Today, I would like to commemorate an event which has laid a very profound impact on the internet.
Ten years ago on this day (06/08/09), a forum website called SomethingAwful held a photoshop contest titled “create paranormal images”. The contest would require participants to edit ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images, and then try to pass them off as authentic photos on other paranormal forums.
Two days later, on June 10th, a user by the name Victor Surge would find this thread, and become inspired. He submitted the two pictures above, featuring a tall, faceless monster which would stalk children, who would then disappear. He called his monster “the Slender Man”.
After this initial post, Surge and others would expand on the character and the story, creating one of the internet’s most famous monsters. The Slender Man proved to be popular enough to spread to other websites, with 4chan, Deviantart, and TV Tropes all having their own Slender-Mania.
On June 20th of that same year, another user on the SomethingAwful forums found the Slender Man, and also wanted to contribute. Noticing nobody had made any videos yet of the monster, he sat down with some of his friends and planned out a video webseries involving a former college film student discovering and unravelling the mysteries surrounding Slender Man; this would become Marble Hornets, one of the first horror-themed ARG’s of the internet.
That all happened ten years ago. Ten years of haunting the darkest corners of the internet, and Slender Man has built up a surprisingly dense resume, for a fictional monster. Several popular webseries, a couple hit games, at least two movies, even inspiring other characters in seperate series like the Silence in Dr Who and the Enderman in Minecraft. And all this within a ten-year period.
I think this just attests to how much humans can be inspired by an idea. From a small handful of edited photographs, we collectively constructed a new monster which lurks in our nightmares, and now it almost seems as natural as the horror mythos he was based on. For better or worse, the Slender Man seems to be here to stay.
Happy Birthday, Slendy! Here’s to hoping you continue to be both terrifying and terrific!
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