Movie Review: “Beware the Slenderman” is a chilling, if somewhat undercooked look at the power of Internet mythology.
Perhaps the most weirdly appropriate element of neo-Nazi scumbag Richard Spencer getting elbowed in the face during a television interview is that, somehow, moments before a hooded protester struck him, Spencer was preparing to explain the significance of a certain decorative pin he was wearing. Said pin bore the image of Pepe the Frog: a meme whose likeness has recently been appropriated by the alt-right, some of Donald Trump’s fringe supporters and assorted white supremacists groups in a kind of twisted re-contextualization.
Frankly, that Spencer wasn’t exactly allowed to finish his sentence is a small but undeniable comfort. And yet there’s no denying the weird serendipity of a man who uses his platform to espouse violence towards certain groups of people being battered before he can elaborate on the supposed significance of an online frog whose fame comes from the most sinister corners of online chat rooms and 4Chan columns. Strange times we’re living in, folks.
“Beware the Slenderman,” a disturbing but ultimately pretty slight new true-crime documentary that is currently streaming on HBOGo, makes no mention of Pepe the Frog. However, the movie is very much about the power of internet iconography, and how alienated loners often retreat to the dark corners of the web in search of some kind of connection: some reassurance that they are not alone in their perversions and troubled thoughts. These isolated souls forge their own world and identity out of webpages that are largely hidden from the public and end up taking refuge in online communities where anonymity is a virtue — almost as a rebuke to engaging in the world that exists outside their laptop screen.
The Slenderman himself is a particularly frightening vision, albeit a fabricated one. He is a kind of silent, malevolent bogeyman who stands anywhere from six to fourteen feet tall (depending on who’s doing the recounting), has no face or distinguishing features and emits octopus-like tentacles from his back that he primarily uses to asphyxiate his victims. Slenderman, or “Slender” as he is often referred to on message boards, is a creation straight out of a child’s nightmare. As he’s sketched, he even looks like a thin, wraithlike ghoul from an early Tim Burton film. Not for nothing does “Beware the Slenderman” at one point juxtapose a child’s illustration of its namesake beast with a doodle of “The Nightmare Before Christmas’s” Jack Skellington.
The crime at the center of “Beware the Slenderman” is a starkly horrific one. During the muggy summer of 2014, two twelve-year old girls from Waukesha, Wisconsin lured their friend of the same age out to an isolated area of the woods and stabbed her nineteen times, with intentions of leaving her to bleed out and die. The young perpetrators then fled, believing that if they reached the outskirts of Nicolet National Park that they would be safe. Meanwhile, their victim was crawling on her belly to a nearby road, where she was discovered by a cyclist who then proceeded to call the local authorities. The girls’ reasoning behind their abhorrent acts? The Slenderman — who both children had discovered through a website called CreepyPasta Wiki, a sort of online database for spooky occult nonsense — told them to do it.
With its bleak depiction of rural America, agonizing court hearings and bloodcurdling look into of the darkest corners of suburban culture, “Beware the Slenderman” bears a superficial resemblance to other thematically analogous true crime documentaries, including the classic “Paradise Lost” series and even Netflix’s more recent criminal justice procedural “Making a Murderer”. What gives “Beware the Slenderman” its prescient edge is that the filmmakers are talking about a fundamental conceit (the power of online symbols) that relates to almost everyone who participates in the circus that is 21st century life in Donald Trump’s America. The fact that the Slenderman is obviously not real — the creature was created out of old stock photos as part of a paranormal-themed Photoshop contest back in 2009 — only serves to drive the point home further. I wouldn’t suggest watching the film right before you head to bed and “Slenderman” does not ultimately linger in the mind with the same stubborn efficacy of the best examples of its kind, but Irene Taylor Brodsky’s film is nevertheless an engrossing and efficient doc that touches on a troubling recurrence in our ongoing cultural climate.
The film examines the lives of both girls before the murder, the day leading up to the stabbing and how each girl found solace and a kind of strange comfort in the Creepy Pasta online community. Both girls, when being deposed by the authorities, speak of the fictional Slenderman in a reverent, glowing tone: almost as if they were speaking about some kind of deity as opposed to a creepy manipulation of shadows that some faceless figure dreamt up online. Waukesha, Wisconsin is one of those forgotten American rust belt towns where gruesome murders seem to occur with great frequency, at least if the popular true crime entertainment we consume is anything to go off of. Along the way, Brodsky introduces us meet a by-now familiar rotating gallery of small-town types: flummoxed parents, worried teachers, police, online scholars, experts in the occult and the like.
One of my issues with “Beware the Slenderman” is that it presents us with a surplus of potentially engaging material and it ends up resolving itself all too tidily. The film glides past names, dates, statistics, court hearings and talking head interviews at a noticeably clipped pace, when perhapsa little muddle and sprawl may have allowed the story to actually breathe. One can’t help but wonder what kind of devastating effect this material might have had if the creators had allowed their work to organically expand in the way that it probably needed to: perhaps opting to splinter the narrative into individual episodes and form a kind of ongoing macro-arc. When “Beware the Slenderman” was over, I felt compelled to research more about the case and while normally I would applaud any entertainment that instills this impulse in its viewers, I still found the final product to be underserviced and lacking in its attempt to streamline a dense and complicated narrative into something digestible for streaming consumption.
The movie teeters on the knife’s edge that separates docudramatic realism from rank exploitation without somehow ever crossing the line. Some of the interviews with Anissa’s parents are downright heartbreaking: we are looking at two utterly ordinary working-class people who are forced to come to peace with the fact that the child they raised is now viewed as a monster by their community. The depositions of the young murderers themselves are simply wrenching. When young Anissa asks if she is going to “go to prison and rot and die” because of the crimes she’s committed, the response she gets is all the more unsettling for its matter-of-factness. One could argue that this same tightrope act was explored in both “Making a Murderer” and HBO’s recent “The Jinx,” two recent, superior examples of true-crime documentary. One of “Beware the Slenderman’s” most admirable qualities is that it manages this tricky feat with agility: it neither condemns the murderers at its center, nor does it make any attempt to humanize them. Good taste only gets you so far, but it does count for something.
“Beware the Slenderman” does pretty much exactly what it sets out to do and for those looking to sink their teeth into a nasty, fitfully gripping true crime saga for about two hours will probably get exactly what they want. The film is far from a disappointment but it’s also lightyears away from being a classic in the vein of “Paradise Lost,” though a few moments do get under your skin. In this eerie, Orwellian era of “alternative facts” and homegrown fascism, “Beware the Slenderman’s” detached depiction of an internet netherworld where disturbed minds can indulge in their fantasies with impunity may strike a chord more than it would had the film been released in any other year. Who knows: maybe CreepyPasta Wikis will soon be considered a legitimate news source along with CNN, MSNBC and, um, Fox News. I jest, but only because it’s often too painful to look reality square in its mean gaze. “Beware the Slenderman” won’t make you any less fearful of our increasingly internet-dominated, fact-resistant society, but it may just fit the bill if you’ve got the true crime jones. Grade: B-.
