Slender Man rumours have been confirmed as a Screen Gems studio will be bringing the creepy internet meme onto the silver screen.
The announcement for the movie is long overdue as Slender Man has long inspired doctored images, fan fiction, fan art and video game. It even took life as a documentary, Beware the Slenderman, which was released earlier in March.
The thin, unnaturally tall man with a featureless face and wearing a black suit created by Eric Knudsen first appeared on the Something Awful website. Slender Man came to be when Knudsen posted photos of children with his creation photoshopped in and built a horror narrative around those pictures.
Implying that the creepy figure is responsible for the disappearance of the children and other terrifying acts. Consequently snatches of text, allegedly from eyewitness account that accompanies the photos of Slender Man, brought the meme to prominence.
With the rise of the meme it spurred works of fiction, along with real-life violence. In 2014, two 14-year old girls lured one of their friends to a secluded spot and stabbed her multiple times. The girls claimed that the murder would allow them to become “proxies” of the Slender Man. Luckily, the victim survived and the two perpetrators are currently awaiting trial.
This incident served as the material for the documentary, Beware the Slenderman. It examines the girls’ worship of the figure, and the workings of internet meme culture and the legal intricacies involved for the pair of underage girls who could not separate fact and fiction.
The upcoming feature film will be produced by James Vanderbilt the writer of Zodiac, along with Bradley Fischer and William Sherak of Mythology Entertainment. David Birke previously wrote 13 Sins will be writing the screenplay.
At the moment, they are on a hunt for a director and hope to start production later this year.
