An Average Movie-Goer’s Review
No spoilers! If you would like spoilers – check out the Spoiler post
I love horror movies and if I’m going to watch them anyway, why not write an entertaining/funny review from the point of view of an average movie-goer and not a professional critic?
Today we’re looking at Sylvian White’s 2018 film, Slender Man
Four friends summon the supernatural creature Slender Man believing it to be a made-up story but soon realize it’s more real than they thought.
Is it Scary?
There are multiple jump scares in this movie and some are pretty effective, others fall flat. Unfortunately the best moment of fear, that isn’t a jump scare, doesn’t happen until very late in the movie and only happens once.
So, overall not scary except for a VERY few key moments and in the end you’ll be more confused than scared.
Review:
This is one of those movies where you end up more confused at the end than when you started and not in the good way. Inception, good confusion, Slender Man, bad confusion because it honestly feels like a lot of plot lines were just dropped or hand waved to conclusion.
After writing all of this I ended up doing some research, turns out the movie was changed at some point due to the real-life stabbing of 12 year old Payton Leutner by two other 12 year old girls who were trying to become proxies of Slender Man. The stabbing took place in 2014 and luckily Payton survived, with both attackers arrested and sentence to decades in mental health institutions.
During the movie’s production the father of one of the attackers claimed the film was trying to capitalize on a tragedy which doesn’t really make sense since Slender Man has been around since 2009 and the film had nothing to do with the attack. But, this was enough to scare Sony Pictures who ended up cutting several scenes and requiring edits to several key scenes.
So that’s why the movie feels off and has a lot of dropped plot lines which sucks since based on the hospital scene, the movie could have been scary and effective.
Would it have been a good movie? Maybe not, the dialogue was still pretty bad and some of the acting was iffy except for Joey King (Wren) and the few scenes Annalise Basso (Katie) was in.
Overall, skip it. There’s no point in watching an incomplete movie that isn’t even that scary.
Cast IMBD