Slenderman
The oldest of the case studies presented on this site, Slenderman is without question the most popular and most pervasive tale ever told on the Web. As an unnaturally-tall, long-armed faceless man in a suit, Slenderman is known to stalk and abduct children, but few know that his humble beginnings lie in a 2009 Photoshop contest on the Something Awful forum. Eric Knudsen, hardly the Internet's Lovecraft, created something that has since spawned countless creepypasta spinoffs, a YouTube video series, videogames, and multiple films. The creator has stated that Slenderman was explicitly invented to create new folklore through cooperation, and it seems that he was successful; a later interview with him labeled Slenderman as “an accelerated version of an urban legend.”
Yet Slenderman has no official canon, so his appearance, abilities, and motives depend entirely on the storyteller. At times he has tentacles to accompany his arms; he often wanders forested areas, but also has teleportation abilities. Recordings get fuzzy when he is near. He will either be extremely aggressive – impaling victims on trees or putting their organs in bags – or passively stand by until their victim loses their composure and lashes out, which he will then respond to by chasing them down to “vanish with them to unknown locations." Like the Pied Piper, Slenderman exhibits the terrifying ability to control the children he lures in; unfortunately, as we shall see, this holds true on both sides of the screen.
Some truly believe that Slenderman is real, and has always been real; with the advent of mass communication via the Internet, his presence is just now becoming mainstream. Others see him as a “psychically crowd sourced […] Internet nightmare”, collectively brought to life as a tulpa. Others still maintain that while “of course Slenderman isn’t real”, the monsters inside the reader do, insinuating that Slenderman is a manifestation of one’s inner demons or that he can use one’s psyche to act out his will. Malinowski’s often-cited difficulty of studying mythology with “primitive” cultures lies with the fact that there’s no context or people he can talk to who believe in the religion that gave rise to the myth – but that is not true here.
In June of 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin lured their longtime friend into the forest after a birthday party, then stabbed her 19 times before disappearing and leaving the girl there to die. When the two attackers were finally found, they revealed that they had been planning it for months, hoping to act as “proxies” of Slenderman in order to impress him, thus sparing his wrath being visited upon their own families. Dolls mutilated with Slenderman’s symbol (popularized by the web series Marble Hornets) and drawings depicting various killings were found in their respective rooms. The victim of the attack ended up making a full recovery, and the other two girls have been institutionalized. Their devotion to a mythical figure managed to override all other forms of reason.
In the early 19th century, myths were seen as “expressions of needs in the human psyche” (3). To Carl Jung, these myths served as clues on the individual’s path to self-realization; while they speak to each person in the same way, they must be dealt with individually. Because such an individual is dependent on society for their identity and thus are anxious to conform to it, Jung urged a perspective of society that viewed it for what it “truly” was: a number of individuals with a similar nature. A big champion of the idea of the “collective unconscious”, Jung also believed that “there slumber in all of us subconscious memories” (bestowed to us by our genetic ancestors) “which awaken at night and seek to compensate the false attitude modern man has towards nature" (3). Could Slenderman, who emerges from the dark recesses of nature, resonate with these ostracized young adults?
Before they were located by local police, the two Waukesha girls were attempting to walk hundreds of miles to the Nicolet National Forest, where they believed Slenderman would be waiting for them in a mansion.
Following Jung’s notion of archetypes – the symbolic elements that contain “aspects of the workings of human life and mind” which, similar to Plato’s Forms, cannot truly or materially exist on their own, but give life and the world meaning – could Slenderman just be the Internet’s version of the bogeyman? The “Shadow” archetype, usually representing the “amoral remnant of our instinctual animal past”, as well as the “Father”, an authority figure that induces fear, both play into the idea that Slenderman is just another deposit for the “constantly repeated experiences of humanity” that appear across all cultures and time periods. The common problem with accepting Jung’s hypotheses is the assumption that such a collective psyche exists, but now it does. The Web never forgets; it rewrites the same story over and over again, each time changing a little something here and there; it grows, mutates into other mediums, other angles, until it becomes all-consuming, until it leaves its birthplace and appears in sidewalk graffiti and a movie you can see at the theater and a 12-year-old’s crude drawings. The myth spreads, and is, eventually, “acted out in ritualistic ways" (3). Myths are stories that resonate with us because they “reveal the nature of the soul” and contain a hidden truth to self-realization, where the conscious and unconscious are joined together in harmony. Rituals give meaning to these myths, to bring what was virtual back out into the physical.
