Slenderman, phenomena of horror in digital age
The word “creepypasta” likely brings a few images to mind — from Slenderman and Jeff the Killer to Momo and the Rake. These shadowy horrors have haunted the childhoods of many 2000s babies, leaving behind an indelible legacy on internet horror.
On Oct. 23, associate professor of folklore Lynne McNeill spoke on the evolution of traditional folklore into the digital realm.
Today, contemporary folklore includes memes, urban legends and perhaps most notably, creepypasta. One of the most iconic figures in digital folklore is the tall, suited and faceless creature known as Slenderman.
Created in 2009 as part of a photoshop contest, images and stories of Slenderman spread like wildfire, sparking fanart, fiction, theories and video game spinoffs. Slenderman’s infamy culminated in the well known case involving two 12 year-old girls stabbing another girl, almost killing her, “to appease Slenderman.”
“This caused a widespread panic,” McNeill said in her talk. “Parents were wondering, ‘Who is creating this content?’ and ‘Is my child going to drag my friend into the woods and stab them?’ So people began searching, and what they found was this mix of rumor, legend, art, horror and games.”
The ambiguity of Slenderman is a large part of why he became an internet legend. People spread myths about “slender sickness,” a fictional condition where a person gets chills if Slenderman was near. Video games such as “Slender: The Eight Pages” popped up, and web series like “Marble Hornets” appeared, all in an attempt to tell and spread the story of Slenderman.
“This is the desired outcome of creepypasta,” McNeill said in her talk. “You want your story to get picked up and told by other people.”
“There are two main things I hope people took away from the talk,” McNeill said. “One is that folklore is a lot more broad and applicable then people seem to think it is.”
When thinking about folklore, classic tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Hansel and Gretel” may come to mind.
“For a long time, folklore has been defined by its oral nature,” said Afsane Rezaei, associate professor of folklore studies. “It was ideally shared by people in a face to face environment, in small, close knit communities.”
According to the American Folklore Society, folklore is defined as “our cultural DNA.” Folklore is the way people share what they perceive as important, encompassing art, stories, knowledge and tradition.
“One of my favorite things to do as a professor of folklore is introducing this new way of understanding folklore,” McNeill said. “People have a sort of, ‘Sure, I know what folklore means,’ perspective but when you start digging into it, you realize maybe you don’t totally have an understanding of what it means.”
Folklore like Slenderman is only possible via crowdsourcing, a process which is amplified and accelerated due to the capabilities of the internet.
“The second thing I hope people took away was the idea that folklore on the internet isn’t frivolous, silly or even malicious,” McNeill said. “It’s really doing some heavy cultural communication for us — It’s articulating things so we can hold them at a distance and understand something about ourselves.”
The stories which reach mass popularity are often stories which include some element of fear or danger. Psychologists and scientists around the world have wondered why. According to Harvard Business Review, one reason may involve mental stimulation and increased adrenaline.
“Fear is a necessary sort of emotion that if we don’t have a lot of cause to feel it in our daily lives, it’s something that we might be inclined to seek out in a cathartic way,” McNeill said.
Another theory views horror media consumption as a means to process the real fears in daily life.
“Processing fear and anxiety about one thing helps us process fear and anxiety about other things,” McNeill said. “Like when you feel buried under school work and you know you need to get caught up, but instead you clean the living room. You’re doing the type of work that needs to be done, but in a different realm.”
Popular horror media can also act as a reflection of and a means to process larger societal fears.
“Modern folklore is an extension of the types of things people have been dealing with all along,” Rezaei said. “A lot of people are concerned about their children. They’re constantly worried about new threats like the internet and social media. These fears are put into these generic forms, like Slenderman who symbolically stands for the threat of social media.”
Projection of real world fears onto fictional stories and characters has long been a common theme in popular media.
“I think the kind of traditional fears that we see crop up in scary folk legend are things that are helping us do internal processing of stressors, fears and anxieties but in this culturally shared way,” McNeill said.
According to McNeill, Slenderman may be a reflection of cyberbullying and threats to children in a digital world.
“One folklorist did a study on children who’d never heard of Slenderman online, only on the playground, and compared their descriptions of ‘slender sickness’ to the CDC documented signs your child might be being bullied,” McNeill said in her talk. “They found an almost perfect overlap.”
Slenderman no longer carries the weight he once did at the height of his popularity almost 15 years ago. In 2024, new horrors are on the rise.
One such character is Loab. Loab first gained traction in 2022 when Steph Maj Swanson, through a series of AI image prompts, created an uncanny image of a woman with bloodied eyes holding unidentifiable objects. Further prompts from this image spawned increasingly disturbing results.
“I find this new Loab phenomena very interesting,” Rezaei said. “It’s going to be very interesting to see how these new examples of AI monsters change.”
The images have sparked debate over the origins behind Loab and why AI produced such images, with many saying Loab is a dark entity living within AI.
“Loab is such a good example of the new kinds of horrors arising,” McNeill said. “AI is such a hot topic and is something we are excited about and equally, if not more, worried about.”
As new fears creep up and more stories are told, the internet continues to play a crucial role in contemporary folklore.
“These fears become concrete in folkloric forms, even when they aren’t substantiated,” Rezaei said. “It’s a matter of how widespread this material is on the internet and that they relate to an inherent anxiety.”