Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man

The Development of an Internet Mythology

S. Chess,E. Newsom

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137491138
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Slender Man entered the general popular consciousness in May 2014, when two young girls led a third girl into a wooded area and stabbed her. Examining the growth of the online horror phenomenon, this book introduces unique attributes of digital culture and establishes a needed framework for studies of other Internet memes and mythologies.

1

The Face of the Slender Man

Abstract: This chapter tells the origin story of the Slender Man as he was created by Eric Knudsen (under the pseudonym “Victor Surge”) and developed by users on the humor forum Something Awful. The chapter then further describes early variations that came in the form of the web series Marble Hornets, TribeTwelve, and EverymanHYBRID. Drawing from forms unique to new media—alternate reality games, memes, viral and spreadable media—the early Slender Man stories built on the expectations of transmedia storytelling to yield something that was different from digital stories that preceded it. An examination of these formative Slender Man texts not only observes the early Slender Man mythos taking shape, but also identifies the malleability of the character as it passed through multiple creative hands.

Keywords: alternate reality games; EverymanHYBRID; Marble Hornets; Memes; something awful; spreadable media; TribeTwelve

Chess, Shira and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137491138.0005.

It all started with Something Awful. On June 8, 2009, a member of the online forums for the web site Something Awful began a new thread, challenging members to “create paranormal images through Photoshop.” Throughout the first two days, forum members created the expected fare: a variety of ghostly or generally creepy images (often adding half-seen spirits into backgrounds of real pictures). But on June 10, the tenor of the forum shifted dramatically when a user posted two doctored photos and a news story identifying a faceless “slender man” in a suit who stalked children. Almost immediately, an obsessive interest in the Slender Man took over the forum discussions. Constant additions expanded the fledgling Slender Man mythos with new photographs, drawings, short fiction, and even woodcuts showing his appearance in multiple places throughout history. With these creations often evoking a “Where’s Waldo?” style by not placing the character in the center of the frame, forum members pored over images, seeking out eerie evidence of the supernatural villain. As this nefarious creature developed via forum discussions, the character quickly grew in popularity, and his presence expanded to other web sites. Ultimately, the Slender Man story expanded into a collectively created, interweaving universe of web series, novels and novellas, video games, mobile apps, and fan fictions. Thousands of people have now read, told, or played materials and stories related to the Slender Man.

This chapter focuses primarily on how the Slender Man came into existence, and identifies key versions of the mythos. We begin by discussing the story as a result of both transmedia storytelling and Internet meme culture. We then chronicle several major iterations of the story as it appeared, and continues to appear, on forums, blogs, YouTube, and other forms of social media and gaming. To conclude, we establish how ongoing shifts and new iterations of the Slender Man help to maintain instability and flexibility. This instability, encouraged by the speed of information online, plays a primary role in making the myth so powerful. It is also why media critics found the phenomenon so threatening. While most of the versions online were relatively benign, the version that the Wisconsin girls ultimately created or appropriated, then acted upon, was not. The fluidity of the story gives it power.

Transmedia storytelling and alternate reality games

The Slender Man phenomenon came about during the mass media turn toward transmedia storytelling. Transmedia describes the fragmentation and distribution of narrative across different media, and has gone by numerous other names—360-degree storytelling, cross media, deep media, distributed storytelling, and others.¹ Transmedia stories usually develop from and extend a narrative universe beyond a core story, creating new points at which new audiences might encounter the work.² Effective transmedia storytelling might be best represented by works like the publicity campaign for the film The Dark Knight, which began with the core story of the film and branched out into an “alternate reality game” (a related phenomenon described below), and a faux political campaign wherein participants created videos for fictional district attorney candidate Harvey Dent. Increasingly, the expansion of storyworld through multi-modal fragmentation not only provides new touchstones for audience members to encounter the narrative universe, but to participate in its creation as well.

