I am fairly uninitiated in the Slender Man mythos, however I will admit to harboring a very remote interest in it for the last few years. Something about the idea that we have our first urban legend born on the internet really intrigues me, as does some of the imagery that tends to surround it. Any time I've attempted to research it however most of what I find online is very 'in-on-the-joke', biased and not informative at all, often being suffering from extremely poor, Junior High School level grammar/spelling/etc. The most un-biased and informative, no bullshit article I've found about the Slender Man to date. There's also a wiki devoted entirely to the legend, however it quickly becomes a rabbit hole, as there are leagues of internet jargon used therein that I have no frame of reference for and thus, end up spending an exorbitant amount of time on tangents.
As morbid as it is I will say my interest in the Slender Man jumped a bit more when about a year ago two twelve-year-old girls stabbed a third in order to appease Slender Man, who they believed had threatened them into doing the deed. The crime is atrocious, but what interests me here is the way fiction has bled over into reality and affected it. That is always worth taking note of because incidents like that wear down the walls between the worlds of fact and fiction and leave our world a little bit more susceptible to becoming... something else.
Last night my interest peaked a little. A bunch of us had gone to see David Lynch's Mulholland Drive at Cinespia (amazing!) and when we came out a flyer with the above image was under my friend Ray's windshield wiper. Intrigued I spent about an hour at the end of the night watching the first thirteen or so entries in the Marble Hornets series. I can't attest to quality of story yet because I'm not nearly far enough along, however I'm definitely still intrigued, more so that the creators apparently parlayed it into a feature length. Always Watching is playing for a week - starting this past Friday May 15th - and although I'll probably not have the chance to drive up to the one cinema that has it in LA, I'll definitely be watching for it to hit Netflix, the place where indie horror flix like this really seem to live the strongest these days.
