''Beware the Slenderman'' (stylized as ''_beware the slenderman'') is a 2016 American documentary film directed by

Irene Taylor Brodsky Irene Taylor (born June 15, 1970) is a Peabody and Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated director and producer whose documentaries have shown theatrically, at film festivals and stream worldwide. Early life Taylor is a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults). Tay ...

about the

Slender Man stabbing On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States, two 12-year-old girls, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, lured their friend Payton Leutner into a forest and stabbed her 19 times in an attempt to appease the fictional character Slender Man. ...

. It premiered at

South by Southwest South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, T ...

in March 2016 and was broadcast on

HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television, premium television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office busi ...

on January 23, 2017.

Synopsis

''Beware the Slenderman'' discusses the incident in which two girls attempted to murder one of their friends in an attempt to appease

Slender Man Slender Man (also spelled Slenderman) is a fictional supernatural character that originated as a creepypasta Internet meme created by Something Awful forum user Eric Knudsen (also known as "Victor Surge") in 2009. He is depicted as a thin, unn ...

, a fictional monster who originated from an Internet phenomenon called "

creepypasta Creepypastas are horror-related legends that have been shared around the Internet. Creepypasta has since become a catch-all term for any horror content posted onto the Internet. These Internet entries are often brief, user-generated, paranormal ...

". The documentary was shot over eighteen months and contains interviews with the families of the two would-be murderers. The film makes use of various YouTube videos to do with Slender Man, in particular footage from ''

Marble Hornets ''Marble Hornets'' (abbreviated ''MH'') is an alternate reality game YouTube web series inspired by the Slender Man online mythos. The first video was posted on YouTube on June 20, 2009, following a post that its creator, Troy Wagner, created ...

'' and ''Tribe Twelve''. It also makes use of footage from the games '' Slender: The Eight Pages'' and '' Minecraft''.

References

External links

''Beware the Slenderman''
on

* * 2016 documentary films 2016 films Documentary films about crime in the United States HBO documentary films Slender Man American documentary films 2010s English-language films 2010s American films {{US-documentary-film-stub