slenderman

A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I have a huge soft spot for archival preservation of disposable internet ephemera.  Even from just running this blog, I’m constantly reminded how vulnerable online content is to digital rot, with most of our posts from over a year ago featuring dead links to nonexistent YouTube clips that used to bolster & illustrate our lukewarm film takes. Internet culture documentaries like The Road Movie (which archives Russian dashcam footage), Wrinkles the Clown (which chronicles the online hoax of real-world horror clown sightings) and We Met in Virtual Reality (which documents a community of VR enthusiasts navigating the early stages of the pandemic) aren’t widely beloved or even respected, but they are loved by me, and I believe their cultural value will only increase the further we get away from their subjects.  We spend a lot of our time online interacting with temporary, disposable imagery that will be lost to time without active, academic preservation of the user-interface hellscape we’ve trapped ourselves in. It’s a shame that most cinema is too timid to do that work, mostly out of fear of appearing cheap or dated.  This kind of serious, thoughtful archival work was especially hard to come by back in 2017, when I positively reviewed the HBO Doc Beware the Slenderman even while noting that it devolves into true crime exploitation and “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” fearmongering.  It turns out I should have just waited a year to see the definitive Slenderman documentary, A Self-Induced Hallucination, directed by Jane Schoenbrun before developing their breakout indie hit We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.  Comprised entirely of 2009-2018 YouTube clips, Schoenbrun’s document of the Slenderman creepypasta phenomenon is such a comprehensive, insightful record of its ephemeral online subject that it even includes criticism of & fallout from the exploitative HBO documentary that was released to a much wider audience & higher praise a year earlier.  It’s undeniably great that Schoenbrun has been able to graduate from D.I.Y. bedroom art to professional productions in the years since, but A Self-Induced Hallucination is not just background prep work for World’s Fair.  It’s a significant work in its own right, especially as an internet culture time capsule from one of the darkest moments in the history of memes.

YouTube is a brilliant catch-all for chronicling the full history of the Slenderman tragedy, which played out on much less cinematic (and only slightly more toxic) platforms like Something Awful, 4Chan, and Reddit before it was regurgitated as viral video content.  In the earliest stirrings of Slenderman creepypasta memery, a loose collection of juvenile “experts” explain to their small audience of YouTube subscribers exactly how & where the Slenderman legend spread online, and how you can tell that the “evidence” presented on the originating forums were fake (or real, depending on the poster’s perspective).  The meme evolves from that Slenderman 101 crash course to include Slenderman short films, Slenderman novelty raps, and Slenderman confessionals from World’s Fair-style loners desperate for online community.  There isn’t much to the tall, faceless, suited figure in either iconography or lore, which makes him the perfect blank screen for users to project meaning onto.  Of course, that memetic potency eventually proved deadly when two 12-year-old girls repeatedly stabbed a friend at the supposed command of the Slenderman.  That’s when Schoenbrun’s archival work gets really interesting, pushing beyond the rundown of basic creepypasta mechanics that you’ll find in Wrinkles the Clown & Beware the Slenderman to examine how real-life tragedy is digested into entertainment #content, both online and in traditional media outlets.  On the amateur level, YouTube creators casually discuss & dissect the details of the stabbing case while playing Minecraft and 1st-person shooter games.  Meanwhile, professional media turns the Slenderman stabbing into vapid news chatter and then, worse yet, fictional fodder for the aforementioned Beware the Slenderman documentary, an official Slender Man horror film, and a legally shaky “inspired by” Lifetime movie of the week: Terror in the Woods.  We catch glimpses of these Slenderman-branded true-crime cash-ins through Fan Reaction Videos to their various trailers and through YouTuber interviews with young actors making their PR rounds.  A Self-Induced Hallucination documents the full metamorphosis cycle of amateur content to real-world tragedy to professional product back to amateur content again that the Slenderman creepypasta uniquely traveled, only commenting on the phenomenon through the sequence of its presentation.

There’s something wryly funny about Schoenbreun’s editing style here, which simulates what it would be like if the Everything is Terrible! team remade Unfriended entirely through amateur YouTube clips (the same way they “remade” Holy Mountain with pet videos in Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez!). Its opening credits’ presentation as real-time screen capture of a word processor document, its full-spectrum omnibus of the embarrassing shades of YouTube Voice, and the throwback CG news recaps from TomoNews are all amusingly absurd, even if only in fits.  Mostly, though, A Self-Induced Hallucination is just deeply eerie & sad in the exact way that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair eventually proved to be.  If the heartbreaking isolation and vulnerability of the literal children posting about their personal experiences with Slenderman doesn’t hit you by the time one of those children are stabbed by their schoolmates, it’s certain to sink it during the end credits, where each featured video is listed alongside their view counts as of the film’s final edit in 2018 – typically millions of views for professional content like Sony Pictures’ Slender Man horror trailer and dozens of views for amateur users’ bedroom broadcasts into the online abyss.  As someone who regularly posts sincere diaries of my day-to-day Movie Thoughts for a near-nonexistent audience, I’m highly sensitive to that embarrassment & loneliness.  I assume Schoenbrun is too, or at least they were at the time of assembling this completionist’s archive of Slenderman lore & cultural fallout.  This is clearly the work of someone who’s submerged in online culture.  It’s both heartwarming to see that disposable culture taken seriously as its own cinematic texture and devastating to see how destructive & isolating it can be to users with no other outlet for social interaction.  There’s no doubt this earlier text deepens & enriches what Schoenbrun would later achieve in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, but in a lot of ways it’s a purer, more streamlined version of the same story, one that clearly deserves to be engaged with as substantial art regardless of its connections to its dramatic sister film.

