12 Days of Monsters: Day 1
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
Slender Man
from the 2015 film SLENDER MAN
THE SET-UP
What is the Slender Man?
For those unfamiliar with Slender Man: It's a fictional boogeyman invented on internet forums in 2009, which has since become extremely recognizable considering this origin. The character has been the subject of indie YouTube series, indie games, multiple feature films, and at least one real-life crime in which attempted murderers invoked the character in their alleged motivation.
A fairly standard depiction of Slender Man; artist unknown. Taken from Villains Wiki
The creature's design is both simple and recognizable, which makes it easy to icon-ify: Slender Man is simply an unusually tall and thin person, in a black suit with a tie (usually black, sometimes red), with a bald featureless head. Beyond that, characterization varies depending on which "canon" you prefer - for instance, he's been depicted with black tentacles emanating from his back since his inception, but there are many major depictions that omit this feature. But the basic visual design is just "faceless white humanoid in a black suit".
Unlike other urban-legend-style-monsters - such as Bloody Mary, Jeff the Killer, or Kuchisake-onna - Slender Man is explicitly non-human. Rather than being a vengeful ghost or an unstoppable killer that was once human or human-adjacent, Slender Man is just a monster. This gets played up in the folkloric stories around the character, which tend to emphasize its mysteriousness. A creature like the Kuchisake-onna, by contrast, has clearly defined rules and motivations, and is much more "grounded" and "knowable".
I could go on about why I think Slender Man is a neat concept, but that's most of what you need to know to get to what I think is cool about this particular depiction.
THE MOVIE
Elaborating on a meme
The 2018 film SLENDER MAN seems to be the most successful mainstream adaptation of the character to film. (Even then, critics have been pretty harsh on it.) There's a lot about the film that I think is silly, or that misses the mark for what makes the character compelling - but I really appreciate their approach to the visual design of Slender Man in the movie.
The Slender Man looks down at one of his victims in the 2018 film
The movie sticks with the concept of Slender Man as some mysterious and unknowable supernatural force. The main characters learn the "rules" of Slender Man in the form of "rituals" to summon or placate the creature that they find from online sources of dubious provenance, which I think is a very solid way to introduce the character in a way that is grounded in reality (i.e. you don't need your audience to pretend that this movie exists in a world where no-one's heard of this media phenomenon) and also establishes a lot of shakiness and ambiguity in what Slender Man's "actual rules" are. Ultimately, the creature appears not to have any rules that we know for certain. Sometimes it behaves the way our heroes expect, and sometimes it doesn’t. At the end, the film has a flimsy moral about how Slender Man wants to spread his destructive influence like a virus, and thus sharing horror stories about him continues to propagate the trauma he causes, but that's it.
For all its failings, the film makes a sincere (and I think noble) effort to tell a grounded story about children encountering an unknowable malicious force that takes over their lives. A lot of people that deride Slender Man media like to take cheap shots by comparing it unfavorably to the 2002 movie THE RING, which is tempting because THE RING was very good and was also about a monster that is closely tied to then-contemporary digital media (in that case, VHS tapes). But I think SLENDER MAN actually does succeed at capturing a real cultural anxiety about contemporary digital media in a relevant way: the way he's presented in this movie, he reflects a lot of the unsettling uncertainty of trying to find things out on the internet.
You can find anything on the internet, which makes it hard to know that what you found is actually true - and that’s especially dangerous when there’s something serious at stake (as anyone who has tried to google their medical symptoms knows). I think that's caught well in this movie. Our leads are constantly finding new information, up until the end of the movie, but they can never successfully parse the signal from the noise. Instead of helping them, the research they do becomes more destructive than protective - the flood of information itself dangerous - another symptom of Slender Man’s influence. One of the characters ends up falling down a rabbit hole of pseudoscience conspiracy theories about energy waves and shit like that as she desperately tries to make sense of her supernatural stalker, and honestly? That's fairly real. Kudos.
THE VISUAL DESIGN
Justifying the Familiar as Unnatural
The movie builds up Slender Man as this unknowable and alien thing. He is strongly thematically associated with the dark forest around the town in which the film takes place, and the sounds of branches bending and snapping, and insects buzzing, are common audio cues for the character. This all represents him as a preternatural force of isolation and disorientation, bigger than any individual story. But this brings us to a bit of a problem with his canonical visual design:
Slender Man is supposed to be wearing a suit.
The Crooked Man shares a lot of similarities with Slender Man’s design: Both are disproportionately gaunt, pale humanoids in suits played by Javier Botet.
And while that works well enough for internet-native urban legends where you don't need to go so deep to "justify" why a character looks a certain way, it does create kind of a thematic contradiction. This being is supposed to be unknowable and alien, but is also wearing identifiable human clothing. This isn't necessarily a sticking point - people don't really care all that much about why the Crooked Man from THE CONJURING 2 wears the human clothes he does (even though they're much goofier than Slender Man's typical digs), for instance.
But the 2018 movie decided to go that extra distance, and found a creative take that I really appreciate. Their version of Slender Man doesn't actually have clothes, per se - he just has features that look like clothes.
Stills from a featurette about the film’s special effects. Note the wood/bark-like textures, especially on the head.
This version of Slender Man appears to be made out of the same things as the creepy forest that he emanates from - he is textured like a rotting tree. His face is featureless, but not immaculately smooth; it's full of asymmetrical imperfections. And on his chest are growths that look like bark or fungus, but arranged and colored in such a way to give the impression of - you guessed it - a white shirt in a black suit. In fact, and I think this bit is really clever, he has the impression of a "tie" created just by the naturally-dark shadow in between the white bark-like growths of the "shirt".
That adds an interesting tension to Slender Man’s design. On the one hand, he’s associated with the dark places of nature - as silent, threatening, and unknowable as a forest at night, something that doesn’t even need to hunt you down: you will doom yourself just by exploring it, and getting hopelessly lost in it. But he’s also still evocative of humanity, not because of his body plan but because of his apparent attire. He has an appearance that hides him both in a forest and in a city crowd. The design suggests that Slender Man is fixed in the overlap of “familiar/human” and “impenetrable/natural”. You might even say that, rather than embodying the dark woods itself, Slender Man embodies getting lost in the woods - a terror experienced uniquely by humans.
This is ultimately pretty subtle stuff - I've seen this movie 3 times, and I didn't even realize the character wasn't "really" wearing a suit until I googled stills from the movie. Slender Man is in darkness or out of focus or far away enough that you can't really tell (except for the "head", which you get a good look at on a few occasions). But I strongly appreciate that level of consideration in character design. I don't know who specifically is responsible for the visual concept of their creature and how closely they worked with the other creatives behind this movie in developing their concept, but ultimately they produced a thoughtful and original spin on a well-worn character - one they didn't really need to do, and one that elaborates on the way they were characterizing this creature in this particular movie.
People love to try to be the first to declare a fad dead, or that everyone is over it, and there’s a particular kind of shared glee in throwing tomatoes at things like film adaptations of creepypasta because there’s this sense that a bunch of clueless adults/squares/whoever were trying to be hip and failing. For some it might be a form of reclaiming the meme by declaring that The Man got it wrong, and for others it might be a way to assert status over the people who propagated the meme in the first place by pointing out how bad it looks in daylight.
And of course, some people think SLENDER MAN is just another relatively generic and unimpressive mainstream horror movie, with no underlying agenda that would discredit their assertion that it’s not very good. And they’re not entirely wrong there, to be fair.
But if you dig a little deeper, you see little things you didn’t expect. The whorls and ridges of the bark on trees at night start to suggest silhouettes. His “featureless” face reveals tiny textures.
And I think that's neat.
