It has been too long since I’ve talked about the greatest film of all-time: Slender Man. Recently I re-watched the masterpiece with one of the friends I watched it with the first time. A re-watch always reveals new things about a film, and I definitely came out of my second viewing of Slender Man with different opinions on the film. If you haven’t read my original review, check it out here, as I’m going to refer to it at several points.
Stuff that hasn’t changed
Before I get into the way a re-watch changed my feelings about Slender Man, its probably worth quickly going through things from my first review that I still believe. Overall, the film is still bad but funny, with a terrible script and bad acting. The actor who plays Hallie is stil by far the best actor in the film (we’ll come back to Hallie later). For the most part I still like the design of the ‘character’ of Slender Man. Something I only realised about him when I watched the behind-the-scenes feature (yes, there’s only one) is that the character was mostly done with practical effects, which is really cool.
The writing still stood out to me as the weakest part of the film. Most of the dialogue is stilted and unnatural, and doesn’t sound like something a modern teen would actually say. The plot is still pretty nonsensical, and feels way too derivative of much better films like The Ring. Without going into stuff that I want to discuss later I don’t have much else to say about the plot, so we’ll look at some stuff that I’ve changed my mind about.
Was I too harsh on Slender Man?
One major feeling that I got from this re-watch was that there were more positives than I had initially picked up on, most majorly the cinematography. I accused the film of being blandly shot in my first review, but that feels unfair now. During the duration of the film, there were an awful lot of moments where one of us would complement interesting shots that I completely missed the first time. A lot of the best shots were the ones which brought one of the girls back from a dream/hallucination into reality, which were really creative. Despite a lot of the cinematography being a lot better than I had initially given it credit for, there are still a fair few uninteresting shots (like the overused one of the sky).
Some of the shots are so utterly bizarre that they are either hilarious or just feel out of place (this is more than just a cinematography issue, but it fits in this section). Hallie’s hallucinations on her date with Tom are so utterly stupid-looking that they’re hilarious. The gross-out stuff, like the weird pregnancy hallucination and most of the things in the hospital sequence, feels really out of place and just there to put in the trailer.
I also think I didn’t give the film enough credit (if that’s the right term) for just how funny a lot of it is. Things like Slender Man sauntering towards Wren in the library scene and gently caressing her face had us in tears from just how funny they were. Probably my favourite thing about the film which I didn’t mention last time was what me and my friend referred to as ‘Slender Skype’. On two separate occasions one of the girls gets a video-call which shows Slender Man’s PoV. We spent a good five minutes trying to work out the logistics of how he does this. Is he holding a phone that he’s filming with? Does he have a Go-Pro strapped to his head? How does he get his camera through the door he passes through? Moments like this made me feel that a Slender Man horror-comedy could be a really fun film.
Even though I didn’t pick up on all of the positives that Slender Man had to offer, it is on the whole a bad film. Ignoring the acting, plot, and unnecessary gross-out stuff, I think most of the issues of the film boil down to one fundamental issue: editing and cut content.
The problem of studio intervention
Saying that Slender Man had some production issues would be a massive understatement. The fact that it came into production two-years after the 2014 Slender Man stabbing meant that there was a fair amount of controversy about the film (which was probably only greenlit because the studio thought that they could exploit the fact that the stabbing brought the character back into the popular consciousness). This led to some issues with the families related to the incident, and eventually the film not being aired in cinemas near where the stabbing happened. This controversy, as well as Screen Gems’ desire for the film to get a PG-13 rating in the US, led to a lot of the film being cut.
Throughout my re-watch of the film the legacy of these cuts was really obvious. Transitions between scenes can give you whiplash, aspects of the film feel like remnants of subplots that were mostly cut from the film, and a lot of character building which is referred to in the behind-the-scenes interviews is missing. When you take into account the amount that was cut (which, according to some articles, included major scenes) it feels like there were nuggets of a decent movie there.
For the most part, I can only speculate about what the original cut of Slender Man looked like. I have a few theories, but I haven’t been able to find any concrete evidence for them in my research about this film yet. At this point, I can only be sure of one scene that was cut: the scalpel scene. This scene was shown in the trailer for the film (1:28), and had Chloe stabbing herself in the eye with a scalpel (eww). It seems like this scene was pretty important, as one of the tracks in the OST (which was written by Ramin Djawadi – yes, the same man who wrote the score for Game of Thrones) is literally called ‘Scalpel‘, but I guess we’ll never know. As much as I would like to see an extended cut of Slender Man or even just the cut scenes, chances are we will never see some of the cut stuff (unless there’s another Sony hack).
I doubt I’ll ever escape from the shadow of Slender Man: there’s too much about this film that intrigues me. Despite all of it’s flaws (or perhaps because of them) this film is one of my all-time favourite films, and I’ll never stop loving it. This definitely won’t be my final post on the movie or other stuff related to the character. If you want to see my future posts, please consider following me here or on Twitter. Also please consider sharing this, it really helps me grow the blog!!!
Post-Millennial Panda 
The Slenderman Blogger
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