created mash-up “slash” fan fiction. Slash is homo-
sexual pairings between characters that are not paired up as part of a
story’s canon. Most commonly, slash fan fictions of the Slender Man pair
him with Jeff the Killer. In one story, “An Interesting Love,” the Slender
Man and Jeff have an evolving relationship. While at the beginning of
the story, Jeff the Killer was interested primarily in killing, as the story
continues, he turns his interest toward a love affair with the Slender
Man.40 After several episodes of the story, the two characters acquire
a puppy—certainly not a typical outcome of typical fictions based on
either character. These stories show flexibility, but also a desire to relate
to the characters in very intimate ways.
The Slender Man, literacy, and authority
It would be easy to look at the romantic, paternal, or sympathetic versions

of the Slender Man fan fictions and declare that they are doing it wrong;
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the stories feel illegitimate, contrarian, and almost subversive in how

deeply they reject the premise of the original fictions. It is also useful
to consider that the more female-centric retellings–those that involve a
female protagonist who treats the Slender Man as a father or lover–are
less likely to be considered legitimate than male-centric versions of the
story that feature male protagonists. By subverting the traditional expec-
tations of the narrative, the authors get to relate the Slender Man story to
things that, presumably, have personal resonance. The subversion here
is decidedly different than those found in the parodies such as the “$20”
meme. The Slender Man is being appropriated and understood in ways
that are distinct from pure horror. These authors are telling a different
story.
And yet, part of the power of online fictions and storytelling is that
there is no illegitimate version. In particular, because the Slender Man’s
original story was constructed on the Something Awful forums, all
other online versions are equally canon. There is no real primary text
here—for example, no executive producer validates different versions
of a story, and no television broadcast is considered the “authorized”
fiction. With the Slender Man, every version is authorized (or equally
unauthorized), and, given the anonymity of many of the storytellers,
often seemingly authorless. To this end, while the Wisconsin stabbing
was based on a less popularized version of the Slender Man, the story
itself is still a valid version. Long-time followers of the myth may
find it difficult to compare their Slender Man and a surrogate father
who lives in a mansion. Still: online, all versions are legitimate. The
storytelling is still in process, and there is no authorized version, only
versions.
In looking at the sheer volume of Slender Man fiction, it may seem
that youth culture41 is obsessed with this macabre figure. Yet, there is
value to the online fictions that are being written and distributed about
the Slender Man. These stories show a canniness and understanding
of literary genres—both online and offline. At the same time, many of
the stories show a rejection of traditional literary genres and expecta-
tions. The process of writing and media literacy itself promotes media
pedagogies that are not often taught in classrooms. As Henry Jenkins
explains, “In talking about media pedagogies, then, we should not longer
imagine this as a process where adults teach and children learn. Rather,
we should see it as increasingly a space where children teach one another
and where, if they would open their eyes, adults could learn a great
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deal.”42 Thus, regardless of whether it is children or adults creating media

