Slenderman (2018)

Director: Sylvain White

Viewed In Theatre

 

Summary: A group of teenage girls decide to summon Slenderman at a slumber party. They are driven insane by Slenderman’s influence while the audience is driven to sleep by the nothing that is happening on screen.

 

Oh Slendy, what have they done to you? I remember a more innocent time, before you were the subject of big studio films, when all Slenderman was was a couple of photoshopped images showing a lanky guy with a blank face wearing a suit who liked to hang out in forests and had a weird affinity for children. There was a simple beauty there, a reason to let your imagination run wild and say, “This guy looks creepy, I wonder what he does?” And your interpretation could be completely different from mine and no less valid. But that kind of horror has no place here, for we are trapped by…mid-August horror movies.

One day a group of teenage girls learn that a group of boys are planning to enact the ritual to summon the legendary Slenderman. Not to be outdone, the girls decide to perform their own ritual (with blackjack and hookers!). During a wild slumber party, which features an open bottle of vodka but no one appears to be intoxicated in any way, they put this plan into motion and watch the video that summons Slenderman into your soul. This sets into motion a horrible series of events where one of the girls, Katie, goes missing during a school field trip to a cemetary near the forest. When the girls attempt another ritual to bargain with Slenderman and bring back Katie they are further exposed to the mind bending horrors of the Slender one. Everyone involved with that ritual starts going insane and no one can figure out how to stop this strange series of events.

 

This movie is awful. Usually I save that until the end, but now I think I need to be upfront and just confirm everything bad that I’m sure you have all heard about this movie. Please join me while I break down everything that is bad, starting with the characters. There are a few problems with the characters, one of the most noticeable being that they barely exist. Everyone has a few character traits, as required by law, but these are all just there to give the illusion of character. Case in point, this ritual that they do to bargain with Slenderman involves them destroying a prized possession of theirs, so we see all of their prized possessions which tells us that Chloe’s father is dead, that (oh god I am struggling to remember people’s names) Hallie had a sibling who died and I cannot remember what Wren sacrificed but the point is that this happened just so the audience could be given more information about the characters and we still don’t know anything about them! Chloe’s father’s death never comes up again, nor does the dead sibling story and its not like Slenderman uses this knowledge to torture his victims. This is just a transparent attempt to get you to care about people with no compelling characteristics and it falls completely flat.

 

So what about the scares? Those are…weird. First off, this movie really loves the association between Slenderman and forests. I always assumed that the reason Slenderman hung out in the woods was so that people would think his spindly limbs were tree branches, not because he had some sort of connection to nature. Here he is some sort of tree demon and we are treated to horror shots of branches swaying in the wind in normal daylight conditions, like in The Happening. At one point Slenderman uses his awesome tree branch skills to crash through a window and abduct one of the girls, and yes, this looked as silly as it sounds.  But that doesn’t mean he is only limited to tree based horror because the other thing Slenderman loves haunting is cell phones. There are three separate scenes where Slenderman jams a cellphone that one of the girls is using, and on two of those occasions he starts a video chat with the girls, showing his approach of the house from his POV to them. I don’t know how he does this. I don’t know why he does this.

 

It certainly doesn’t help that the crazy visions that the girls keep seeing while they are going insane from Slenderman aren’t shocking or disturbing or creepy or even all that weird. In fact the only funny moment in the movies comes from when Hallie was making out with her boyfriend, Tom,  and then suddenly Slenderman visions start happening and Hallie sees, in quick succession, images of Tom’s face with the standard scrunched up dark eyes horror shot and then we are treated to Tom’s face shaking rapidly back and forth so fast it is blurred while a horror sting plays. It doesn’t quite hit the mark as far as terror goes.

 

One of the strangest things that jumped out at me was just how derivative this movie is, how much of it that it just takes from other, better, horror movies. Not only is Slenderman presented as being a demon scourge of children (just like Bagul in Sinister) he is some kind of tree demon and uses branches (like in Evil Dead), he causes hallucinations, like in a lot of mind bending horror movies. Hell, he even takes over cellphones, which I thought was strictly the domain of ghosts and Truth Or Dare/Unfriended demons. My point is, Slenderman has no true horror identity and all I could think of whenever I saw him do a thing was how another movie had done that exact same thing better. If a horror movie takes you out of it whenever something ‘scary’ happens, that is a BIG problem.

 

By now you may be thinking, “this sounds like a mess, I gotta see this!” Please don’t, for one reason and one reason only, and that reason is that this movie is so incomprehensibly booooooring. That plot summary I started with is pretty much the whole story, with everything between and around these events just being filler.This movie is so slow and ponderous and bereft of real horror that I almost fell asleep. It doesn’t help that the movie is so dimly lit that the majority of the horror scenes are just black voids. This combination of boring nothing scenes with excessive darkness just tricked my brain into thinking it was time to go to sleep and I could feel my eyelids drooping. It was so tempting. No one would have noticed if I dozed off for a bit, hell I could probably write this exact same review if I only saw the first half of the movie. But I willed myself to stay awake. For you. So you could know these horrors. The horror of sitting in a theatre and feeling yourself getting caught in a time warp, feeling the seconds stretch on to minutes, then hours, then days, then weeks.

There is so much more that could be said but I’ll just finish here so I don’t write 50 more pages about how unilaterally terrible this movie is. Bottom line, it is bad, it is not funny bad, please do not see it.