unforum

[zbeeblebrox]

[Black Sand]

[dinorobo]

You know what I never want to see/hear in a Slenderseries again?:

[Black Sand]

When people "Find" a series.

ahem.

[Zaden]

[Baronness]

Can I bump this thread somehow? Love it. Very useful.

[Fotzepolitic]

Re: Things you NEVER want to hear/see in a Slenderseries

[Fotzepolitic]

Kinda weird that so many people hate more or less every element of the Slender Man Mythos. Makes me wonder why y'all don't just go to the movies!

Slvlogs are pretty much all about innovation within a form pre-existing form, kinda like The Jazz. But if someone were to make a vlog avoiding all of these clichés, you've got to ask why they're happy to sully their flawless record of über-originality to do something as staggeringly UNoriginal as sticking Slender Man in there.

Don't get me wrong, if someone wants to make the least cliché Slender vlog ever, I'd be interested in seeing it. But if someone avoids clichés to please anyone else, I dunno, I guess I feel like they should just be doing their own thing rather than trying to bolt it onto something that just-so-happens to already be popular.

[OhWhatProvidence]

[Baronness]

I want to address the concerns about the "cliché" of distortion, particularly the video variety. While I do understand that it gets pretty easy to guess when SM is around due to all the craziness on-screen (and therefore lends a lot of predictability to the scene/series), let's also think about it practically.

Face it, y'all - there's no way that a Slender Man costume, put together by people with no budget or CGI access/skills, is going to look scary up close without video distortion, unless you purposely use a really crappy camera (which, I guess, is one option available...). Maybe it could still work from a distance, but I don't see how you could keep him at a distance for the entire series. That's why the distortion is a great trick for A) scaring the crap out of people, 2) giving him a cool, "modern," possibly scientifically-measurable characteristic (electromagnetic energy, anyone?), and C) covering up the fact that the costume is made of duct-tape, cotton, random bits of fabric, panty hose (or a morph mask), and whatever box(es) you can find to stand him on.

[Fotzepolitic]

Actually, now that I've had a shower, I'm-a do my own list. All of these should carry a big fat asterisk to the footnote "unless you have some kind of in-vlog justification for it", but you all know what an asterisk looks like, right? In my pre-emptive defense, these things are not so much about originality; some are basic technical things, but mostly they're the kind of things that people do when they didn't really make a conscious decision about something and just did whatever. And I'd also add that even big money horror films make these mistakes, so if you did them in your series, don't sweat it.

• Secret societies, organisations and/or conspiracies that teenagers are able to find out lots of information about without too much trouble.
  
• Willingness of characters to tolerate other characters being a dick for a prolonged period with no explanation.
  
• Using a symbol that might as well be the Operator symbol because it serves the same functions (or no function at all) but looks different. If that seems like a dig at those complaining about the overuse of the Operator symbol, it's really not. I mean, it sort of is, but you people don't object when you see a pentagram in a movie about devil-worship, right? Would those movies really be so much more original if they used a heptagram instead?
  
• Cults that resemble the Hollywood archetype of Satanism. There are a whole load of reasons for this: 1) Not even Satanic cults look like that. 2) Slender Man isn't Satan and has generally been established to have a completely different origin. If you want to go down this road, look into Germanic rituals. 3) Real cults, and especially ones that have the money and influence to orchestrate the kind of coverups and such that we're told the Slendercults can, probably aren't going to sit around in dank basements or drafty old churches just in case you might be filming them. Say what you like about the Scientologists, but they don't skimp when it comes to hiring out shopfronts and conference centres. 4) To be honest, every single other thing about this. It's just a bad trope.
  
• I don't know if anyone did this yet, but DO NOT USE OUIJA BOARDS. They're a horror cliché, they have an incredibly innocuous origin as a party game from well within living memory, and there's no real reason why a spirit or demon couldn't just pick up a pen.
  
• Night vision. Now don't get me wrong, I know bugger all about camera so maybe they all have night-vision functions on them and I just didn't press Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start right, but it seems like every camera in the Slenderverse has a night-vision function. Whereas one thing MH did so well that it found its way into Slender was to have people rely on flashlights, which in turn meant that to run they'd have to point their flashlight at the ground and completely blind themselves to something that might only be 10 feet in front of them, no 8 feet, no 5 feet, no AAARGHSHITSHITSHIT. Night-vision makes a protagonist who ought be weak and vulnerable into someone with a superhuman sense who might as well not be in the dark at all. The only time night-vision has been a good thing for tension is in Silence Of The Lambs, because it was used to show the protagonist being weak and helpless.
  
• Filming for no reason. And by no reason I mean no good reason. I know Paranormal Activity has people setting up a bajillion cameras all over the house just in case they have ghosts/burglars, and while they made some effort to explain it (i.e. the families in the movies are rich and can afford this stuff), even there you find yourself asking why someone's first instinct upon hearing someone screaming in their house is to pick up a damn camera. It'd make sense if a character actually WERE a cameraman and that was just an instinctive reaction (or in the case of the aforementioned night-vision), but if your protagonist is too comfortable filming it makes the situations they're in seems a lot less perilous.
  
• Conversations that reference in passing something that you would think people would want to talk about at length. This is especially noticeable when the conversation does not go anywhere after that.
  