related to the Slender Man, the literacy necessitated and developed by
the process is undeniable. And regardless of perceived legitimacy of a
variation, the stories all have meaning.
At the same time, as discussed in Chapter 2, the power of horror is
the ability to deal with anxieties on metaphorical and allegorical levels.
As outlined in Chapter 2, horror narratives that preceded the Slender
Man were primarily based on larger cultural anxieties. But this chapter
has shown that the anxieties explored by fans of the Slender Man are
personal and intimate. Many of the stories show an anxiety about aging
and the unknown. Others stories show anxieties about parental figures
and lovers. This purging of anxieties through fiction—regardless of its
quality or grammar—has its own pedagogical value. These stories are a
way that people, both young and old, are turning their abstract anxieties
into knowable stories.
New media literacies are not only about understanding the content
and subjects of emerging media platforms, or knowing how to properly
navigate for them. New media literacies can integrate with older litera-
cies in a way that is holistic and productive. Through writing these
fictions, authors are learning about form and function of writing, but
also about the scope and limitations of the places they are posting, and
the expectations about the kinds of fiction that are acceptable on those
sites—in other words, how to write for an audience. As discussed in
Chapter 3, Carolyn Miller ascribes the construction of different genres
to the exigency of a specific place and need and refers to it as a form of
“social action.”43 Authors on Creepypasta, Reddit, FanFiction.net, as well
as the creators of YouTube parodies, all teach authors the relevance of
genre as a form of social action.
Many of the Slender Man stories illustrate ways that new media
literacies eliminate boundaries and regulations. No authorized form
of storytelling emerges from Slender Man fictions. This can be seen in
a multitude of ways: through the fan mash-ups of FanFiction.net, the
distinctions between creepypasta and crappypasta, and the redditor
insistence that everything is real. In particular, the Reddit examples (/r/
nosleep and /r/Slender_Man) show a desire to only have participants
that are “all in”—they have no interest in spoilsports who break the
game. Just as Booth suggests that digital fandom is necessarily playful
and ludic, there is a game inherent in the Slender Man stories. The story
is real because the Internet has made it real.
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Notes
1 Massive Times, “Cold and Dark,” 3.
2 Ibid., 8.
3 Slenderversemedia, “Slenderverse List.”
4 Busse, “Geek Hierarchies, Boundary Policing, and the Gendering of the
Good Fan.”
5 Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction: Why a Fan Fiction Studies Reader
Now?”.
6 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23.
7 Hills, Fan Cultures, xi.
8 Booth, Digital Fandom, 12.
9 Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 183.
10 Black, Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction.
11 Ibid., 73.
12 Most fan fictions and many online fictions are relatively anonymous, and it
is therefore difficult to determine the exact age of those who are doing the
writing.
13 “What Is Creepypasta?”
14 “Jeff the Killer.”
15 “Creepypasta Homepage.”
16 McNuggets, “THEN WHO WAS PHONE?”.
17 In fact, this example is so well known that “THEN WHO WAS PHONE?”
has become a common meme used to note or identify poorly constructed
horror fiction online.
18 derpbutt, “Slenderman Vs. Commando.”
19 “/r/Slender_Man (sidebar).”
20 “/r/nosleep (sidebar).”
21 The Uncanny X-Fan, “Slendy Y U No Take Justin Bieber?,” -.
22 Booth, “Reifying the Fan: Inspector Spacetime as Fan Practice,” 157.
23 Tomberry, “Slender Man.”
24 Neil Cicierega, “Splendorman.”
25 Champ Chong, “SLENDERMAN Vs. GANGNAM STYLE.”
26 brett284, “MARBLE HORNETS ENTRY #6 MISSING AUDIO FOUND!”.
27 Tomberry, “Slender Man.”
28 TheCP2F, “Slender Man Is a Crappy Roomate.”
29 Neil Cicierega, “Splendorman.”
30 “The Slender Man Misunderstood.”
31 appa-appa-away, “Shaun Vs. the Slenderman.”
32 Chieko-san, “Monsters with Morals.”
33 TheFace000, “A Slender Tale.”
34 Lady Dragonite, “Slender Puzzle.”
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35 S. Sparks, “SlenderSass.”
36 As discussed in Chapter 2, the Operator Symbol was first used by Marble
Hornets as a symbol of the Slender Man.
37 Tkdoegirl, “A Slender Chance.”
38 “Savaged by Slenderman”.
39 Steele, I Slept with Slender Man.
40 XArtemis WolfX, “An Interesting Love.”
41 While there is no evidence that only young people are writing these stories
and consuming media relating to the Slender Man, many of the early news
stories framed the Slender Man as a youth-related fad.
42 Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 205.
43 Miller, “Genre as Social Action.”
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6
Facing the Slender Man
Abstract: Previous chapters discussed Slender Man
prototypes, the original telling, the propagation of the story to
new spaces, and second-level stories in the form of fan fiction;
this chapter begins by following that trajectory to its next
destination: the mainstream. The Slender Man is presented
both literally and figuratively as a form of a “tulpa,” a creature
brought to life by collective thought. As forthcoming mass
media efforts appropriate the Slender Man, communities
respond to a more widespread sharing of the character they
collectively thought into existence. In conclusion, the openly
shared, collectively created, community-contextualized Slender
Man phenomenon serves as a harbinger of storytelling to
come.
Keywords: digital storytelling; Doctor Who; Minecraft;

Supernatural; tulpa

doi: 10.1057/9781137491138.0010.
118 DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0010

Facing the Slender Man 119
In spiritual and magical writings, a “tulpa” is a thought-form—a crea-

