a missive from steinmen wood

I finally finished going through the entire Paranormal Images thread at Something Awful where Slender Man was created (the thread kicks off with ghostly images and the like, but after Slender Man appears on page 5 or so, he kind of takes over the whole thing), along with the thread that was created to discuss the Marble Hornet videos. I'm going to have nightmares for the REST OF MY LIFE.

The Marble Hornets videos are really what turned the whole thing into High Octane Nightmare Fuel for me. Basic premise: a few years ago, a film student named Alex was shooting his movie, Marble Hornets, in the woods around his house. His behavior grew increasingly erratic, and he abruptly dropped the project before transferring to an out of state school. When his friend, Jay, asked him what he was going to do with the tapes, he told Jay he planned to burn them. Jay talked Alex into giving him the footage, but was so unnerved by his friend's weird behavior that he didn't watch any of it...until he read the Something Awful thread about Slender Man, at which point he decided to review the tapes to see if there was anything there. Creepiness ensues.

For a bunch of video clips put together by a group of people doing this for fun, they're incredibly well done, and have scared me more than things I've paid good money to see see in a movie theater. And the accompanying totheark videos? Jesus GOD. They're not scary, exactly, but they're incredibly unsettling. Overall, the entire project is just really cool and impressive, and I'm excited/terrified to see how they go about wrapping the whole story up.

I suspect part of the reason I'm digging this so much is because I absolutely love collage and/or epistolary fiction, and the entire Slender Man mythos (the Marble Hornets stuff included) is like one giant, collaborative collage story. Since there's no consensus as to what Slender Man actually is, he ends up being this eldritch, incomprehensible THING whose motives we can't ever hope to comprehend. He kinda reminds me of the Weaver in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station -- not so much the "freaky giant spider with teeny-tiny people hands" thing (*shudder*), but more in the "doing horrible horrible things to people because its motives cannot be quantified by the human mind" sense. I like it when there's a little bit of Lovecraftian flavor in my internet urban legends.

This needs to be a book, House of Leaves style. Make it happen, internet!

a missive from steinmen wood

I finally finished going through the entire Paranormal Images thread at Something Awful where Slender Man was created (the thread kicks off with ghostly images and the like, but after Slender Man appears on page 5 or so, he kind of takes over the whole thing), along with the thread that was created to discuss the Marble Hornet videos. I'm going to have nightmares for the REST OF MY LIFE.

The Marble Hornets videos are really what turned the whole thing into High Octane Nightmare Fuel for me. Basic premise: a few years ago, a film student named Alex was shooting his movie, Marble Hornets, in the woods around his house. His behavior grew increasingly erratic, and he abruptly dropped the project before transferring to an out of state school. When his friend, Jay, asked him what he was going to do with the tapes, he told Jay he planned to burn them. Jay talked Alex into giving him the footage, but was so unnerved by his friend's weird behavior that he didn't watch any of it...until he read the Something Awful thread about Slender Man, at which point he decided to review the tapes to see if there was anything there. Creepiness ensues.

For a bunch of video clips put together by a group of people doing this for fun, they're incredibly well done, and have scared me more than things I've paid good money to see see in a movie theater. And the accompanying totheark videos? Jesus GOD. They're not scary, exactly, but they're incredibly unsettling. Overall, the entire project is just really cool and impressive, and I'm excited/terrified to see how they go about wrapping the whole story up.

I suspect part of the reason I'm digging this so much is because I absolutely love collage and/or epistolary fiction, and the entire Slender Man mythos (the Marble Hornets stuff included) is like one giant, collaborative collage story. Since there's no consensus as to what Slender Man actually is, he ends up being this eldritch, incomprehensible THING whose motives we can't ever hope to comprehend. He kinda reminds me of the Weaver in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station -- not so much the "freaky giant spider with teeny-tiny people hands" thing (*shudder*), but more in the "doing horrible horrible things to people because its motives cannot be quantified by the human mind" sense. I like it when there's a little bit of Lovecraftian flavor in my internet urban legends.

This needs to be a book, House of Leaves style. Make it happen, internet!