It’s Rumor Time: Hollywood might finally be getting around to making a Slender Man movie

By William Hughes | May 5, 2016 | 4:09am

Aux Features Film

If you’re friends with any internet forum goers or real-world teenagers (and it’s possible we just repeated ourselves), you’re probably familiar with Slender Man, the web’s favorite well-dressed devourer of souls. Invented on Something Awful by poster Eric Knudsen, the blank-faced suit-wearer—whose most consistent trick is his persistent pursuit of anyone who thinks about him too much, so, sorry, anxiety-prone teens—is a perfect example of the online world’s ability to create, transmit, and mutate its own myths, in the interest of giving 12-year-olds nightmares about mummy-men with a propensity for static. The meme has inspired podcasts, online video series, an episode of Supernatural, and even, indirectly, a few movies, with films like Sinister and The Tall Man drawing on some of the character’s associated imagery and ideas. (There’s also been at least one indie film, 2016’s Slender, that directly references the idea.)

It might be time to sweep that “indirect” stuff aside, though. Comicbook.com is reporting that Screen Gems—the studio that brought you such horror masterpieces as Legion, Resident Evil: Afterlife, and the 2013 Carrie remake—is now making a movie titled Slender Man. And that’s pretty much all we know, because the site is claiming the story as an exclusive, without giving many details about where they got the info. Among other things, we don’t know whether Knudsen signed off on the movie or even, exactly, how the copyright would work on a mass-created work like the collaboratively developed character. It’s possible that someone—maybe horror screenwriter David Burke, who’s said to be attached and have already written a script—has taken a page from the character’s playbook, even, and is just trying to get a movie willed into existence by the internet’s collective belief. In which case, we’re sorry to all the tweens out there, for helping bring their noodle-armed nightmares to life.