ture created from the imaginations of people through magical acts. The
concept was appropriated for the West through Alexandra David-Néel’s
1929 book, Magic and Mystery in Tibet. According to David-Néel:
Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the
part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker’s control. . . . Sometimes
the phantom becomes a rebellious son and one hears of uncanny struggles
that have taken place between magicians and their creatures, the former
being severely hurt or killed by the later.1
Essentially, a tulpa is a magical friend brought into physical form, but one
over which the magician loses control as it acts of its own accord. Tulpas
often become troublesome to those who created them, wreaking havoc
in the real world. Certain beliefs about tulpas suggest that the singular
magician or magical group is not necessary: when enough people believe
in something that is not real, they can bring that thing to life as a tulpa.
In other words, if enough people around the world genuinely believe in
something, the thought-form can become an entity in the real world.
Early in the process of the development of the Slender Man, a kind of
tulpa effect was suggested by some of the participants of the Something
Awful forums. One user, Bobby Deluxe posted a Slender Man story on
June 30, which addresses the possibility that the Slender Man has become
a tulpa:
Clutching my hands to my chest I listened for the inevitable. A hollow, boom-
ing voice. Or a high cold one—I’ll admit now I’ve only been skim-reading
most of the text accounts and am unaware of how it speaks or even if the
consensus is that it does. Only enough to know the single word booming
against the back of my skull like a chant from an underground temple - Tulpa,
Tulpa, Tulpa. A creature made flesh by enough people thinking about it.2
This idea was nurtured, and many people on Slender Nation and other
forums related to the Slender Man have suggested he has, indeed,
become a tulpa. The basic idea of this theory is that, in constructing the
character, fictionalizing him, and then putting the character out into the
world as though he were real, the Internet has essentially created a “real”
Slender Man, who stalks victims just as the fictional one does.
The tulpa theory adds a certain gracefulness to the immersion
demanded by the community. While everyone is able to acknowledge
that the character, itself, was born fictionally, the tulpa theory allows
a space where the Slender Man is able to both exist and not exist. The
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tulpa theory also helps to explain broad variations between how differ-
ent groups represent and revise the character. As Omega of Encyclopedia
Slenderia writes:
Tulpa Theory’s major advantage is how it handles Slender Man’s obviously
faked origins. It doesn’t take long for anyone new to the Mythos to learn
about his origin (unless they are very, very bad at internets). The problem
is, it’s harder to be scared of a monster which you know isn’t real than it is to
be scared of one which could be real. Tulpa Theory solves this: Yes, Slender
Man was just some clever little photomanipulation done by Victor Surge on
SomethingAwful. But that was then; now, because of that thread, he’s become
real. And is coming for you. Yes, you.
The Theory also explains why Slender Man never stays consistent between
stories. As the abilities we give him change, he changes to match our new
beliefs.3
The tulpa theory, while not the only fan-based theory of the Slender
Man’s existence, is certainly the most elegant. It implies an inherently
complicit audience, while providing reason for that audience’s inability
to control its subject.
In the conclusion of our previous chapter, we suggested that the
Slender Man story is real because the Internet has made it real. But we
are not necessarily implying a literal tulpa effect. The Slender Man may
not be real in the sense that he is a real being that stalks and brings pain
and insanity upon his victims, but rather, that the Internet’s construc-
tion and belief in the existence of a Slender Man has pulled him from a
small pocket of counterculture and brought him to popular mainstream
culture. One true tulpa effect is that mainstream television shows, films,
and other popular media now make references to the character. And the
actions that occurred in Wisconsin imply a kind of figurative tulpa. It
does not matter that the character is not real—what matters is that the
young girls committed a crime because the character seemed, for them,
to have been brought to life.
In our final chapter, we must face the Slender Man, so to speak, to
consider some of the broader implications of the character—both on the
Internet and in more mainstream venues of mass media. At the same
time, facing the Slender Man is about de-facing him—removing the
mask from the Internet-born tulpa and considering him as an amalgam
of cultures, interests, and beliefs, and not as one coherent and stable
character. Facing the Slender Man means acknowledging his power
online while still acknowledging his fictional roots.
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The figurative tulpa: the Slender Man in

mainstream media
The notion of a literal tulpa—a version of the Slender Man actually

brought to reality through the belief and energy of Internet forums, is
not terribly likely. But, at the same time, it is undeniable that something
has been brought to life in our reality through the process of the creation
of the Slender Man. Certainly, as seen in the Introduction, some might
argue that the Wisconsin stabbing is an actualization of the Slender
Man. But this is only the most overt example of the Slender Man being
brought to reality.
The Slender Man has become a figurative tulpa in a much clearer way:
his transition from web forums, YouTube, and fan fictions to main-
stream media. This has happened rapidly, and with great importance, as
the character appearances have begun to occur in film, television, and
gaming. This transition from a monster that was only relevant on the
Internet to one that is able to prosper in the mainstream shows a shifting
of storytelling styles, and reveals an intersection where media makers are
taking audiences, fandoms, and alternative modes of storytelling more
seriously. At the same time, the transition is empowering audiences who
are engaged in the new media literacies of blurred boundaries between
fantasy and reality. As the Slender Man transitions from an Internet
character to a mainstream character, audiences can see their tulpa come
to life.
In February 2013, Variety announced the film production company
Mosaic is making Marble Hornets into a Hollywood film.4 In preparation
for the upcoming film, in June of 2014, the Marble Hornets web series
ended, and one of the creators posted on his blog that the new film
would not be a reboot of the web series, but would take place in the same
universe.5 With Kickstarter campaigns6 and rumors of other films in
production, it seems likely that the Slender Man will soon migrate to the
big screen.
At least two television shows that have paranormal and fantasy themes
have made reference to the Slender Man in episodes. In several episodes
of the BBC television show Doctor Who, the protagonists face monsters
known as “the Silence”—tall, faceless, suit-wearing monsters that are
able to control other characters telepathically and wipe their memories,7
similar to the abilities of the version of the Slender Man in Marble Hornets.
In a 2014 episode of the television show Supernatural, paranormal
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investigators Sam and Dean Winchester encounter murders related to an

