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[saksxalmo]

I'm going to try to make this a list, since this is going to be very long and technical...

1. As people have mentioned, the fact that we don't know how to fight it or even react to it. Think about all the other supernatural entities-- they're so well-known that you can (and people have) write guide books on how to survive them.

ghosts: exorcism, moving, finishing unfinished business
zombies: barricades, guns, double-tap
demons: exorcism, lots of religion, inner strength
vampires: hell, people LOVE vampires... they're not even scary anymore. Ditto for werewolves.
Slendy: ???

No matter how much we make fun of Jay for doing derpy things like going to abandoned buildings at night, you have to admit that it only makes it scarier for the audience-- it doesn't actually make a difference in what will happen to him. And think about it, have you ever actually heard about someone defeating Slenderman?

2. Related to my first point-- Slenderman stalks people indiscriminately. With ghosts and demons, typically they've been invited in. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc. have been used in movies again and again as a kind of "punishment" for morally corrupt people, especially youth. Slenderman is different. He simply appears and chooses victims without any apparent reason. You can be a good person or a murderer. It makes no difference.

Both these first points make the victim (or audience member) feel extremely powerless and vulnerable to Slendy. You cannot take preventative measures, and you can't fight back.

3. Juxtapositions. I'll try not to go too far into this seeing how long this post is forever. The first example of a juxtaposition is the "uncanny valley" feeling that people have already mentioned (a juxtaposition of the inhuman and human.)

In addition to that, I think one of the most striking things about Slendy is his grace/agility. Like people have said, it's unnerving to see how quickly and gracefully he moves in some of the entries. This is contrasted with a) his total immobility at other moments and b) the harshness of some of his traits and actions-- like making Alex kill, slendersickness, and distortions. The fact that he can do horrible, inhuman things, yet still wear a suit is also a juxtaposition of order and disorder. This is way too long to explain in one bullet point so I'll leave it at that.

4. Memory loss, teleportation, and general appearance-- these are all examples of how Slendy doesn't play by the rules of our universe. It's painfully obvious to the audience and his victims that they cannot understand him, that he doesn't follow our rules, and that terrifies us.

5. The lack of a story or explanation. This ties into the previous point. Slenderman is not a known altered form of a human or god, as demons (fallen angels), vampires, werewolves, and zombies (infected humans), or ghosts (dead humans) are. The "explanation" Alex gave, for example, which I never took to be a real origin story and which, if I recall correctly, Troy said wasn't supposed to be one, doesn't seem to "fit" Slendy. Like another poster said, Slendy is like the manifestation of paranoia. He is more of a feeling or an entity than a being. You can't quite classify him as living, dead, or undead because that assumes that he follows our rules of life. The closest equivalents that I can think of is the house from House of Leaves or pretty much every Lovecraftian being ever.

I'm going to cut myself off here, because I fear that if I go any further, I'll just be repeating things other posters have already said. Sorry that my explanations are a little unclear, but I don't want to make this too long.





Holy fuck, I just realized that it's now 1:30 am and I pretty much wrote an essay on this.
Why don't include Slenderman in the curriculum at my school?!

If you've made it this far, I salute you.


Silly thoughts I had while writing this:

1. Where does Slendy get his suit, anyway?
2. WHoever writes a story that combines Slenderman, House of Leaves, and Lovecraft wins 1000000 internets.
3. Someone should try write a Slenderman survival guide, just so that I can feel a LITTLE safe...

[saksxalmo]

double post, derp

[saksxalmo]

Ooh, I forgot something! (I know, this is too long already.)

Slendy reminds me a lot of the Gentlemen from the episode "Hush" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They're both silent, both wear suits, both have... er, non-standard faces, and both move gracefully and, um, patiently?

They also have these kind of "assistants" (almost slaves) that are these equally silent, brutish demon things in straitjackets. Something about them reminds me so much of Masky. I don't think Masky is an assistant to Slendy, but I DO think that he and everyone else in MH is being manipulated... Just a thought.


