Slenderman: A Myth Come to Life?

The modern world has not abandoned its myths. While few of us ponder Tiamat the dragon who created the seas or Icarus straining to reach the sun, we have plenty of contemporary myths we use to explain things. Our modern era has given us Frankenstein, Bigfoot, and zombies—all creations of the mind still used to explain, metaphorically or otherwise, problems we humans face.

In the past, myths emerged from misty cultural memories, from poems and art and orations. They often involved great beasts that brought us rains or drought or perhaps human-shaped beings who delivered diseases and hidden knowledge. With the advent of print and widespread literacy, new myths could be generated by a single mind and spread through the marketplace of ideas. Frankenstein’s monster, a stand-in for our thirst for knowledge and immortality gone awry, was created by Mary Shelley in 1818. Her idea of a man-made beast haunting its creator has since been re-created in countless films, novels, and TV shows. More recently, we see his shadow in vague warnings about a coming dystopia of A.I. and robots.

In The Modern Myths, Philip Ball explains that our current myths serve the same function as the old ones: They help us make sense of a terrifying world. He sees zombies, Dracula, and Sherlock Holmes among a cast of still-relevant explanatory superhuman beings

The internet has allowed us to crowd-source our myths. In 2009, a Photoshop contest to insert horror images into old photographs yielded a creature called Slenderman. Eric Knudsen (under the alias Victor Surge) offered up images of children playing, with a tall, faceless figure lurking in the background. In some of these images, he added tentacles.

Slenderman went viral. People started making their own Slenderman images and memes, fanfictions, and even video games. Slenderman’s blank visage and creepy behavior tapped into the pit of our postmodern fears—of childhoods irrevocably lost, the ever-presence of death and decline, stranger danger, and so on.

Like every successful myth, Slenderman is not static. Writes scholar James Twitchell, people are “continually finishing these stories, plugging loopholes, locating gaps, reiterating important characteristics, and, most importantly, introducing new players, especially victims.”

In 2014, two 12-year-old girls plotted to kill a third girl at a sleepover. The victim was stabbed multiple times in the woods of Waukesha, Wisconsin, and then left for dead. Fortunately, she survived. The two perpetrators, believing they’d succeeded in their crime, proceeded to try to make it to a distant forest. Here they hoped to meet Slenderman, who, pleased with their deed, would take them in to live with him forever in his Slender Mansion.

As you might guess, the media took the story and ran with it. Importantly, the guiding discussion was a mythic one: Many news outlets treated Slenderman as an actual character in the crime, a ghostly boogeyman who erupted from the dark corners of the internet to infect the minds of two impressionable kids. The Waukesha Police Chief warned parents that this “should be a wake-up call for all parents…The internet is full of dark and wicked things.” A talking head in an HBO documentary called Slenderman a “virus” that had somehow infected these kids.

Slenderman had finally become real. Like Frankenstein, he’d torn free from his creators, leaped into the countryside, and wrought mayhem. The message that won out was a conservative one: Monitor your kids’ exposure to internet evil, lest a similar beast comes and influences their impressionable minds.

The problem with this narrative is that Slenderman is not, in fact, real. In reality, the girl who committed the crime was suffering from severe untreated schizophrenia, and her partner suffered a shared delusion. This narrative was not what the public wanted, nor what it got. Rather than a national call for mental health awareness, or demands for better childhood treatment and services, we got warnings about Slenderman. Lurking in the shadows, like a seductive nightmare, he became real. America wanted to enter Slender Mansion.

Journalist Kathleen Hale, who has done the most thorough research on the Waukesha case, argues that we should see the Slenderman stabbing not as a myth come alive but rather as a lesson. As she explains in an interview, “basically, there are no resources for people like Morgan [the perpetrator] before they get arrested. After they get arrested, they get into the prison system, which has become our largest mental health care provider, and of course, there is no mental health care provided, it’s just that there are prescribing doctors and a lot of inmates with mental illness whose basic human needs were not attended to.”

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This lesson, alas, has none of the simplicity or allure of the faceless man with the tentacles.