Internet-created urban myth known as “thinman.” During the course of
the episode it is revealed that the thinman story was made up, and that
a human who was disguised as a supernatural creature committed the
murders. The episode pays homage to the legend it borrows from, even
going so far as to suggest that the Internet has created a tulpa, which had
previously been defined within the world of the Supernatural series.8
Additionally, the popular video game Minecraft hosts a kind of
“mob” (a hostile character group that can damage the player) called an
“Enderman.” The Enderman character is taller than most in the game
world and entirely featureless other than violet eyes. The characters will
only attack if a player avatar looked directly at them. Once in attack
mode, they are able to teleport. The creator, Notch, explains how and
why he created the Enderman character:
Suddenly you could walk up to these looking beasts (they’re three meters
tall) and watch them as they moved their blocks around, but as soon as you
happened to look straight at them, they’d attack. And by ‘straight at them’, I
mean putting the reticle on top of them. You can keep them visible on screen
and actually look straight at them in real life, but as soon as your in game
character looks straight at them, boom.
Still, that was more scary than creepy. . . . I wanted something a bit more
psychological. So to really drive home the point of looking at them being bad,
I made the Endermen freeze and turn towards you when you look at them. As
long as you look straight at them, they stand perfectly still and look straight
at you. As soon as you look away, they will run (very fast) towards you.9
Notch’s focus on the psychological and creepy aspects of the character

helps to draw parallels between Enderman and Slenderman. Without
question, the Enderman, like the Silence and the thinman arise from the
growing popularity of the Slender Man.
Chapter 5 focused on questions of fandom and fan writing. Most
often, fan writing is a kind of alternative text based on a more canonical,
accepted text in mass media. But the phenomenon related to the Slender
Man show a different manifestation occurring in digital culture. Here
we see a series of unauthorized texts that are being transformed and
reworked into authorized spaces. It seems almost as though mainstream
media has begun to write a kind of fan fiction for the Slender Man.
The Slender Man is not reified by corporate action, but by fan action.
Studies on transmedia storytelling often focus on the authorized stories—
stories that are told by major media outlets that integrate a variety of
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platforms and modes of storytelling in order to engage audiences in new

ways. With the Slender Man, we can see an example of a bottom-up form
of transmedia.
As the Slender Man transitions from pockets of the Internet to main-
stream media, we see visible unease among people on both sides of the
equation. Fans and creators of the story on the Internet want to see their
story recognized, yet not taken away from them. And mainstream mass
media creators want to find ways to appropriate something that is clearly
popular, yet presumably not provoke more violent acts. This mainstream
adoption of a crowd-sourced Internet created character, combined
with the rise of other digital stories and genres that openly follow in his
footsteps, marks the Slender Man as a groundbreaking and foundational
transmedia phenomenon. Yet there is an obvious discomfort in letting
that story get out of control. But in the online tellings, the story (and
authors) never had control—even from the early days on the Something
Awful forums the legend of the Slender Man was never one that could be
controlled.
Responding to Real World Violence
In the wake of the stabbing in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Internet fans of

the Slender Man were shocked and confused. In the first week of June,
several Reddit threads debated the implications and repercussions of the
horrific event. On the one hand, fans of the Slender Man fiction seemed
defensive—the girls had decontextualized a beloved story and used it as
a rationale for a horrible crime, yet there was also a subtle undercurrent
of pride on the forums. After all, their relatively obscure Internet-based
story was suddenly receiving national attention. Fans defended the
Slender Man and, at the same time, made a plea for others to speak out
and publically defend the mythos.
The girls’ relationship to the fiction was deeply questioned on these
threads. One user, CarlEatshands suggested that the girls were not legiti-
mate fans, given their “misunderstanding” of the Mythos. CarlEatshands
explains:
Obviously these so called ‘fans’ don’t understand the line between reality and
fiction. Seriously upsets me. In a few months I’m gonna get a Slenderman/
Enderman tattoo and I wish to not be looked at like I belong in a psych
word . . . Us TRUE Slenderman fans don’t KILL people. Holy shit. These
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children just can’t understand that Slenderman is fictional. As much as I love

the character, I’m not gonna go off and kill someone. Nor have I ever had the
twinge. So these kids must be reading some heavy fanfiction than just the
CreepyPasta.10
It seems almost comical that someone dedicated enough to brandish a

Slender Man tattoo would question the legitimacy of other fans—if one
does not accept the paternalistic depiction of the Slender Man, it seems
strange to brand yourself with the symbols of a monster. To ink oneself
with a Slender Man tattoo suggests that the author of this statement
wants people to associate him with the horror, yet still understand that
fans “don’t KILL people.” There is an embracing of the horror here with
a simultaneously distancing from the “heavy fanfiction” that clearly the
author does not think is legitimate.
Users questioned the actions of the girls because of how little they
matched with the stories they had been reading online. User Vacerious
explains the distinction between the girls’ version of the Slender Man
story versus what this particular user was familiar with:
As far as I can tell with most forms of Slender media, murdering another
human being is rarely a prerequisite for becoming a Proxy. In most cases, the
process can be more closely considered ‘conscription,’ in that the Proxy-to-be
doesn’t usually volunteer for the job. They’re forced into it. Proxies do indeed
kill in the S-Man’s name, but few people kill to become Proxies.11
The excuse the girls used—that they “wanted to be proxies,” which is