Alternate reality games (ARG) are a relatively new form that emerged in the early part of the century, originating (though there are some earlier proto-models) as a marketing campaign for the Steven Spielberg film A.I. Few developers, researchers, or players are happy with the term, but it is one with which we’re stuck. In their “Storytelling in New Media: The case of alternate reality games, 2001–2009,” Kim, et al., cite the multi-part definition of Sean Stewart (a designer for the A.I. alternate reality campaign that became known as The Beast,) as their guide on classifying ARGs as a genre.³ Stewart describes the fragmented story system that is the hallmark of transmedia, but differentiates that the ARG obscures the fragmented pieces.⁴ The player role in the ARG is not just putting the pieces together but finding the pieces as well. Each fragment of the story is delivered through a media node that already exists in the life of the player, from billboards to websites to cell phones to email to social networks. Each fragment holds meaning only when connected with others, and the search for these connections leads to the formation of communities that pool collective knowledge to turn the fragments into a larger whole. Meanwhile, the “puppet masters,” or those running the game, take their storytelling cues by monitoring the efforts of the players. They begin with a flexible framework and can make modifications to both suit the player experience and enrich the narrative.⁵ The ARG exists at the intersection of game/ludic play, narrative, and community building. That the genre came to wider recognition at the same time as the boom in “new media” technologies—such as social networks, blogs, and widespread embedding of multi-media within websites—is no coincidence. The digital nature of the web and new media technologies allowed for a number of utilities that are key to the success of ARGs. The embedding of storytelling elements into code-driven websites, for instance, allowed for a reflexivity that cannot be achieved in mass media; once a film is widely released or a television show broadcasted, they cannot be recalled halfway through viewing in response to audience reaction.

The tellings and retellings of the Slender Man mythos represent a turn to a more transmedia aesthetic in storytelling practices. This new aesthetic highlights the fluidity of medium, storyteller, and process, and also privileges a form of storytelling that is always necessarily incomplete. While the Slender Man phenomenon is not easily classifiable as an ARG, it was born from a culture where ARGs have not only become more standardized and acceptable, but expected. Media consumers now anticipate that they will participate in the process of storytelling as narrative detectives who uncover and recontextualize information, and will be rewarded by a richer, more engaging storyworld. These emerging aesthetics helped to establish the Slender Man as a notable supernatural creature portrayed in immersive digital texts. But the emergence of the Slender Man mythos from amateur, non-mass media sources, and the development of multiple, shared core stories as opposed to a single intellectual property, delineate the Slender Man phenomenon as something markedly different from transmedia storytelling that came before him.

Memes, virality, and spreadable media

While in the next section we will describe the creation, development, and characteristics of the Slender Man, it is important to first connect the character’s development to qualities and affordances endemic to digital culture. To fully understand the conditions that gave rise to the Slender Man myth requires a broader awareness of meme culture and the value of spreadable media, both of which draw on immediacy and variability inherent in digital media. The prevalence of meme culture has fostered the creation of ideas that are easily packaged and spread, which, in the case of the Slender Man, helped the legend grow beyond its original author and supported the development of a collective voice capable of yielding an endless supply of variations.

Digital meme culture is an essential concept for explaining the crowd sourcing and shaping of the Slender Man. Richard Dawkins first defined the term “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene,⁶ initially to apply evolutionary theory to the movement of thoughts and ideas through a culture. The term was later appropriated by Internet culture to similarly describe thoughts and ideas as they occur, are repurposed, changed, and distributed through online spaces. Through this appropriation, the term shifted in meaning for society at large, sometimes referring to the Dawkins version, but more often intended to be understood to solely describe Internet culture. Carlos Mauricio Castaño Díaz sees some overlap. He explains, “While referring to Internet memes, it is possible to say that they perfectly fit in the epidemiologic theory of memes, with certain characteristics that are only proper of its own kind, allowing the emergence of new patterns of interchange, exchange, and reproduction.”⁷ Thus, while the concept of digital memes may overlap with the original definition, it has carved out meaning of its own. Limor Shifman defines an Internet meme as: “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.”⁸ Internet memes are commonly repeated photos, videos, audio clips, or texts distributed online with slight variations. Importantly, though, this variability helps shed light on both the individuals and cultures from which the variations arise. According to Shifman, “Internet memes 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.”⁹ In ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Face of the Slender Man
• 2  Here There Be Monsters
• 3  Open-Sourcing Horror
• 4  The Digital Campfire
• 5  The Slender Man Who Loved Me
• 6  Facing the Slender Man
• Bibliography
• Index