The 2012 tragedy that made ‘Slender Man’ the biggest missed opportunity of modern horror
The Slender Man mythos carries with it the sting of genuine tragedy these days, but, at one stage, he was one of the most famous horror characters in popular culture.
The 2010s were a banner decade for horror, one that gave the world a number of iconic characters that horror fans still cherish. Mister Babadook, Art the Clown, Annabelle, the list goes on. However, all of them, save for maybe Annabelle, were cult hits that most normal people couldn’t pick out of a police line-up. While Slender Man began on the darkest depths of the SomethingAwful forums, there’s an argument to be made that he became a bigger deal than any of the names mentioned above.
Thanks at first to YouTube series’ like Marble Hornets, Twelve Tribes and everymanHYBRID, the phenomenon truly took off with the release of Slender. The video game series that, for a period of time, was up there with Five Nights at Freddy’s for sheer shrieks-a-minute. The careers of legions of streamers were made by booting up Slender and screaming into a camera, which would be enough of a bleak legacy to leave, but that clearly wasn’t enough for ol’ Slendy.
For a time, everything seemed to be hunky-dory for the suited-up weirdo. Hollywood was even sniffing around, which made sense. The character’s creator, Eric Knudsen, didn’t hold a copyright to him, so any studio could throw a couple of bucks at a bargain basement horror director and get a passable Slender Man movie made. A bunch of them were in production, some even with the creators of Marble Hornets involved and then, literally, the worst happened.
A pair of deeply troubled 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin stabbed a classmate 19 times in the name of the Slender Man. Suddenly, everything changed.
The story is as sad as it is horrifying. It’s only saved from being an unabashed tragedy by the fact that, miraculously, the victim survived the attack. Suddenly, Slender Man was toxic. He wasn’t a horror character or a figure of fun, he was a genuinely disturbing, corrupting figure. A psy-op that targeted the vulnerable and got them to do terrible things. Ironically enough, that’s pretty much exactly what he is in the stories as well, but now he was doing it in real life.
The films were either canned or quietly released on streaming to cause as little controversy as possible, and everything else just felt in bad taste. The games stopped getting made, the comics and novels being written about the character got shelved and the Slender Man musical (that actually exists and was written by Paul Shapera) will almost certainly never see the stage. You might think that the tragedy showed the Slender Man phenomenon for what it really was, some silly, puerile nonsense that only served to mess with the heads of young people. However, I don’t think that’s quite the case.
After all, I believe one of the most anticipated horror movies of 2026 shows exactly what Slender Man could have been had the Waukesha tragedy not happened. A creepypasta? Turned into a YouTube series? That became a streaming phenomenon thanks to a set of low-budget horror games? Am I describing Slender Man? Or am I describing The Backrooms, whose creator Kane Parsons has been given a blank check to adapt his vision into Backrooms, a film which is gaining rave early reactions.
Could the same thing have happened had you given the makers of Marble Hornets a similar budget and creative freedom 15 years ago? We’ll never know for sure, and I, for one, think that’s a crying shame.