![]() Slenderman first appeared on the SomethingAwful forums under a thread titled “Create Paranormal Images.” One user, Slidebite, said “You just know a couple of the good ones are going to eventually make it to paranormal websites and be used as genuine.” He was right. He is the first pure product of the Internet, a demon spawned not out of a specific place but out of bits. An entire history, an entire corpus, has grown up around him in a way that would have been impossible a decade ago. He belongs to a guy in Florida named Eric Knudsen who has a young daughter and is surprised as much as anything that his demon hasn’t yet been thrown onto the slag heap of forgotten memes. He was born on June 8, 2009, on a forum site frequented by Photoshop pranksters. Unlike most urban legends, we can trace his provenance with absolute certainty. Slenderman’s origin is surprisingly clear. It was a horrible story and it underlies how little we understand about the psychology of a generation weaned on the Internet and how images can morph from fiction to fact in the course of half a decade. He is a suburban ghoul with his own history and his own methodology and, of late, he has become the object of controversy due to an attack in Wisconsin during which two girls stabbed another in order to appease Slenderman’s dark needs. He appears in places we rarely frequent, these days – abandoned, crumbling halls, deep woods, a playground with a rickety steel jungle gyms. Slenderman is a pure product of electronic media. ![]() ![]() This generation gets its monsters from the Internet. Folk tales tell of witches and wyrms in the woods, my TV-infused generation feared Jaws in lakes and Bloody Mary in the mirror. Every generation creates its own monsters. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |