|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 31 May 2014, three 12-year-old girls embarked on a birdwatching expedition in a wooded area near their homes in Waukesha, Wisconsin that ended in one of them being stabbed 19 times and left for dead. Seriously injured, the victim managed to crawl to a nearby road, where she was found and taken to a hospital. She told police her friends had attacked her. The other two girls were arrested and charged with attempted first-degree intentional homicide. The attack weapon was found among their belongings. They admitted to planning and executing the crime. Under interrogation, they claimed they did it to appease a supernatural being called Slenderman (aka Slender Man), who was described in a Newsweek article as an evil character who lives only on the Internet, but in whom the accused attackers said they fervently believed: Although months in the planning, their mission did not succeed. The victim, Payton Leutner, recovered, though she still lives in fear for her life, her mother says. The accused were tried as adults and pleaded guilty to the attack but argued in court they weren't responsible for their actions due to mental illness. In December 2017, Weier was sentenced to 25 years in a psychiatric institution. Geyser has yet to face sentencing. The incident was cast as a cautionary tale for parents by Waukesha police chief Russell Jack, who cited it as a consequence of allowing children unsupervised access to the Internet: But although it's true there are dark and wicked things to be found on the Internet (as in life, generally), and children's use of the Internet ought indeed to be supervised, to suggest that the Slenderman materials viewed by the accused are wicked, in any deeper sense than, say, a Stephen King novel is wicked, is to misunderstand them. The Slenderman mythos, as the accumulated stories, images, and commentary related to the character have come to be called, is a blend of fiction and folklore. It's a crowd-sourced horror story that hearkens back to boogeyman tales of old. The first time the name Slender Man appeared anywhere in print or on screen was on the entertainment web site SomethingAwful.com on 10 June 2009. Someone started a thread in a discussion forum, essentially a Photoshop contest, entitled Create Paranormal Images. Among the early entries was one posted under the pseudonym Victor Surge (later identified as member Eric Knudsen), consisting of an old photograph manipulated to depict a tall, faceless human-like figure with tentacle-like arms lurking in the shadows near a children's playground: The effect was understated, yet creepy. Inspired by the example, others contributed photos and backstory expanding on Surge's themes, and piecemeal construction of the Slenderman mythos, a collaborative project from the start, was underway. As Surge himself suggested, it was also, from the start, a patchwork of cultural influences: By the time middle-schoolers Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier encountered the Slenderman character years later, the mythos had grown considerably and was being archived on fan sites like Creepypasta Wiki (creepypasta being an Internet slang term for user-created horror stories and images). It's where, for example, the girls would have read that Slenderman uses fear to control people's minds, and then kills them: It's also where they would have learned what a Slenderman proxy is: And it's where they would have been introduced to evidence that Slenderman sightings date back to the 16th-century in Germany, where woodcuts documenting reports of a murderous so-called Tall Man (Der Großmann) with a spear-like arm and superfluous legs were allegedly found: Like other items purporting to constitute visual proof of Slenderman's existence, however, the woodcut is merely a doctored version of a Hans Holbein print (circa 1497, below right) depicting a knight in armor pierced by Death's lance: It's hard not to admire the creativity that went into Slenderman. It's equally hard — at least, from our point of view — to subscribe to the view that it was done for a malevolent purpose or represents a dark and wicked side of the Internet. It's more accurate to characterize it as an ad hoc communal art project, or, if you're a folklorist and your bailiwick includes studying the spontaneous generation of stories, an updated, Internet-savvy instance of the age-old process of legend creation. American folklorist Andrea Kitta expressed just this view in a January 2017 interview with the web site inews.co.uk: Folklorists see such tales as imbued with deeper social meanings. Shira Chess, author of Folklore, Horror Stories and the Slender Man (2014), explored these in comments to The Washington Post: Chess seems to be saying it's the feeling of helplessness and fear underlying them, not horror stories themselves, that can drive people to cold-blooded lengths. Andrea Kitta isn't so sure: We're not in a position to judge to what extent, if any, the Slenderman materials viewed by Payton Leutner's accused attackers may have exerted an influence on their behavior. We would point out, however, that reports of such incidents have been very few and far between since the character was created in 2009. Perhaps, as Kitta says, folklore isn't always benign, but we should be wary when it's blamed for the bad things people do.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}