Most of us love a good scary story. These days, with so much of our time spent gathered around the flickering glow and woody crackle of the internet, it’s there our new monsters are rising from the shadows. And what better place than a dark room and a lit screen for scaring ourselves a little? Humans have been scared of the dark since our inception, when our poor night vision was up against the eyes of the large predators looking to eat us while we slept.
In this vein, Slender Man is a tall, underfed, black-suited gentleman who goes around stalking children and YouTubers, causing memory loss, paranoia, and sometimes even the unstoppable urge to make fan art. Doesn’t sound too bad? Well to add to the freak-out factor: if you look too long, he snatches you with his tentacle arms and drags you back into the dark from whence he came.
Much like the urban legends of old, the Slender Man meme caught on in small communities, forums, and subreddits, and more specifically through a paranormal pictures Photoshop contest held by the Something Awful (SA) Forums in 2009. This wasn’t just any contest; the participants had to not only create spooky images, but also pass them off as real on several pro-paranormal forums. Two photographs, which lead to the entire subsequent phenomenon of Slender Man, were posted by user Victor Surge with the following descriptions:
“‘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…’ – 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.”