Many academic studies on fairy tales, particularly those published by Bruno Bettelheim, employ the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to apply a psychoanalytic lens to the stories. As Chess and Newsom indicate, Slender Man’s “motives are generally left to mystery, although many of the early stories have him specifically targeting children or young adults In general, the Slender Man is a stalker character whose primary interest is in taking children,” although, “few of the retellings identify exactly what kind of monster the Slender Man might be, and what his specific intentions are” (30). Both are mysterious male figures with a certain affinity for children. Jack Zipes, author of Breaking the Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (1979), compares Slender Man to the Pied Piper. Slender Man has often been referred to as a modern boogeyman, and yet, as the documentary points out, Slendy aligns with established folkloric archetypes. Fan participation and circulation of Slender Man through stories, photographs, You Tube video encounters, web series like Marble Hornets, and games like Slender: The Eight Pages have built a transmedia figure now paradigmatic of digital folklore. This epidemiological metaphor speaks to the fact that, apart from Surge’s original post, there is no distinctive Slender Man authoritative text. He compares memes to viruses, ones that can be passed through horizontal transmission, or from person to person. The word meme was originally coined by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who is also featured on Beware the Slenderman. Quoting Shifman, Shira Chess and Eric Newsom comment that as an Internet meme, Slender Man “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.’ In other words, memes crowdsource cultural values, fetishes, fears, and anxieties” (2015: 19). Fans adjusted old Germanic woodcuts and petroglyphs to illustrate Slender Man’s existence beyond the digital realm, inventing “proof” that Slender Man, or at least the Slender Man archetype, has existed since time immemorial. While Victor Surge copyrighted Slender Man in 2010, he also encouraged fans of his original Something Awful posts to embellish the story and use their technological skills to craft a historical and folkloric tradition that would lend to the immortality and realism of the figure. Though Slender Man began as a clever bit of photoshopping and flashfiction, the collective authorship and reinterpretation of the character through digital channels buoyed his popularity and seeming veracity. The documentary manages to incorporate the digital corpus and community that made Slender Man into a mythic creation capable of inciting violence, but the preoccupation with Internet surveillance among children and psychology of the girls fails to account for the digital ecology within which Slender Man was produced, or the connections between the mimetic monster and the digital affordances that have also given rise to phenomena like Pepe the Frog, Pizzagate, and Anonymous. The Slender Man stabbing, as it has come to be known, is the subject of HBO’s latest documentary Beware The Slenderman, a film as concerned with the psychological conditions of Geyser and Weier as it is with the mimetic production and circulation of the faceless horror figure, a creature many have referred to as a digitally crowd-sourced monster. Both girls have been incarcerated since 2014 and their trial as adults is set to take place this year. Though the girls were quickly apprehended en route to Nicolet State Park and the victim, Payton (Bella) Leutner, was rushed to the hospital, the violent episode made national news as an eerie, uncanny figure emerged in Geyser and Weier’s stories-that of Slender Man, a fictional creature first spawned on Something Awful by Eric Knudsen/Victor Surge as a part of a paranormal photo competition. The moral panic surrounding Slender Man- a figure of Internet folklore-erupted in 2014 after two young girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, stabbed a female friend and left her for dead in Waukesha, Wisconsin. 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…
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