On a blank google doc, just as I am right now, Jane Schoenbrun, with their cluttered laptop full of sources and tabs surrounding, titles their documentary, a 71 minute documentary made up entirely of footage surrounding the Slender Man creepypasta uploaded to Youtube between 2009-2018. No voiceover, no original footage, no new interviews, just the internet.
The Slender Man myth was a very specific and inescapable moment in the internets lore, pretty much everyone even remotely online would have the lanky man with a suit and no face seared into their brains, it was a new kind of horror, like a modern folklore story specifically for the digital age, with the story of the figure being mainly created by anyone who wanted to be involved, a true bringing together of the outsiders. Fear as a child is almost always going to be interesting as they have been shielded from it for so long, even in Jane’s newest film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) they show that it’s normal to watch films you know you shouldn’t watch at a young age, like your own personal rebellion of what’s right and wrong. This documentary captures the uniqueness of creepypastas and Slenderman in that children and young adults were all being scared together, as said in the film “A campfire story on a global scale”.
Instead the documentary, after a small compilation of slenderman short films, thrusts us into what you could call the end of Slenderman as a community. As many might know on May 31st 2014, two twelve year old girls Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, motivated to prove the existence of Slender Man, lured their friend Payton Leutner into the woods and stabbed her 19 times, as a sacrifice to Slender Man. By a miracle Leutner survived after being rescued by cyclist but the tragedy quickly became a worldwide media frenzy of the outside world’s desperation to spout their agendas over a single tragedy, from Call of Duty commentators calling the girls ‘little bitches’ and to smash the like button, to calling it satanic worship, to witchcraft, to the new world order, a government plot, to Egregores and an obligatory Chris Hansen appearance. The aftermath revealed that adults were just as scared and confused as children, which this documentary lays out perfectly, even showing videos of children commenting on the incident more sanely than news anchors pushing narratives.
Unsurprisingly, the film industry and Hollywood started rubbing its hands together and quickly swooped down and began creating as much as they could on it, with Terror in the Woods (2018) being directly inspired by the stabbing, a Sony film Slender Man (2018) and HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman (2017). The community was over, it was an IP now, the bubble had been popped by the outside world.
A seemingly disconnected video throughout the doc from an account on youtube called Ford and Aury details his experience, specifically with Tulpas, a mythological belief that enough subconscious and conscious mind energy can create an individual, which was a theory for how Slender Man became a real life entity. But in the last ten minutes it is revealed Ford is not talking about Slender Man, they reveal that their parents found out that they had a boyfriend and decided they had ‘severe mental illness’ after finding one of their Tulpa blog posts, their father saying that this online community believing in Tulpas gave them schizophrenia, while it was just their way of creating a friend that helped them through their inability of making them, their psychiatrist then helped them through realizing they did not have to apologize for creating something that helped them function through daily life. This is where, from what can be interpreted, lies the genius, the film seems to be about being an outsider and finding a community in which you are all connected in your loneliness and wanting to be a part of something different from the norm, but how coming out of that bubble can be scary and full of wild opinions and shame and confusion, but you can grow into something or someone beautiful.
Shortly after the documentary’s release Jane Schoenbrun came out as trangsgender and deleted the documentary from Vimeo, calling it a “Work of theological inquiry”. The film has since been reuploaded to Youtube. As said in Jane’s sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow (2024) in a moment of the director almost reaching out of the screen to talk straight to us, “There is still time”.
Jane’s newest film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma releases everywhere on the 21st of August.
