noiseredux wrote:Ack wrote:Generally me neither, but I think the effort is an interesting one. It's kind of exciting seeing this Internet myth take on such a life of its own.
outside of the concept that "the thinman is an internet myth," I don't actually know much about the whole thing. Maybe you can outline it a bit for those of us not familiar? That might actually make me interested in seeing some of said videos.
Sure.
The Slender Man was originally created on June 8, 2009, as part of a competition on the Something Awful forums to edit photographs to contain supernatural beings or monsters. The member who put up the Slender Man photographs, Victor Surge, also added snatches of text, effectively turning his shopped photographs into snatches of stories. The Slender Man went viral, first on Something Awful and then across the Internet.
A few months after the creation, another Something Awful forum member began creating a series of short films on YouTube, entitled MarbleHornets, documenting a film student trying to create his first feature-length production. The found footage series documents the film student's interactions with Slender Man. Other series of short films followed, along with the eventual video games and now feature length films.
Here's the MarbleHornets introduction video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmhfn3mgWUISo Slender Man is entirely a product of the Internet, first being born in a photoshop contest and eventually leading to series on YouTube, fan-made games, a character based on Slender Man appearing in Minecraft, and now feature-length productions. Here's a paragraph from the Wikipedia page worth reading about the large reaction to the character:
"The Slender Man was called "the first great myth of the web" by the BBC.[14] The success of the Slender Man legend has been ascribed to the connective nature of the Internet. While nearly everyone involved understands that the Slender Man is not real, the Internet allows others to build on the established tropes, and thus lend an air of authenticity to the character.[3] Victor Surge has commented that many people, despite understanding that the Slender Man was created on the Something Awful forums, still entertain the possibility that it might be real.[14] Professor Tom Peddit of the University of Southern Denmark has described Slender Man as being an exemplar of the modern age's closing of the "Gutenberg Parenthesis"; the time period from the invention of the printing press to the spread of the web in which stories and information were codified in discrete media, to a return to the older, more primal forms of storytelling, exemplified by oral tradition and campfire tales, in which the same story can be retold, reinterpreted and recast by different tellers, expanding and evolving with time.[14] Shira Chess has noted that the Slender Man exemplifies the similarities between traditional folklore and the open source ethos of the Internet, and that, unlike those of traditional monsters such as vampires and werewolves, the Slender Man's mythos can be tracked and signposted, giving a powerful insight into how myth and folklore form.[2] Tye Van Horn, a writer for The Elm, has suggested that the Slender Man represents modern fear of the unknown; in an age flooded with information people have become so inured to ignorance that they now fear what they cannot understand.[16] Troy Wagner, the creator of Marble Hornets, ascribes the terror of the Slender Man to its malleability; people can shape it into whatever frightens them most.[14]"
