Slender Man

The Slender Man (or Slenderman) is a fictional creature from an internet meme. It appears as a tall and thin man, wearing a black suit and tie. The man's face is usually blank, without any features. It is said to stalk, abduct, or scare people, especially children.

The Slender Man was originally created on the Internet forum Something Awful in 2009. It has grown into a kind of urban legend.

Description 
The Slender Man is described as very tall and thin with unnaturally long arms. It can extend its arms to scare people or capture them. It has a white, featureless head and appears to be wearing a dark suit. In images, the figure is often out of focus and blurry. The Slender Man is associated with the forest and has the ability to teleport.

Origins
The Slender Man was created during a contest on the Something Awful forums in June 2009. The goal was to change photographs using digital manipulation so that the pictures showed something supernatural. On 10 June, a forum poster with the user name "Victor Surge" uploaded two images in black and white. They were photographs of groups of children, to which had been added an obscured figure in the background: a tall, thin man with a blank face. Surge included short stories to go with the images, describing the disappearance of the children in the images. It gave the character the name, "The Slender Man":

One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.
1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.

These stories made it a work of fiction. Other users on the forum developed the character further, adding their own images or stories about "The Slender Man". However, is it possible to find supposed records of the monster dating back to the 14th century, a notable example is a medieval German folktale entitled Der Ritter ("The Knight" in German), it tells the history of a brave knight appointed by the church to slay a great evil entity who had been stealing children from a local village from around the Black Forest, Württemberg, in Southern Germany, by which some people claim the existence of the entity.

Development 
The Slender Man soon became very popular on the Internet. Many works of fanart, cosplay and fiction were created and spread from website to website. The first video series involving the Slender Man was published on YouTube. It is called Marble Hornets, and is now one of the most popular Slender Man creations. Other YouTube serials about the Slender Man followed, including EverymanHYBRID and Tribe Twelve. In 2011, Markus "Notch" Persson, creator of the sandbox indie game Minecraft, added a new character to the game. He named it the "Enderman" when many users on Reddit and Google+ commented on how similar it was to the Slender Man. A video game based on the Slender Man was released in 2012, named Slender: The Eight Pages. Several popular variants of the game followed, including Slenderman's Shadow and Slender Man for iOS, which became the second most-popular app download. The sequel to Slender: The Eight Pages, Slender: The Arrival, was released in 2013.

A horror movie about the Slender Man, Entity, was released in 2013. Another, The Slender Man, was released free online. On August 10, 2018, another movie about the character, Slender Man, directed by Sylvain White, was released. Marble Hornets is also being made into a movie.

The Slender Man was called "the first great myth of the web" by the BBC. The success of the idea has been ascribed to the Internet's ability to connect people with one another. It has allowed anybody to build on the story and develop the character, and also shape it into whatever frightens them most.

Related pages 
 Ghost

References

Other websites 
 The Something Awful forum thread in which the Slender Man was created
 Slender Man on KnowYourMeme.com

Internet memes
Fictional characters
Monsters