something that does not occur in most of the Slender Man stories—
seemed confounding to members of the community. The distinctions
between the event in Wisconsin and the reality of the fictional stories did
not match up to many. That members of the Slender Man community
would consider a real-life stabbing illegitimate, compared to the fictions
they had created, seems ironic. At the same time, it should be unsurpris-
ing to members of a Reddit forum where people insist members not be
“spoilsports” and break the immersion of the story, that young people
might actually believe in the Slender Man. After all, belief is necessary to
the storytelling process.
Others felt defensive and concerned over what might happen to all
of the web series and stories, and whether there would be negative
public reaction against the community. User RMV4488 explains, “I’m
concerned about the backlash that Slenderman creative projects (such
as MH/etc.) will get now, just like video games and rock music do/
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0010
have.”12 One user simply titled a thread “This is going to be bad.”13 User
Vacerious seemed uneasy with the possibility that, at some point, a web
series or fiction might integrate the story of what happened to the girls
in Wisconsin: “Though someone will want to use it, at some point. The
subject is still well into the ‘Too Soon’ category, but stuff like this does
make for good fiction.”14 Again, there seems to be a certain irony here—by
fictionalizing the girls’ version of the Slender Man story, community
members would be forced to recognize it as a legitimate version of the
mythos. While Vacerious was probably correct, a fiction based on the
story would likely be seen as “too soon,” telling the story would also help
community members come to terms with the actions of what occurred
in Wisconsin.
At the same time, because of how the story was crowdsourced online,
this categorical rejection of the version of the story reimagined by the
Wisconsin girls is legitimate. As noted in Chapter 5, if Victor Surge
original posting about the Slender Man is the only legitimate canon,
then all versions after that become equally valid, and equally contest-
able. In attempting to distance themselves from the “fan fiction” version,
wherein proxies are able to curry favor with the Slender Man through
committing murder, community members are doing a disservice to the
power of the online mythos. The story is powerful because of its flex-
ibility and fluidity. Online, all retellings of the Slender Man story are
equal.
Yet, the fear that was clearly felt throughout this community is unsur-
prising. After all, their legend, previously only vaguely known in specific
online spaces, had suddenly been bombarded with media write-ups
asking, “Who is the Slender Man?” And while these fans were and are
uniquely equipped to answer this question, there was a reticence to do so,
out of fear that they might, too, be labeled as potential murderers. Reddit
user CirnoWhiterock expresses this precise sentiment, remarking, “To
see Slender reach that level though is both frightening and amazing.”15
The Slender Man and the future of digital storytelling

Ongoing shifts and variation in the Slender Man Mythos continue, as
specific iterations of the story may be complete, but the larger transme-
dia story—due to the open source ethos that spawned it and the folkloric
processes that have sustained it—never will be. As Slender Man creators
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0010
continue to make fiction in a variety of formats on social media across

the Internet, new variations in the mythos continue to reify the poten-
tial of collaborative fiction. While the web series stabilized the story to
some extent, new authors are constantly pushing at these boundaries to
continue to define the character and the nature of his encounters with
others. To those who first happen upon it several years after the creation
of the initial thread on Something Awful, the Slender Man might appear
to suddenly be everywhere. In particular, after the incident in Wisconsin,
parents, members of the mass media, and those in law enforcement who
had never heard of the Slender Man would seek out information on the
character and find a seemingly endless, still-flowing stream of prose,
video, forum conversations, illustrations, photographs, and other media
featuring the character. As demonstrated in the Introduction, it seems
unsurprising that the responses to the Slender Man from many who had
not previously heard of the phenomenon was fear and panic.
This instability and eternal incompleteness is encouraged by the speed
of information online and part of what makes the myth so powerful—
but also why some critics have found the phenomenon so threatening.
The young girls in Wisconsin seemingly changed some details from the
story as it is generally known and told in Slender Man communities.
But variability and lack of control of the text make it feel more threaten-
ing. The romantic and father figure versions of the story that appear on
FanFiction.net illustrate this complete lack of control—these stories took
on lives of their own. The variability and constant shifting of an Internet
story means that it is impossible to track all versions. It also means that
there is no one “correct” version—the story belongs to both no one and
everyone. It is difficult to know what version of the story the accused
attackers attached themselves to, and how they might have reinterpreted
the story. It is possible that they had constructed their own versions of
the Slender Man, internalizing some variation and reinterpreting the
folklore to help condone committing their violent acts. The fluidity of
the Slender Man stories ultimately gives them power.
The Slender Man stories arose from a digital culture that had already
developed literacies through the making of fan fiction, participation
in creative communities, and a lifetime of having digital tools at hand.
Many Slender Man storytellers, including most of the early developers
of the mythos, were born into a world of ubiquitous computing and
widespread use of the Internet. That the Slender Man was born at a time
when this generation was coming to age is no coincidence: along with a
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0010
knowledge and experience of the digital tools, they also had increasing
expectations for interactive storytelling following the development of
genres like the alternate reality game, and the widespread popularity of
video games.
The Slender Man can thus be seen as a grand experiment, a first foray
into a kind of storytelling that in some ways recalls the pre-electronic
world, yet at the same time revels in the affordances of the digital. As a
result of his creation and the stories that followed, we’ve seen expansion
of similar storytelling efforts at websites like Creepypasta and digital
campfires like /r/nosleep that share the qualities that informed the crea-
tion of the Slender Man: creators that open source the raw materials of
story, stories that vary according to teller and audience, stories that are
performed and co-created with audiences in the context of specific digital
campfires, the development of common themes and characteristics
through a mixture of individual inspiration and collective honing proc-
esses, and even the recursion of meta fan fiction works that poach from
the resulting body of work. That these works remain in the horror genre
is likely a result of the shared cultural anxieties that fuel such efforts.
The Slender Man and his many transformations on the Internet mark
an important milestone for the legitimization of digital transmedia story-
telling. While most transmedia stories are corporately constructed and are
expanding intellectual properties into slightly more interactive areas, the
Slender Man provides a clear and successful example of a non-corporate
community telling a story over different modalities, media, and to differ-
ent effect. The story is important because it is mutable and driven by a
collective of audience-creators that define its parameters and salience.
The story is important because it shows a transition from fans revising
mass media stories, to mass media (and fans) revising fan-created stories.
The Slender Man and the stories told about him broaden understanding
of transmedia storytelling and what it has the capability of being.
As a rich and pioneering case, the Slender Man stories and the contexts
in which they were created will provide vital material of a pivotal moment
in transmedia storytelling, regardless of whether the stories themselves
continue to be as popular. While platforms and technologies may change
and transition, the Slender Man story is not so much about the tech-
nology as it is about the changing process of storytelling. As we have
shown, such is the case with the Slender Man. This kind of transmedia
storytelling is about the human beings using the digital tools—not the
tools themselves.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0010
Based on our observations of the ignition of multiple digital camp-

