Slender Man – Film Review
The film adaptation of the Internet urban legend Slender Man is here on the big screen about five years late, and proves to be an absolute mess filled with poorly written characters, cheap and lazy scares, and bad dialogue.
A group of teenage girls living in Massachusetts grow a large interest with the Internet urban legend of the Slender Man, a tall, thin man with no face who abducts and presumably kills his victims, who are usually young children. The girls then make an attempt to prove that he is nothing more than a myth, but that’s exactly where things start to go awry.
I am genuinely baffled that this film is releasing in 2018, as the Internet myth of the Slender Man began in about 2012. It genuinely makes me scratch me head and has me wondering how this film was never made years prior. Either way, this is a really bad film.
The characters in Slender Man have little to no characterization or development throughout the entire film. The only thing our lead protagonists do is make bad decision after bad decision constantly, and that gets rather annoying fairly quickly.
I cannot root for a group of teenagers who constantly try to prove that an Internet horror myth is real in increasingly silly and absurd ways. So many scenes go by that I wonder what the characters were thinking beforehand. Did they really think everything would just be okay?
Joey King as Wren in Slender Man (2018)
What’s worse perhaps is the dialogue that these characters are given throughout the film. Not one thing of remote intelligence comes out of any of our characters mouths during the course of Slender Man. In fact, some lines of dialogue were so cheesy, that I literally heard people snickering in the theatre. Trust me, it’s pretty awful.
When you go to the theatre and see a film like Slender Man, a film that markets itself as being a horror film, you’d at least expect it to be scary, creepy, or maybe even unnerving. The thing is, however, Slender Man is not any of those things.
Taylor Richardson as Lizzie in Slender Man (2018)
The only thing this film does in an attempt to “scare” its audience is repeatedly show them creepy imagery, and that’s it. It’s all so lazy, unoriginal, and boring. Not once during Slender Man did I feel creeped out or unsettled in the slightest bit. What I did feel, was how slow the film was going and how much longer of the film I had to watch.
An abysmal mix of bland characters, awful dialogue, lazy and boring scares, Slender Man is one of the worst horror films in years.
Overall Grade: F
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for disturbing images, sequences of terror, thematic elements and language including some crude sexual references
Cast: Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalise Basso
Directed by: Sylvain White
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Releasing
Running Time: 93 minutes