• Characters who are incredibly quick to believe in the supernatural. I don't personally believe in ghosts, but I'm pretty sure that even if I did, if someone broke into my house I'd be more likely to change the locks than get an exorcist in.
  
• CALL THE DAMN POLICE. WHY WOULDN'T YOU? Horror movies actually have more excuse because they're usually showing things happening in the heat of the moment and/or over maybe an hour or two of real-time, but if you're being menaced by something that you've clearly filmed for weeks on end, you'd need a pretty good reason not to take it to the police. And while we're on that...
  
• "We called the police but they didn't seem interested..." - this is just weak. That's like saying you called the fire brigade about a fire but they weren't interested. The police aren't going to not show up because they think you're a kook, and chances are they will keep showing up. Seriously, if people knew how much public money was spent humouring kooks, they'd probably rote Romney.
  
• Awareness of Slender Man. People have mentioned suspension of disbelief in other threads, so I don't see why this shouldn't apply to an in-universe version of Google that doesn't tell you everything about Slender Man (including him being both fictional and a well-worn trope in myth) the second you search for "guy in a suit with no face". Pomo/genre-savvy horror has had its day, and chances are that when your character has gone through his "nah, it must just be a hoax" phase, a few vlog entries later he'll still end up exactly where he would've been if it hadn't happened, so it just feels like padding.
  

[/spoiler]

I think that's all.

EDIT: no, wait, there's more:

• Slendersickness. Since we're apparently slating great swathes of the Mythos, I don't care much for Slendersickness. Much like the Operator symbol that everyone hates so much, it seems like foreshadowing for the sake of foreshadowing. I'm really careful not to cough in my videos because I don't want people thinking it's Slendersickness and then thinking I'm forgetting to do it later. Also, other than occasionally moving from coughing to coughing up blood, it seems like a condition that doesn't really escalate. If it's radiation sickness, then it should escalate with prolonged exposure to the source. If it's a supernatural disease (intended to unnerve the sufferer perhaps?), it should do something more interesting than making people cough. If it's a traditional disease, it should either get worse or go away as the body's immune system deals with it. And if it's something like AIDS then that's just messed up, man.
  
• "I'm going to go on the road for a while". No you're not. You wanna know why?
  1.) Cars aren't any more secure than houses. They're no harder to follow than a person on foot if your pursuer also has a car, and you have to keep putting money into them to make them work.
  2.) If you disappear for months at a time, you'll probably lose your source of income. Either you'll lose your job, or you'll miss out on your social security, or your parents will stop paying your rent for you, or whatever. This leads into the issue of...
  
• The Slenderverse Is The Star Trekverse. People in the Slenderverse seem not to really need money. We know they buy things, and some of them have jobs or go to college, but they can walk away from those jobs and college courses for weeks at a time without being fired, kicked off or running out of petrol money or booze money.
  This might seem like petty realism, and while I'd happily argue that it isn't, it's more about tension. Money and the lack thereof is a big part of what keeps people trapped. We do jobs we hate because we can't afford not to. We stay in houses that stink of piddle because they're all we can afford. We put up with problem neighbours because we don't want to lose our damage deposits. These things might seem mundane, but being free of them is just another thing, like the night-vision cameras, that makes these people seem less vulnerable and more capable. Of course we don't assume that people in the Slenderverse don't need money. But it's problematic when they don't act like it.
  

2nd EDIT: oh, and one more.

• Non-diegetic music. I cannot stress this enough.
  For those who don't know, diegetic sound is sound that has a clear source on screen or in the world of the film. So a character playing music on a CD player would be diegetic music. Non-diegetic sound is sound that doesn't represent anything in the world of the film. A film score would be the obvious example.
  Now the Slenderverse has this big ugly grey area in the form of film distortion, but I'm inclined to say that that qualifies as diegetic because it's supposed to be something that's being done to the camera by Ol' Slendy.
  But that long ominous synth note that you think is really subtle? It isn't subtle enough, and it never will be. I get that sometimes this is a result of people trying to do ULF sound, and while that's admirable, five minutes on Google would tell you how to do it properly. Also no synth anywhere will put out the brown note unless it's hooked up to a transmitter the size of Mt Etna, so give up on that one.
  Sometimes though, the music is just undeniably music, with chords and everything, and the burning question is: is our protagonist trying to make his scary experiences scarier for the audience (which would actually be legit if that was the point of it), or is someone hanging out in the woods noodling on his Korg while the protagonist is choking on the floor?
  And I still can't get my head around EMH's Animal Collective sample.
  

[OhWhatProvidence]

[Stanislav]

There is a very good justification for night-vision: it exists and is useful and realistic. And it does have its limits, but Marble Hornets handled it really well with its dual-use of flashlights and NV.

[Fotzepolitic]

Sorry about the insane length of that, by the way.

I know night-vision exists, I'm just not sure how available it is to film students (except I guess obviously it must be, but you know what I mean). It might do more for the tension if maybe they couldn't afford it, is all.

[OhWhatProvidence]

Or if they were just too terrified to turn it on, plus a flashlight has a beam that you can shine at things, NV is pretty much entirely dependent on the viewing screen/eyepiece, which isn't very useful when you're running or spinning around to find something.

I like what MH did in the "basement of doom" with the NV and the flashlight/external light on the DVC being used to see basic room vs details like the blood splatters. The light on flashlight makes it easier to see details and color compared to a camera's NV.