fires, the development of new collective creative processes, and the wide
and easy spread of stories across the Internet and beyond in just the
half-decade since the first seemingly innocent Something Awful post,
we foresee a bold new movement in collective storytelling for which the
Slender Man serves as a harbinger. As subsequent generations grow up
steeped in digital cultures, they will continue to push the boundaries
of how stories are told in digital spaces and beyond. With the sudden
awareness of the product of communities like Creepypasta and others
like it, the world will now be watching.
And so will the Slender Man.
Notes
1 David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet.
2 Bobby Deluxe, “Create Paranormal Images.”
3 Omega, “Tulpa Theory.”
4 McNary, “Marble Hornets Flying to Big Screen.”
5 Wagner, “So About That Movie.”
6 In 2011, a filmmaker named A.J. Meadows ran a Kickstarter campaign and
ultimately raised the funds for and released a feature-length version of a
Slender Man film online, but it was removed because of copyright violation.
Because Eric Knudsen currently owns the copyright, it is difficult to know
how official film versions of the story will continue to play out. Often,
mainstream versions use variations on the name “Slender Man” to avoid
copyright infringement.
7 “The Impossible Astronaut.”
8 Klein and Kripke, “#thinman.”
9 Moffat, “The Impossible Astronaut.”
10 CarlEatshands, “13 Year Old Ohio Girl Stabs Mother in 2nd ‘Slenderman’
Attack.”
11 Vacerious, “Hopefully No One Will Use the Recent Tragedy for ARG
Material.”
12 Saberpilot, “12 Y.o. Girl Murders Friend to Become a Proxy of
Slenderman . . . WHAT THE FUCK?!”.
13 Chunga5836, “This Is Going to Be Bad.”
14 Vacerious, “Hopefully No One Will Use the Recent Tragedy for ARG
Material.”
15 CirnoWhiterock, “This Is Going to Be Bad.”
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0010
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Index
4chan, 21, 55, 56, 102, 103 109, 118, 119, 124, 125,
127
A.I. (film), 17 Cover, Rob, 84
abject, 46 Crappypasta, 103, 106, 115,
Alexander, Bryan, 37 Creepypasta Wiki, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12,
Alternate Reality Games, 15–19, 66, 95, 96, 97, 101–107, 111,
36, 70, 86, 87, 104, 127 115, 124, 127, 128
Anonymous (group), 11, 39,
55–58 Dark Knight, The, (film), 17
DarkHarvest00 (web show),
Bauman, Richard, 79, 80, 83, 34, 82
84 David-Néel, Alexandria, 119
Beast, The (ARG), 17 Dawkins, Richard, 19
Ben-Amos, Daniel, 88–89 Dégh, Linda, 80
Black, Rebecca W., 101 Der Großmann, 25, 68
Blair Witch Project, The (film), Díaz, Carlos Mauricio
8, 52, 66 Castaño, 19
Booth, Paul, 99, 107, 115 Dibbell, Julian, 21
Boyer, Tina Marie, 41 Digital Campfire, 12, 20, 76–93,
Bradley, Dale, 67 98, 101, 107, 109, 110, 127,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV 128
show), 47 Ditko, Steve, 48
Busse, Kristina, 97 Doctor Who (TV show), 36,
118, 121
CaughtNotSleeping (web show),
82 Encyclopedia Slenderia, 88, 120
Cloverfield (film), 52 Enderman, 122
Coleman, E. Gabriella, 55 erotica, 113
comic books, 8, 40, 48, 106 “I Slept with Slender Man,”
collective intelligence, 89 113
collectivity (see community) “Savaged by Slender Man,” 113
community (storytelling and), EverymanHYBRID (web show),
12, 17, 19, 28–29, 76, 79, 11, 15, 30, 34–35, 50, 51, 66,
80, 88–92, 93, 98–103, 107, 77, 82, 87
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0012 141

