Dare you summon him?
Director: Sylvain White
Starring: Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalise Basso, Javier Botet
Genre: Horror
Release Date: August 24th
Certificate: 15
In a small American town, four friends attempt to summon the fabled Slender Man during a sleepover, over the next week they all start to go missing one by one.
It’s now been ten years since Slenderman first appeared as a meme online and despite no set in stone back story or folklore, he’s been popping up in works of fiction ever since, even causing a few real-life incidents along the way, so the cornerstones were there to make a half decent film centred around him, so how the makers managed to miss this badly I’ll never know.
There are a lot of stories and even a game that lends itself perfectly to making a decent horror or thriller film, but what we are treated to is a small group of girls who can apparently find a way to summon the Slenderman within five minutes on Google and seemingly can only make the worst possible decision throughout the film.
This isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have some redeeming qualities, Joey King and Julia Goldani Telles both do the most with what they were given and were most definitely wasted in this film, whilst some of the visuals in the film were genuinely creepy.
The biggest disappointment, however, is that every time it looks like the tension is building to something great it is ruined by sloppy writing taking the characters down the laziest possible route, some of which are signposted so badly you know exactly what is going to happen a good 20/30 minutes before it does.
You have a decent cast and a blank slate in terms of the foe, but after watching Slenderman, I can’t help but see it as nothing more than a paint-by-numbers horror film with a cast and antagonist that have both been let down by the writers and director
If you liked: The Tall Man, Darkness Falls, IT
I still don’t get who he actually is and what it is that he does!? Sounds like such a wasted opportunity.
Couldn’t agree more, they had almost an empty slate to expand our knowledge of his lore, but instead they don’t do anything with him, quite frankly he could be anybody
Plus, if they are the ones who summoned him, why are they the ones he’s killing? Even if the film went into Death Note territory with the girls telling him who they wanted him to kill on their behalf, it would have been better, Y’know?
Thats very true, in the ned it would of made more sense as a Bloody Mary film