The Internet bogeyman that actually inspired a pair of impressionable 12-year-old girls to try to kill a friend in 2014 comes to the screen in this drearily familiar horror movie. The spooky figure—a tall, dark, faceless creature with long, spindly fingers, who was often depicted as stalking and kidnapping children—is here summoned by four high-school girls (Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair, and Annalise Basso) when they upload a video, after which they are each targeted. The rules governing just how Slender Man operates are never made very clear, or they seem to be made up as the movie progresses, eventually settling on the creature as some sort of bioelectrical being. Slender Man encases its victims in the trunks of trees, grabbing them with extended branchlike tendrils from its fingers—or at least that is what seems to be happening (the film is so murkily shot and haltingly edited that one cannot always tell what is going on, and many sequences turn out to be the girls’ nightmares). The Slender Man figure is presented with some evocative imagery onscreen, but when it turns into a humanoid played by a real actor, the result looks rather silly (although not so ridiculous as the giant wooden spider that it morphs into near the close). A film about the murderous impulse that this Internet figure inspired in real children could have been truly frightening, but director Sylvain White’s cookie-cutter horror flick is most definitely not. Not recommended. (F. Swietek)
Slender Man
Sony, 93 min., PG-13, DVD: $30.99, Blu-ray: $34.99, Oct. 30 Volume 33, Issue 6
Slender Man
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