Internet Nostalgia

Let’s Revisit Slender Man

Careful what you make when bored online …

Welcome to part 27 of our Internet Nostalgia series, which looks back at phenomena that captured the internet’s imagination and attention for a fleeting moment and then vanished as everyone moved on to something else. This series looks back at those olden times and what they told us about the internet and ourselves. If you have a suggested topic, email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. Last week: Milkshake Duck. This week: Slender Man.

When: 2009.

The Story: Back in 2009, one of the most popular, creative forums online was Something Awful, a forum for just about every wild, often-charming Internet denizen who just wanted to make stuff and be weird. (The site was sold last October and appears to be in a state of permanent limbo right now.) It was a place for smart Web people, and defiantly uncorporate ones. It was a place to fun shit.

One day, in 2009, a thread emerged in which users decided to use Photoshop to “create paranormal images.” (This was the sort of silly, why-not thing you did on the Internet in 2009.) One user, a man named Eric Knudsen, did something very simple: He put up a picture of two children, in black and white, next to “a tall, thin, spectral figure wearing a black suit.” He gave the photos a caption hinting at a horrible old legend and gave the figure a name: Slender Man.

It was a brilliant idea for a “paranormal image,” and Something Awful posters ran with it, adding to the legend, with everyone adding their own spin on it. The stories were meant to connect slightly to real life, to feel vaguely “real,” but it was always understood that the Slender Men was not in fact an actual being, and never had been. Why would anyone come across something ridiculous on the Internet and think it’s real?

Pop Culture Crossover: For reasons that were more creepy and exploitive than in the initial spirit of the first postings — and we’ll get into those reasons in the next section — there was actually a Hollywood movie made about the Slender Man in 2018. It was terrible.