142 Index
Eyeless Jack, 96, 107 Jentsch, Ernst, 45

Just Another Fool (blog), 82, 85, 86
facelessness, 11, 13, 16, 36, 39, 44–47,
49–51, 56, 65, 66, 72, 108, 121 Kállay, Katalin G., 44
fairies, 11, 39, 48, 49, 59, 68 Kelty, Chrisopher, 63, 65, 67, 68
fakelore, 92 Knudsen, Eric (see Victor Surge)
fan fiction, 12, 16, 52, 95, 97–15, 118, 121, Kristeva, Julia, 46
122, 125–127
FanFiction.net, 12, 52, 83, 95, 97, 98, Lévy, Pierre, 89
105–107, 109, 111, 112, 115, 126 literacy, 12, 100, 101, 113–115
“Slender Chance, A,” 113 LOLcats, 19
“Slender Tale, A,” 112
“Interesting Love, An,” 113 Marble Hornets (web show), 11, 15, 30,
“Cold and Dark,” 52, 96–98, 100, 31–34, 36, 37, 50, 52, 53, 57, 63, 64,
110, 112 66, 70, 72, 73, 81, 82, 86, 87, 92, 96,
“Monsters with Morals,” 112 100, 105, 106, 110, 113, 121
“Shaun Vs the Slenderman,” 111 Martin, Rafe, 85
“Slender Puzzle,” 112 Media Coalition, 8
“SlenderSass,” 112 Melville, Herman, 44
“Slendy Y U no take Justin Beiber,” 106 meme, 3, 10, 16, 18–20, 21, 29, 35, 36,
Fark, 21 64, 104, 108, 109, 114
Fausing, Brent, 54 Men in Black, 47, 48
Fiske, John, 80 Miller, Carolyn, 62, 70, 71, 115
folklore, 9, 10, 12, 19, 25, 46, 47, 48, 49, Miller, Carolyn Handler, 78
77, 79, 81, 84, 85, 89, 91–93, 126 Minecraft (video game), 3, 122
found footage, 8, 34, 52 MLAnderson0, 38, 82,
Frankenstein, 50 monsters, 11, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 50, 81,
Free Software, 63, 65 112, 121
Freud, Sigmund, 45 moral panic, 1, 2, 8, 100
Morgenstern, Dexter, 74
Gangnam Style, 20, 109 Murray, Janet, 91, 92
Gimme $20, 110
Guy Fawkes mask, 56–58 Newell, William Wells, 92
Nightmare Before Christmas, The
Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, 52 (film), 66
help me, 128 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (film), 50
Hills, Matt, 99
House of Leaves (book), 67 Occupy Wall Street, 11, 55–58
Offenderman, 96
if you are reading this it is already too Open Source Software, 11, 61–64, 67,
late, He has found me, 128 68, 77, 79
Ingebretsen, Edward J., 43 Open-Sourcing, 11, 62–65, 70, 73
Instagram, 31, 33 Operator, The, 32, 33, 77, 113, 117
Other, The, 40, 43
Jeff the Killer, 96, 102, 103, 107, 113
Jenkins, Henry, 8, 20, 99–101, 114 parody, 107–110
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0012
Index 143
patriarch, 11, 39, 47, 49–52 Photoshop Phriday, 22