(Other things I forgot to mention: Slendy is scary because he is unknown. The fear of the unknown is innate in people. It's also clever on the part of the filmmaker because he-- Troy-- knows that he can never show something on screen that will be scarier than what the audience can think of. I mean, the internet is probably the best example of this... Instead of being scared because of what Slendy DOES, we are scared because we see how it makes his victims feel. We only get the initial "scary situation"/sense of powerlessness I mentioned earlier and the end product-- pathetic, amnesiac, balls of crazy-- which is enough to scare us so that the process the victims go through is irrelevant, or even required to be unknown in order to keep Slendy scary.)

Why am I still typing. Someone please tell me to go to bed...

[Ithilwen22]

Go to bed!

Oh wait...you stopped writing. I assume you did.

Anyways...

This is an excellent summary of everything that is horrifying about The Slenderator.

As for the suit...I assumed it wasn't really a suit, just his way of manifesting in a manner that looks human. But he didn't quite get it right, either by accident or on purpose to freak people out.

Also if you want a "guide" to survive the Slender Man, you can read The Tutorial blog. It works for the protagonist...most of the time.

Also at night when I'm outside alone I still get that "being watched" feeling. Word is out on if I have an overactive imagination or if there really is an eldritch horror in the area.

[Lithp]

[Whisku]

He could be right behind me, but when I turn around, he may have teleported off. This has probably been said already, but it's the thing that bothers me the most when I stay up. I also have flashbacks of when Masky attacked Jay whenever I walk downstairs. The floor/landing of my staircase makes a sharp turn to the left into a hallway and the sofa faces the hallway, so I always turn on my lights and just leave them on all night in case I have to go back down there. Waste of electricity, I know.

[Blank_Zero]

Not wading through 8 pages of backlog to check, but there is one thing that makes Slendy so fucking terrifying for me.

He's the one monster you don't have to turn the lights off to be worried about.

To clarify, when I was little, I was VERY afraid of dark places. There could be anything there, ya know? Light was the "safe" place.

Slenderman doesn't care how bright or dark a place is. Nowhere is safe.


That's what I find most frightening.

[pravado]

[Starkley]

Someone said something about how The Operator is less scary because of how it can appear in both dark and light, but it's still scary in the dark. Think of all those Entries where someone slowly pans their camera across a dark room...and suddenly, chaos distortion which ends with either a mad run from TO, or a few frames of Operator and then a still camera that sees nothing.

That's the scariest thing for me. You could just turn on a light, and the Operator could just be standing there. It makes you just as afraid to turn lights on as you would be to turn them off. You never know when he's there, and maybe you don't want to know.

[punxtr]

The scariest scene I ever saw of Slendy was in daylight. A lot of them are, actually.

[Gante]

What freaks me out most about Slenderman in all his incarnations is the grotesque approximation of tenderness he somethimes shows his victims.

Remeber the origional Something Awful quote?

[Nautilus]

[DHawk314]

[Starkley]

What everyone doesn't want as far as an origin story is for it to be trite and cliched. That's why the "Operator is the ghost of pedophiles" thing in that Entry with Alex's story kind of had some people on edge.

We don't want Slenderman to be Freddie Krueger. He's already got the fire and the children association. Please don't make it worse. :'(

They need to give some reason for Slenderman to be there/some motive, or else it's bad storytelling. They don't need to make it something simple and comforting. Making it something specific to Tim ("Tim imagined Slendy as a friend and had his wish twistedly granted") takes the fear out of it. Someone said it earlier, it's comforting to be able to say "Oh, well don't do that, and it won't happen to us."

If Slenderman was an eternal creature, something that just exists, and isn't the direct result of anyone's actions, then that would be fine. They can explain plenty without giving him a boring and unmysterious origin story.

[pravado]

I don't care about an origin story nor do I really wanna know how he came to be on this earth. I just want to know his motive