Screen Gems

A couple months ago, I wrote a column contemplating the role that real-life events have in dictating our entertainment. For the most part, I find the things that happen in life to be fair game, but stories involving these events are often derailed because people tend to take things too seriously, or are too sensitive, or are just eager to find a reason to hate or speak out against something. But there are times when it’s okay to take things seriously, like when a particular event directly affects someone, or a member of someone’s family, or, in the case of Screen Gems’ upcoming horror flick Slender Man, both.

Some background, first. The character Slender Man was created as an internet meme in 2009 by a guy named Eric Knudsen, who did it for the website Something Awful, under the user name Victor Surge. Knudsen doesn’t own the copyright to the character, which is owned by an unnamed third party, but the media rights belong to Mythology Entertainment, which is co-producing the film with Screen Gems. Knudsen, or rather “Surge,” is getting a “created by” credit on the film, which is standard for any use of the character. He is always acknowledged, and, in some cases, gives his personal blessing to projects involving his creepy creation.

The character is pretty much as described, in that he’s a thin, unnaturally tall man with a featureless face, who’s often depicted wearing a black suit. According to his Wikipedia entry, stories of the Slender Man “commonly feature him stalking, abducting or traumatizing people, particularly children,” which is charming, to say the least, not to mention easy fodder for urban legends and, yes, horror films.

It’s the urban legend part of that equation that led to a near-fatal assault perpetrated in 2014 against a then-12-year-old Wisconsin girl named Peyton Leutner, who was stabbed 19 times by classmate Morgan Geyser while a fellow classmate, Anissa Weier, cheered her on. Geyser barely missed Leutner’s heart, and the victim ended up crawling out of the woods where she’d been lured to a path where a passing bicyclist found her. She survived, and her two attackers reportedly told police detectives that they had to kill her to prove to Slender Man — a fictional character whom they clearly believed to be real — that they were worthy of being his servants, while also ensuring their families’ protection from him.

Geyser is now 15. In a deal with prosecutors, she pled guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide. The state is asking that she get at least 40 years in a mental hospital, and she’ll be sentenced next month. Weier, now 16, has already been sentenced to 25 years in an institution, after pleading guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide.

There are other crimes associated with Slender Man that occurred in the days and months after Leutner was attacked, like a 13-year-old Ohio girl who was apparently obsessed with the character and stabbed her mother, and a 14-year-old Florida girl who set her family’s house on fire after reading about him.

Which brings us to the Screen Gems movie, the first trailers for which have just started dropping, and which is set for release on May 18 — two weeks into the Summer Movie Season, when it will undoubtedly set the box office on fire as the summer’s first mainstream horror flick. As of this moment, the only competition coming out the same day is How to Train Your Dragon 3, which caters to a very different target audience, while Avengers: Infinity War will have already been out for two weeks, so the whole world will have already seen it. Nothing else on the schedule should really scare Slender Man, which could end up being a horror hit, a la The Ring ($249 million worldwide) or The Conjuring ($319M).

That potential success is precisely what scares Bill Weier, Anissa’s father, who condemned the film on Wednesday, saying “it’s absurd they want to make a movie like this. It’s popularizing a tragedy is what it’s doing. I’m not surprised, but in my opinion it’s extremely distasteful. All we’re doing is extending the pain all three of these families have gone through.”

I must admit, I’m torn on this one. On one hand, I’m a firm believer that no real-life event, no matter how tragic, should be off limits to an artist. In fact, I was at a dinner party right after Thanksgiving, and another guest was railing about an attempt at humor that many people enjoyed, but which he found offensive. He asked me what I thought, and I said, “Nothing is off limits, as long as it’s funny.” He did not take kindly to that at all, and said, “Well, then, you won’t mind if I start insulting your mother.” I responded, “Not if it’s funny,” and that pretty quickly took the wind out of his sails, prompting someone to change the subject.

I stand by that belief, but Bill Weier’s perspective on it is obviously going to be different than mine, and if I were in his shoes, I’m not sure if I’d feel any differently. And yet, at the same time, there’s no question he’s far too close to this situation to see the other side of it. There is a case to be made that movie studios should be decried for trying to profit off of real-life tragedies, but movies and television shows based on devastating true events have been a mainstay of pop culture for 100 years. You wouldn’t tell Steven Spielberg not to make Schindler’s List, or Paul Greengrass to make United 93, would you? Thus, the question becomes less about whether or not something is appropriate for the mainstream, and more about what the appropriate waiting period is to tell a story about it, if there should even be one. Should Hollywood have to wait five years before tackling Slender Man without any guilt? 10 years? 20?

Or, does the attack on Leutner not have any bearing on this discussion? I’m not much of a consumer of internet fads or bogeyman tales, but even I had heard of the Slender Man before this occurred. In fact, I remember being surprised that something like the attack on Leutner hadn’t happened sooner. If the last year-and-a-half has shown us anything, it’s that people will believe all kinds of stuff they read on the internet, whether it’s true or not, and kids are especially susceptible. The tragedy of what happened certainly brought the character to the attention of more people, but the movie doesn’t appear to have anything at all to do with what happened in Wisconsin. It pretty much looks like your standard horror flick featuring a character that has already pervaded the nightmares of folks who are into this kind of thing.

I certainly understand where Weier is coming from, and I sympathize with him, but four years will have transpired between his daughter’s attack on another girl and the film’s release. That’s not exactly a “ripped from the headlines” adaptation, and so to me, Slender Man doesn’t have the creepy feel of exploitation attached to it. People will question whether Sony is capitalizing on a tragedy here, but I genuinely don’t believe that it is. Feel free to make up your own mind this summer.

Neil Turitz is a filmmaker and journalist who has spent close to two decades working in and writing about Hollywood. Feel free to send him a tweet at @neilturitz. He’ll more than likely respond.