184 - The Arrival of a Dumbass

I don't get the Slenderman fad.

I mean I get how it started and all that but I never understood why he's apparently "scary" in the first place. Maybe it's just me but I took one look at his character design and said.... "I don't get it!"

From what I saw of the two games he's been in I get the sense it's what The Blair Witch Project should have been and I respect an indie creation being more of a scary or feared character than say Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees. Yet I can't quite put my finger on what it is that makes "him" so scary in the first place. Is it the blank emotionless face? Is it the "I'm just gonna appear out of nowhere" trick or is it that weird glitchy effect when you get too close with the spooky noises?

Maybe it's none of those things at all?

I recently saw a walk through of the game Slender: The Arrival and I think it's the atmosphere and the environment surrounding the character that is truly terrifying. The terrifying screams, the mystery of who this character was and the eventual ending will send a chill up your spine. Yet it's not the character that does that. It's the people he's stalking that create the spooky atmosphere for me. Every time I saw him he was just standing there in a "Sup?" kinda pose.

It does remind me of classic film techniques in that "What you don't see makes something more terrifying" so when all of Slenderman's evil antics happen off camera or is heard from a distance it causes you to use your imagination. And our imaginations are infinitely more terrifying that what reality can ever throw at us!

Perhaps that's why Slenderman is so popular? He's able to create tension, fear, panic, dread and possible insanity just by doing nothing at all.

That's skill right there.

So anyway, I put off including Slenderman in a comic because everyone was talking about it and I didn't want people to assume I was jumping on a bandwagon. Plus what more can there be said about him? Or what could you possible do with the character that everybody else hasn't already done? I've seen pictures of Batman punching him, The VG Cats had a good joke about him, he's doing Gangnam Style and hell, there is this hilarious comic where Grimlock from Transformers freaks him out.


Bottom line, Slenderman is a master of tension.... even if I think he doesn't look it.