Yes, Virginia, there is a Slenderman
Jane Schoenbrun has become one of the hottest names in lo-fi horror and queer cinema, but before their breakthrough, they were on the indie grind for more than a decade. They studied film in college, wrote articles for independent film publications, did some work for Kickstarter’s film wing, and crewed on a bunch of low-budget productions that gained no crossover traction. In 2022, their We’re All Going to the World’s Fair bubbled just under the mainstream surface but got some cult horror buzz. (It also earned a rare 0/10 from our friend Hunter at Kinemalogue. This has me as curious as anything else written about the film.) Their next feature just came out earlier this year: I Saw the TV Glow. The praise for the latter has been so rapturous, the backlash so small, that it’s getting some legitimate Oscar speculation.
I haven’t seen either of those movies, but my curiosity was piqued when I saw on Letterboxd that their feature-length debut is a documentary about Slenderman. (As a matter of style, it seems both “Slender Man” and “Slenderman” are widely used, but Schoenbrun uses the latter, and Lord knows I don’t care, so I’ll defer to that.) The film was a spare-time project for Schoenbrun that they eventually released online. In the six years since, it has mostly vanished despite Schoenbrun’s rising profile, but not vanished so much that you can’t find it with 30 seconds of Googling. (For example, here’s a link to it tweeted by Schoenbrun. You can email me if that link goes down.)
This is a deeply curious cinematic object. To call it a “documentary” does not actually feel like a totally accurate genre descriptor. Hell, to call it “cinematic object” isn’t even right. A Self-Induced Hallucination is almost as much a laptop-screen found footage film as it is a documentary. It is assembled entirely of clips pulled from YouTube videos of all sorts about Slenderman, ranging from vlogs made by 10-year-olds to snippets from real news networks, and a hundred different styles in between. There is no additional voiceover or score, just an extended stream of YouTube clips.
Thus, the film is an object of pure curation and editing. Schoenbrun guides us through the origin and evolution of the Slenderman legend, it’s darkest moments, its mainstream recognition, and its long, creepy tendrils through internet culture.
A high-level summary of the documentary’s arc: In 2009, the Something Awful forums invented the myth of a tall, ghostly figure with a blank white face wearing a black suit who appears on the periphery of human consciousness (and photographs). The legend took shape during a digital art creation contest on the forum that proved hugely popular and expanded well beyond its source site. It spread memetically throughout the “Web 2.0”-era Internet with photoshops and homemade videos and wikis. The newly-invented horror creature became the subject of numerous “creepypastas” — short horror stories shared throughout the web in comment sections, forums, and the like.
Through gradual lore expansions, the digital myth took a particularly sinister shape of a child manipulator and predator. And then that concept became manifest in 2014, with the real-life tragedy the fictional creature is most-often associated with: A stabbing of a twelve-year old girl by two of her friends who claimed to have done so to please Slenderman. From here, the film takes an especially dark timbre: We’re not dealing just with a hypothetical dark idea, but something that triggered real, horrifying violence within impressionable, Internet-obsessed tweens.
Within the videos come a wide variety of philosophies towards Slenderman. The role-playing of Slenderman believer in some cases blends with true delusion. All of this has echoes with Internet culture writ large: Individuals acting as personas online that both are and are not their real identity; where the virtual personalities we encounter are sometimes personable but sometimes as faceless as Slenderman himself.
I thought a lot of my all-time favorite feature documentary, Gates of Heaven by Errol Morris, when watching A Self-Induced Hallucination. Like Errol Morris’s masterpiece, this film deals with a scenario simultaneously silly and provocative. And, as a formal similarity, the director is absent from any sort of on-screen appearance or voiceover in both. But like Gates of Heaven, the real subject under the film’s hood is the director’s reckoning with the material: it’s an ongoing tug-of-war between bemused skepticism that borders on eye-rolling versus an enraptured, awed curiosity. Somehow, just with sequencing and editing, Schoenbrun displays both empathy and cynical comic timing — I admit I burst out laughing a couple of times at some of the more unhinged vlogs included.
Schoenbrun intellectually engages, quite earnestly, with the concept of “tulpas.” They are defined in one of the included clips as an imagined concept that becomes in some form “real” simply through cultural belief in the idea, much like Santa Claus. Indeed, Santa Claus is cited as an analog to Slenderman in the stabbing murder trial, and Schoenbrun cites that comparison as one of the key concepts that hooked them on the Slenderman idea in the accompanying essay they wrote: If people believe in Slenderman and act on those beliefs in a way aligns with the way the culture depicts him, is he not “real” in some way? (I say “no” but I appreciate that Schoenbrun challenges us to consider it.)
The film is 72 minutes long, which is short for a feature but still 10-15 minutes too long for this project. The documentary drags a little in the closing act as it pivots its focus to a quickie B-movie about Slenderman released in the wake of the stabbing. It’s the kind of topic that a film-head like Schoenbrun would be fascinated by, but is less fundamental to the documentary’s core consideration of how something — “someone” — like Slenderman could be created from thin virtual air for fun before ultimately becoming so genuine to some people that it cascades into real violence.
Schoenbrun’s cognitive dissonance to Slenderman is most obvious in the film’s closing sequence. The last two clips they shown us are, first, “Update 15” from the channel TulpaEffect: it’s a ramble that shows its vlogger, initially a Slenderman skeptic as seen in videos throughout the documentary, in the midst of some sort of breakdown that seems unrelated the mythical creature, though the creator has filtered it through the concept: “It’s hard to find logic in any of it” she says in an earnest near-cry to her 3,000-ish viewers. Then the last clip: A quick cut to a Slenderman comedy song (that’s not especially funny) by a figure who looks like a stereotypical “neckbeard,” credited as bludleef. These clips show two very different kinds of YouTube content that might make you cringe as you watch for totally different reasons. They have vastly different viewpoints toward Slenderman, yet both clips reinforce the grip that Slenderman somehow has on the brains of Internet denizens around the world. The clips are opposite ends on the same conceptual sphere.
As Schoenbrun’s filmmaking reputation has risen, the power and distortion of “screens” has, by their own admission, been the overriding theme of their filmography. A Self-Induced Hallucination is a minor work, a curiosity, but compelling enough as a seed of some profound ideas about the blurriness of identities, of self vs. collective in the Internet age, for me to check out their subsequent.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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