Slender Man

Slender Man wears a black suit over limbs stretched past human proportion; his face is a blank stretch of pale skin, and in many versions black tentacles unfold from his back. He stands at the edge of playgrounds, deep in treelines, or in the background of photographs. Those he fixes on suffer memory gaps, coughing fits, and paranoia — fans call it "slender sickness" — and then disappear. He never runs; he is simply closer each time.

His birth is dated to the day: on June 10, 2009, in a Something Awful forum contest to "create paranormal images," Eric Knudsen, posting as Victor Surge, uploaded two black-and-white photographs of children with a blurred, elongated figure behind them, captioned as archival prints from 1983 and 1986 whose photographers had vanished. Other users piled on with fabricated documents; the YouTube found-footage series Marble Hornets began that same month (calling him "the Operator"), and the 2012 game Slender: The Eight Pages ignited a streaming craze. Slender Man became the flagship of creepypasta and the standard case study of crowd-built "open-source horror."

In May 2014 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls lured a classmate into the woods and stabbed her nineteen times, saying they acted to appease Slender Man; the victim survived, and the case set off a national debate about internet horror and children, chronicled in the HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman (2016). Knudsen rarely gives interviews, and the 2018 feature film landed flat — the monster has never been more effective than in those two grainy forum photographs.