But in many ways, it was scarier not knowing any of the specific details about his backstory. Users posited that he preyed on children, beckoning them into the woods and inviting them to kill in order to be initiated into his “proxy.” His modes and motives were always left ambiguous. Wikimedia Commons The vague nature of Slender Man allowed many artists to get creative with their interpretations. “The ‘open source’ nature of it - a wide-ranging canon with lots of gaps to fill in around a fairly well-defined spine - helped a lot, I think,” said Cat Vincent, a Slender Man enthusiast. But fans soon filled in the blanks of the mythos with their own ideas as to what he did and why. In these depictions, Slender Man was always a tall, faceless figure with a dark suit and long arms, who usually had tentacles on his back. Other Slender Man-inspired videos and video games soon followed, appearing on websites with hundreds of thousands of visitors. And it still boasts more than 500,000 subscribers.
#Slender man height series#
Joseph DeLage, Tim Sutton, and Troy Wagner shot the nearly 90-episode series with practically no budget - and it ran for five years.
Produced by three film students from Alabama, Marble Hornets quickly began to garner fans on YouTube. The channel featured a Blair Witch Project-style found footage series about a film student being stalked by a figure known as “The Operator” - which appeared to have been inspired by Slender Man. On June 20, 2009, just 10 days after Knudsen’s posts, the YouTube channel Marble Hornets premiered. “If you want to study the life cycle of a meme from a random internet post to a fully realized, culturally known concept,” noted Carli Velocci for The Verge, “you can’t get much better than Slender Man.” While Knudsen gave Slender Man his name and physique, the Slender Man legend was the communal, home-grown creation of a slew of internet users. The Making Of The Slender Man LegendĮric Knudsen/DeviantArt Eric Knudsen’s Slender Man photos quickly attracted attention after he first posted them in 2009. Knudsen never could’ve imagined how many people would be inspired by his character - or that some would take their enthusiasm too far. It read, “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.” One of his photos also featured a cryptic caption that added to its creepy allure.
In one image, he added tentacles to the figure’s back.
Burroughs, and a host of folklore creatures, Knudsen took some old black-and-white pictures of children playing and inserted a tall, thin, grainy figure in the background. Inspired by the “surreal imaginings” of H.P. “I saw some of the pictures in the thread and just decided to make something that I myself would find creepy.” “It was pretty spontaneous,” Knudsen told an interviewer in 2011. A ghostly figure with a featureless face, this character was creepy enough to make the photos go viral. The challenge, which was posted on the comedy website Something Awful, encouraged people to take regular photographs and make them look scary by adding realistic ghosts, ghouls, or monsters.Įric Knudsen, who went by the username Victor Surge, responded to the call by creating Slender Man. On June 10, 2009, Slender Man was born out of a Photoshop contest on an internet forum. Eric Knudsen/DeviantArt The story of Slender Man began as one man’s contribution to an online Photoshop challenge - and quickly went viral.
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