Looks like The Darkest Minds won’t be the only film in theaters that felt like it was just found on the shelf, catching dust for five years. I never fully caught on to the whole Slender Man phenomenon that happened during that 2011-2014 period, but I dig the idea of an internet urban legend, which is prime for making some compelling fiction. Unfortunately, it took all the way to 2018 for a film to be made, which is coming off the acclaim of the 2017 HBO documentary, Beware The Slenderman, which dived into the incident that occurred in 2014 where two 12 year old girls lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her in order to appease the creature.
The film, simply titled Slender Man, also deals in a group of girls, but they are aged up to high school. It begins with the disappearance of Katie (Annalise Basso). One of Katie’s friends, Wren (Joey King) believes the being known as Slender Man might be responsible since she, Katie, Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles), and Chloe (Jaz Sinclair) all watched a video on a mysterious website that supposedly summons Slender Man at a sleepover they had a week prior. Since the disappearance, the girls begin experiencing things that cannot be explained, and all involving the Slender Man.
The film, which is directed by Sylvain White and written by David Burke, is quick to make a bad impression as we’re introduced to our characters walking through the halls in their high school. The dialogue suffers from a serious case of “how do you do, fellow kids” syndrome, and the cast, many of whom I’ve seen done good work before, are clearly struggling to make the banter feel natural and engaging. It improves over time, especially once all the spooky stuff starts happening, but it still doesn’t fully recover, merely settling for somewhat serviceable territory. It also falls into many of the problems that you usually see in disposable PG-13 horror films, sloppy plotting, hollow story, and characters that are only performing convoluted actions to keep things moving along.
But forget about the characters – how is it as a scary movie? Well, sadly, the film drops the ball in this department as well. I feel like the biggest mistake was taking the threat of Slender Man far too literally. There isn’t any ambiguity about the activity, reducing the near Lovecraftian lore into a simple and straightforward creature feature. It also removes potentially interesting psychological dynamics between the characters. There just isn’t much to the material here. It’s all superficial and thinly constructed. At a point, it almost seems like the film was beginning to take inspiration from the 2014 crime when the cast is whittled down to three girls, but it continues with the same conventional choices. Would taking elements from the real story be tasteless and exploitative? Of course, but it at least would’ve tapped into something compelling and genuinely terrifying.
It’s not like the film doesn’t try, though. White manages to direct this with far more atmosphere and style than you’d typically see in these kinds of younger-skewing horror movies. It captures the feeling of being stuck in a small, uneventful town as a teenager just wanting to escape. The environments even feel oppressive and unnerving, as even mid-afternoon scenes look gloomy and foggy. Plus, Javier Botet’s tall and…slender…figure are perfect in making the character an ominous and intimidating presence. The budget limitations are obvious, but the filmmakers do a decent job at creating a sinister mood in a mundane setting fairly consistently. It’s just that everyone is at the mercy of a script that doesn’t give anyone anything of substance to work with.
Despite the fact that the film is arriving a little late to the game, I think there is some potential in a film about Slender Man, especially in the context of exploring how the lines between fantasy and reality can blur in the minds of young, impressionable kids. Unfortunately, the film that we did get doesn’t seem to be all that interested in digging into any of the very real, very primal fears that this character has inspired in the real world. Sure, it is directed with some more flair than your average junky teen horror movie, but it’s ultimately just another junky teen horror movie.