performance (storytelling and), 12, 76, Splendorman, 3, 13, 96, 108–110
79–80, 83–88, 105 spreadable media, 18–20
Phantasm (film), 25, 47, 59, 62, 66, 67 Stalker, 30, 50, 81, 111
Phillips, Kendall, 41, 43 Storyworld, 17, 18, 105
Photoshop, 4, 8, 10, 16, 19, 22, 38, 69, Supernatural (TV show), 36, 121, 122
70, 98 surveillance, 11, 22, 52–55
Poe, Edgar Allen, 44
Prince, Stephen, 42 Tall Man, The
Propp, Vladimir, 80–83 Romanian Fairy Tale, 27, 28, 102
proxy, 7, 31, 36, 41, 43, 49, 56, 66, 80, Tall Man from Phantasm, 25, 47, 59,
96, 124, 125 66, 67
teleportation, 30
Question, The (comic), 48 tentacles, 2, 24, 30, 42, 45, 48, 65, 66,
69, 72, 109
Rake, The, 35, 103 Tichi, Cecelia, 78
Reagle Jr., Joseph, 64 transmedia storytelling, 10, 16–18, 36,
reddit, 12, 21, 87, 95, 103–106, 115, 123, 37, 122, 123, 125, 127
124, 125, Trender Man, 96, 108, 109
/r/creepypasta, 104 TribeTwelve (web show), 11, 30, 33, 34,
/r/nosleep, 104, 105, 115, 127 50, 51, 56, 66, 82, 100
/r/slender, 104 tulpa, 119–122
/r/Slender_Man, 104, 115 Tumblr, 97, 108
/r/slenderart, 104 Tutorial, The, (web show), 88, 91, 93
/r/slenderman, 104
/r/slenderman ARGS, 104 uncanny, 11, 44–46, 48
Rojcewicz, Peter M., 47, 48
Royle, Nicholas, 44 V for Vendetta (film/graphic novel), 56
vampires, 40, 71, 72, 111
selfie, 53, 54 variability (storytelling and), 12, 76, 79,
Shifman, Limor, 19, 20 80–83
Slender (video games), 11, 35, 36, 63, 93, Victor Surge, 11, 23–25, 29, 31, 45, 47, 53,
106, 111 65, 67–69, 72, 81, 92, 97, 100, 111,
Slender: The Arrival, 35 120, 125
Slender: The Eight Pages, 35, 93 virality, 18–20, 108
Slender Man is a Crappy Roommate (web
show), 110 Waukesha, Wisconsin stabbing, 2, 4, 6,
Slender Nation, 25, 77, 90, 119 7, 10–12, 80, 96, 100, 114, 120, 121,
Slender Sickness, 33, 34, 66 123–126
Sobol, Joseph Daniel, 91 Worland, Rick, 41, 42
Something Awful, 4, 8, 10, 16, 20, 21,
26, 28–29, 31, 32, 37, 46, 50, 55, 56, YouTube, 7, 8, 16, 31, 33, 37, 53, 87, 88,
62–70, 72, 73, 83, 98, 102, 111, 114, 104, 108, 109, 115, 121
119, 123, 126, 128
“Create Paranormal Images,” 16, 22, 67 Zizek, Slavoj, 50
DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0012

Folklore, Horror Stories, and The Slender Man The Development of An Internet Mythology by Shira Chess, Eric Newsom

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Folklore, Horror Stories, and The Slender Man The Development of An Internet Mythology by Shira Chess, Eric Newsom

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Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from

DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0002 vii

viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0003

into digital studies; fellow faculty in digital media and communication

Abstract: The introductory chapter presents some of the key

Keywords: moral panic; Waukesha; Wisconsin

Chess, Shira and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories,

Were Platter’s readers to Google for themselves, as she prescribed, they

good thing.”19 Morales, perhaps unintentionally, paints her moral message

“Stories and the real world”

In a June 4 phone interview with a 12-year-old Creepypasta user named

Mass media-driven moral panics about the dangers of a different form

empties media images of their meanings, strips them of their contexts,

Who is the Slender Man?

And so there remains something to this question. In the reactionary

understanding of the work and processes of thousands of Slender Man

Organization of this book

Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an

of “Victor Surge,” the pseudonym of Eric Knudsen, which contained

In Chapter 4, “The Digital Campfire,” we turn away from digital rheto-

22 Froma, “What Lurks Deep Down in a Sweet Child’s Online World?”.

Abstract: This chapter tells the origin story of the

Keywords: alternate reality games; EverymanHYBRID;

Chess, Shira and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories,

It all started with Something Awful. On June 8, 2009, a member of the

Transmedia storytelling and alternate reality games

and distribution of narrative across different media, and has gone by

Memes, virality, and spreadable media

While in the next section we will describe the creation, development,

Digital meme culture is an essential concept for explaining the

This idea of spreadability, as opposed to virality, applies much more

The origins of the Slender Man

seemingly spur the creation of a phenomenon like the Slender Man.

Additionally, Something Awful lists several rules of acceptable behaviors

Among the regular opportunities for comedy is a weekly thread,

commonly a disembodied and distorted face). Others on the forum

figure 1.1 Victor Surge’s first Slender Man image

At first glance, the image seems like a normal black-and-white archive

figure 1.2 Victor Surge’s second Slender Man image

figure 1.3 Something Awful image of an ancient Slender Man “woodcut”

Others followed, within the hour, some offering more photo-manip-

Already, within a week from Surge’s original post, the community of

iteration. In terms of visual representation, the Slender Man is always

Major iterations and web series

figure 1.4 Image from Marble Hornets

In addition to videos, comments and notes were posted on Instagram.

often creating long, paranoid monologues. While Marble Hornets func-

The Slender Man is everywhere

The Slender Man myth seems to somewhat stabilize at the point of

terms of often expecting viewers to function as detectives. In writing about

17 Images of an unfortunate tourist Photoshopped to imitate the moment

Abstract: This chapter positions the Slender Man as a

Keywords: Anonymous; fairies; horror; monsters;

Chess, Shira and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories,

The definition and uses of horror

In order to clarify the set of possible meanings, it is necessary to consider

audience, but also in doing so in such a way that is shocking, unnerving,

Blankness and the uncanny

The horror experienced on encountering the featureless face of the

with it. We expect regular proportions of limbs. We certainly don’t

nonfictive media to audiences, digital horror storytelling exploits the

While the Slender Man is certainly a uniquely Internet villain—one that