Slender Man (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Best friends Wren (Joey King), Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles), Chloe (Jaz Sinclair) and Katie (Annalise Basso), while searching the Internet, find a mysterious video that features images of a figure described in forums as 'The Slender Man'. A week after watching the video, Katie disappears and the other three realise that they did more than just watch a video: They actually summoned the Slender Man. As they try and find a way to get her back, the increasingly violent visions they keep seeing indicate that the Slender Man is much closer than they thought... and if they aren't careful, they could be his next victims.

Joey King certainly fares better than the last time we saw her in a horror feature, but her efficacy only seems to shine through when she’s part of the main cast. This is the case for the entire main group, and as chuffed as I am to see Annalise Basso on the big screen again, these are characters that only seem to work as multiplying factors for each other. Their chemistry is definitely on-point, and as a showing of a more likeable group of horror leads, they definitely work at getting the audience on their side right at the start. But as they start getting picked off, it’s like the plot’s energy is being snatched away with them.

 

Taylor Richardson as Hallie’s sister works decently as one slightly outside of that main circle, although same rules definitely apply, and while most of the adults do well enough in their frames as the adults that get sidelined for the teens to be focused on, Kevin Chapman as Katie’s sloshed and desperate father is the only one who makes a sizeable impact. And then there’s Javier Botet as the creature actor for Slendy himself, whose physical presence definitely helps sell the quasi-Eldritch nature of the monster.

Well, this film is already off to a good start with its visuals, which stand out as being quite unlike a lot of horror flicks nowadays. Director Sylvain White (Stomp The Yard, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer) and DOP Luca Del Puppo show a serious urge to create a chilling atmosphere, and with how consistently cold the visuals can get, they certainly deliver on that. The scenes of our leads wandering with ragged breath through the woods channels some healthy Blair Witch-esque imagery and tone, and when it comes time for the hallucinations to kick in, it makes for rather intriguing psychedelic set pieces. It’s like the trippier moments of Rob Zombie’s Halloween films were transplanted into a narrative where that brand of psycho-horror is actually warranted, and while they tend to stick closely to the tactics of that sub-genre, it still makes this big-budget telling of an iconic piece of Web folklore feel like it’s taking the right approach.

As far as how everything looks, at the very least, and it’s here where we hit the film’s main drawback: Between the visuals and the script they’re in service to, it’s painfully clear which of the two had more effort put into it. Now, admittedly, there are reported reasons for why this may be the case, the main one being in connection to a real-world tragedy (the ‘Slender Man stabbing’ back in 2014). Specifically, that connection is that the father of one of the murderers in question found this film’s marketing and core story about a group of girls at the mercy of Slender Man to be… in poor taste, to put it mildly. In response, Sony subsidiary Screen Gems ordered for not only a rewrite of David Birke’s original script, but also a toning down to fit a PG-13 rating in the U.S. 

 

Now, I would really like to get into how real-world events, the moral panic that can arise out of certain Internet phenomena, and the unfortunate connections people make between the two is hardly justification for messing with, ostensibly, unrelated media. But doing so would put the aforementioned father in the villain position for this leg of the story, and quite frankly, I don’t care that much about any given film to turn victims of circumstance into the bad guys.

What I will get into is how this whole situation, if the reports are accurate, essentially left this film in a similar state to last year’s The Snowman; namely, that the edits made only served to weaken the guts of this story. We get a certain level of development of the Slender Man mythos in-universe, connecting him to legends of creatures that steal and murder children (we even get an expected but still reasonable connection to the Pied Piper of Hamelin), and the character building adds in some The Craft-like textures to show why the characters would both be interested in the occult, and why some of them would actively want an encounter with Slendy.

 

However, likely due to the gutting the script got, the narrative lacks any real sense of focus or even drive towards a thematic destination, meaning that we get a lot of head trips from our lead characters but no real stock into why they matter. With how incredibly rich in lore the Slender Man legend is, not to mention the numerous forms of media that crafted their own stories from it, this theatrically-released entry into that universe isn’t going nearly as deep into that legend as it could have.

And that, quite frankly, is the nail in this film’s coffin: Comparing it to the YouTube web horror showcases that turned this one-off joke in a web forum into one of the Internet’s most popular collective creations. Put this in comparison to YouTube series like EverymanHybrid or even the quintessential Marble Hornets: Both full of reality-bending ARG touches, a DIY aesthetic that shows found footage horror in its primitive stomping grounds, and containing intricate (sometimes literally unsolvable) puzzles to draw the prospective audience in. All ostensibly for free to watch on top of that. This is one of the bigger roadblocks that films of this nature have to get around: The prospect that similar material is readily available online, and that a theatrical film version of it should be able to add to that. Well, as said above, the visuals definitely show that the theatrical side of things is covered quite nicely, but as an entry that requires paying today’s ticket prices to experience? It just doesn’t measure up as far as story, and considering story and character development are usually the main crux of a lot of Slender Man web series, that is a serious down side.

All in all, this has all of the mainstream polish that a cinematic version of this character deserves, but none of the lore-drenched guts that made that character as legendary as he is to this day. The acting is spotty, with only a scant few being able to stand out all on their own, the cinematography and even the music from Ramin Djawadi and Brandon Campbell give the film a fitting amount of sonic texture, but the truly disembowelled writing holds all of that back by skimming over a hefty amount of what makes the mythos of Slender Man worth adapting for the big screen. If an uncut version of this film makes its way to home media, with the supposedly-offending material intact, I might revisit this and see if the initial effort was worth salvaging. But for right now, though, this is just a film that is unfortunately style over substance.