Slender Man is a fictional creature created by Eric Knudsen. He is a tall and thin humanoid, wearing a black suit and tie. Slender Man's face is usually blank, lacking any features. He is said to stalk, abduct, or scare people, especially children.
Slender Man was originally created on the Internet forum Something Awful in 2009 by Eric Knudsen, under the online pseudonym Victor Surge. Since then, the character has transformed into an online urban legend.
Slender Man is described as a very tall and thin white creature with unnaturally long arms. He can extend his arms to scare people or capture them. His "skin" is pale and bone-like in appearance, and his head lacks any facial features. He also wears a black suit and tie. When photographed, the figure is often out of focus and blurry. Slender Man is often found in deep forests and has the ability to teleport.
Slender Man was created during a contest on the Something Awful forum website in June 2009. The goal was to change photographs using digital manipulation so that the pictures showed something supernatural. On 10 June, a forum poster with the username "Victor Surge" uploaded two black and white images. They were photographs of groups of children, to which there had been an obscured figure added into the background: a tall, thin man with a blank face and tentacles. Surge included short stories to go with the images, describing the disappearance of the children in the images. It gave the character the name, "Slender Man", and detailed mysterious events:
One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “Slender Man”. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.
1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.
Other users on the forum developed the character further, adding their own images or stories about "Slender Man". However, is it possible to find supposed records of a monster dating back to the 14th century, a notable example is a medieval German folktale entitled Der Ritter ("The Knight" in German). It tells the story of a brave knight appointed by the church to slay a great evil entity who had been stealing children from a local village near the Black Forest, Württemberg, in Southern Germany.
Slender Man soon became very popular on the Internet. Many works of fanart, cosplay and fan fiction were created and spread across many websites. The first video series involving Slender Man was published on YouTube, called Marble Hornets, and is now one of the most popular Slender Man fan works. Other YouTube serials about Slender Man followed, including EverymanHYBRID and Tribe Twelve. In 2011, Markus "Notch" Persson, creator of the sandbox indie game Minecraft, added a new character to the game, named the "Enderman", and many users on Reddit and Google+ commented on how similar it was to the Slender Man. A video game based on Slender Man was released in 2012, named Slender: The Eight Pages. Several popular variants of the game followed, including Slender Man's Shadow and Slender Man for iOS, which became the second most-popular app download. The sequel to Slender: The Eight Pages, named Slender: The Arrival, was released in 2013.
A horror movie about Slender Man, Entity, was released in 2013. Another, The Slender Man, was released for free online. On August 10, 2018, a theatrical movie about the character, Slender Man, directed by Sylvain White, was released. Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story was released in 2015.
Slender Man was called "the first great myth of the web" by the BBC. The success of the idea has been ascribed to the Internet's ability to connect people with one another, similar to real world folklore. Since there is no defined "canon", everyone is invited to build on the story and develop the character, shaping it into whatever frightens them the most.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)