-Brandon Ledet

Beware the Slenderman (2017)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

threehalfstar

One of the most common complaints that documentaries suffer is the accusation that they exploit their human subjects for artistic (and financial) gain. It’d be difficult to argue against that accusation in regards to the recent HBO Docs release Beware the Slenderman, which turns the real-life stabbing of a twelve year old girl into a midnight movie creepshow & a jumping point for internet age fear mongering. Although I could comfortably call Beware the Slenderman exploitative, it’s exploitation cinema done exceedingly well. The first hour of the documentary is highly effective as bone-chilling horror, opening with a Blair Witch-style dramatization of the titular “creepy pasta” the Slenderman in a heavily pixelated version of the woods. As the film tracks the legend of the Slenderman from online fiction to amateur video games to Tumblr fan art to YouTube mainstay, it makes some really interesting and genuinely unnerving points about the evolution of memes as a collective “virus of the mind” and the function of online folklore as “digital fairy tales.” It’s when the film instead focuses on the 2014 stabbing of a young Wisconsin girl that it veers into the more exploitative True Crime territory and loses track of its Candyman-esque fascination with the nature of urban legends. I definitely found one side of that divide far more satisfying than the other, but watching Beware the Slenderman navigate this confusing tonal clash and gleefully cross some ethical lines to get its point across made for a unique documentary experience.

Two twelve year old girls are taken into custody and tried as adults for stabbing their friend 19 times in the woods of Wisconsin suburbia. As there has been no decision made in their first-degree attempted murder trial to this date, a charge that could possibly earn them each 65 years in prison, the two girls’ story has, by design, no conclusion. All we know upfront about the stabbing is that the victim thankfully survived and that the accused have made no attempt to hide the fact that they are guilty. The crime is introduced in-film through media coverage montage and long-form interviews with the accused’s parents, which tells their entire life story to a backdrop of home video footage. The parents describe mostly normal childhoods outside stray sociopathic reactions to pop culture media (specifically the infamously devastating scene from the beginning of Bambi) and a gothy tinge to their daughters’ online activity. There’s a lot of frustration and empathy in those interviews as the parents struggle to make sense of children they thought they knew, an internet culture they completely underestimated, and the earliest signs of mental illness in otherwise normal-seeming childhoods. The problem is that they aren’t the only interviews the documentary is structured around. In a much sleazier line of inquiry, Beware the Slenderman integrates long stretches of the two girls’ confessions/police interrogations from mere hours after the stabbing. Watching two children describe the stabbing of a third child in cold-blooded terms is just about the most exploitative thing I’ve ever seen in True Crime media, but it serves the material well, especially in the way it deepens the creepiness of the film’s titular monster, the Slenderman.

Originally penned as a creepy pasta, but earning a full-blown urban legend status through online folklore, the Slenderman is a tall, lanky being with long arms, claws, and retractable tendrils. He is faceless, always wears a suit & tie, and is naturally drawn to young children. Adults see his attraction to children as a threat of harm, but children (especially bullied outsiders) see it as welcoming & protective. As one interviewee puts it, “Often in the adult world, we can forget how much it sucks to be a kid.” This modernized version of the Boogeyman or the Pied Piper offers alienated children the promise of protection & community. The scary part is that some kids truly believe he’s real, real enough for them to stab a friend 19 times to “prove themselves worthy” and to “prove the skeptics wrong.” By their logic they had no choice but to slay a human sacrifice for the Slenderman, explaining, “I didn’t want to do this, but I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.” Richard Dawkins is brought in as an evolution expert on the way memes spread & adapt. Brothers Grimm scholars attempt to contextualize the phenomenon in the tradition of fairy tale folklore. None of the talking heads are nearly as effective as seeing for yourself how the Slenderman is represented in online multimedia art and hearing what the fictional character’s devotees are willing to do “for him” in the real world. It may be a question of my general genre preferences with all media, but I think this documentary works best when it pursues this type of urban legend horror aesthetic instead of playing with the ethics of True Crime narratives.

I’ll admit that as an audience, my biggest hurdle with Beware the Slenderman was its length, not its ethical dilemmas. At two full hours, the film outwears its welcome a bit by the concluding 30min stretch, which started to feel as pedestrian as an episode of Dateline NBC. I’m always advocating for my horror cinema to limit its runtime, though, and it’s that genre distinction that allowed me to enjoy the documentary despite its occasionally objectionable sense of morality. Using the near-murder of a young girl by her peers for shock value or an audience hook is certainly questionable, especially if the ultimate purpose of your works to creep adults out with technophobic warnings about what children are getting into online. That’s not even to mention that the film liberally appropriates artwork from those same children for its imagery without pay or credit. I expect that kind of unethical alarmism in my horror media, though, and I really like the way Beware the Slenderman tried to make phenomena like the Ice Bucket Challenge, planking, and YouTube reaction videos into just as sinister of a force as CandyCrush is in #horror and Skype is in Unfriended. Before the easy fact checking days of the internet, people used to believe films like The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Cannibal Holocaust were genuine documentaries, real life recordings of actual incidents. Beware the Slenderman works best as a continuation of that horror tradition by actually filling that role as a document of a real-life event. It’s a little overlong, a tad sensationalist, and mundanely sleazy in some of its True Crime touches, but it’s also a great horror film, especially for a documentary.

-Brandon Ledet