is there not a Quick Look of this?
Slender: The Eight Pages
Game » consists of 4 releases. Released Jun 26, 2012
Slender: The Eight Pages is a freeware horror adventure game for PC and MAC that uses the Unity engine and is based on the Slender Man, a fictional cryptid popularized by the Internet.
Why?
@BestUsernameEver said:
Brecause it's not done yet.
This was what I was gonna say. If it eventually becomes a full-on game rather than a short lark, I can guarantee there'll be a QL, but otherwise we're not gonna get one. Watch the Lone Survivor QL in the meantime.
also worth noting that there's plenty of good Slenderman videos on the net, some of them occasionally scary. If you're a fan of the game and haven't checked them out already, Marble Hornets, EverymanHYBRID, and TribeTwelve are the "big three" and are pretty darn good. Well, I haven't watched enough of T12 to say that with confidence, and most of the opening has been biting off Hornets, but it has a pretty large following. All of them have a bit of a slow build-up; EMH easily has the slowest of the bunch, though. There are a whole bunch of "Slendervlogs" to watch beyond those three, but nobody seems that excited about the other ones because they aren't as good.
@Brunchies said:
I don't get it, what about an internet meme is scary?
What about any horror creature is scary? They're used properly to threaten characters you care about; in the case of a game, that's usually just you. Most people aren't watching these and then being scared to sleep at night, they're just enjoying them and rooting for their favorite characters to succeed (which they rarely do.) They've also done a good job with pacing so far in MH and EMH; each individual entry does a decent job building up tension, while EMH has the body count to match it.
Basically, Slender's only been propagated by found-footage horror series, the same as Blair Witch Project (which I really ought to see) and Paranormal Activity. The Slender game pretty accurately presents the creature's high speed and stalking tendencies as featured in the different series, and it builds the music so that you know something "bad" is going to happen. Slender isn't an amazing game, but its one-and-done experience was enough to scare me in the daytime. And there's plenty of Slender materials that don't work very well at all, and so they haven't caught on.
...you want more?
I've been thinking a lot about the more popular Slender stuff lately, mostly because I think he's the first monster that's even remotely scared me since I saw Alien, and the different series have scared me on multiple occasions. As a result, I've been working on a Slender tabletop game for some of my friends to play, a sort of low-systems horror RPG to get people used to roleplaying. While working on it, there's a number of things that I've distilled that I think work about Slender as a monster. Obviously, he's a stalker and we haven't liked those since Michael Myers stole the screen in 78; there's more to him than that. For one, he always exists beyond the accepted or known; he's no "town boogeyman," he's a myth come to life. This is separate from The Wolfman, or Shelley's Frankenstein, in that he's a reflection of our ignorance rather than a constant paranoia. By the same token, Slenderman is anonymous, and as a result it is of course fitting that he springs from the internet, a den of anonymity. The suit he's continually pictured in causes distrust due to our distrust of corporatism, but this also creates a smart juxtaposition between his appearance and the trees he's regularly surrounded by, making him seem more alien. His traditional motive, to "take the children," has been altered many times now; MH seems to have him as a soul-devourer, EMH seems to pose him as something more complicated.
As for his actual powers, they're regularly shifting from series to series, perhaps expanding on the mysteriousness of the character. Different series seem to agree on his lightning speed or his ability to teleport, but the functionality of it remains unknown; all that matters is that he can probably be anywhere at anytime, including just about any room of your house. The "tentacles" are a primal fear, and they add to his unnatural appearance along with serving as potential weapons. There's a reason they're often not included, though, and it's because they simply make him more extraterrestrial than they make him mysterious and truly "alien." That said, these previous two powers (also the main ones) express an existence "beyond"; think less Pennywise the Dancing Clown and more IT, less Mind Flayers and more Elder Gods. Of course, this juxtaposes strangely with his suit, which is decidedly modern; it's entirely possible that he is some sort of new cosmic being, and EMH has delved into this concept the farthest.
The big three also have two other combining traits that add to his effectiveness; the fact that he causes physical sickness (usually expressed by intense coughing fits, though all three series have moved beyond that to include other more serious symptoms) and the fact that he brings along with him something more dangerous (insanity, human stalkers, and, in the case of EMH, other monsters.) Our society is currently terrified of death and, by association, illness; most of us don't keep ourselves in very good shape, and the lasting legacy of Slender's primary audience has been typing too much on our computers. Meanwhile, each series has a "masked man equivalent," an anonymous and cryptic human of questionable allegiance who absolutely nobody should trust. These are presumed to be previous Slender victims and/or part of his cadre of Big Bads, meaning either Slender will mindslave you or he'll bring along somebody who'll probably just kill you.
As for the series themselves, the feedback loop and constant immersion system of YouTube series has a lot going for it. Episodes are rarely announced until the day before they're released (if not just hours before release,) meaning it requires pretty regular check-ins to stay up to date on your own. They operate more like weekly serial adventures than most horror series have been able to accomplish. Obviously, film, literature, and games would take more time to pump out. Television has the problem of filling a same-sized block every week, not to mention commercial breaks. A web series is quite a bit more free-form, there's no set distribution system, and the found-footage genre requires less editing than most television series would. Found-footage has also served as another effective system, as it can explain bad acting and short scenes as amateur filmmaking and boring people. Meanwhile, visual and audio distortion, regulars whenever Slender is near/on-screen, are just plain creepy; we expect our tech to work, and when it doesn't, we currently get some really messed-up results. Even Paranormal Activity's getting in on the action, taking on some screen tearing reminiscent of MH in its newest trailer.
Compare :
...that's all I've got for now.
Hopefully, that helps explain it a little bit; I'm actually just happy to have written it down somewhere.
Log in to comment